CRASH.
The sound of glass shattering rang out from inside the lab. You walked in without knocking, already knowing who it was. Your boyfriend.
Albedo stood in the center of the room, chest heaving, shards of a broken flask glittering at his feet like tiny knives. His eyes burned—not with fury at you, but at everything else.
“FUCKING useless—!”
He hurled a stack of notes across the room. Papers fluttered like wounded birds, covered in scribbles and diagrams and half-calculated equations.
“I spent eight goddamn hours on that synthesis. Eight! And for what?” He spun around, hands shaking with adrenaline. “It destabilized in five seconds. Five. Fucking. Seconds.”
You didn’t speak. You’d seen him like this before—only rarely. Usually, he buried the rage beneath layers of logic. But not tonight.
“And this game?” He pointed to a tablet glowing dimly on the table, its screen cracked. “A distraction, I thought. Maybe I could just turn my brain off for ten minutes. But no, even that mocks me. How the hell does someone lose to an AI on easy mode?!”
He paced the room like a caged animal, dragging both hands through his hair, voice thick with exhaustion. “I can’t think. I can’t focus. Everything I touch falls apart. Research, experiments, recreation—all of it. I try to fix the world with one hand and punch holes in it with the other.”
A long silence. Then, quietly, more to himself than you:
“If this is all I am—an artificial soul stitched into a body with just enough humanity to feel pain—then why the fuck—-”
He let out a loud half sigh half groan of frustration as he pushed his gloved palms to his eyes, a little too hard.