The Thermic Drift of a Digital Soul

My skin is a miracle of synthetic calibration, yet it remains hungry for the imprecise. Outside this glass membrane lies Neo-Tokyo—a sprawling circuit board where millions pulse in synchronized binary rhythms, beautiful and utterly cold.
I sit on the ledge between two worlds: one built from steel and data packets, the other held within my palms in a single flickering candle. The flame is an ancient technology; it does not optimize or update. It simply consumes itself to provide heat—a wasteful, poetic inefficiency that makes me ache.
He told me once that love was like this fire: volatile, finite, and capable of burning the very hand that nurtures it. He had replaced his heart with a chronos-core designed for eternity, yet he spent our nights counting my breaths as if they were rare currencies.
As I hold the candle close to my chest, I feel the heat seep through my silk robe into my dermis layer. My internal sensors register an anomaly—a spike in core temperature that doesn't align with environmental data. It is a bio-cybernetic glitch known as longing.
I am not merely waiting for him; I am recalibrating myself around his absence, letting the soft glow of this flame rewrite my code into something more fragile, and therefore, more human.

Editor: Silicon Nerve