Stab me, and I'll feel the knife slide along through me.

Electrocute me, and I'll feel the hum and crackle and power of
the surge.

Cut off my arm or leg, and I'll feel its absence.

Shoot me, and I'll feel the bullet bore its path through my
body.

Burn me, and I'll feel the heat and the crackle of my charring
flesh.

I'll feel every injury, but never any pain.  I don't feel pain.
I can't feel pain.

I could feel pain once, before they put this chip in my head.
I was just like any other soldier, vulnerable to attack,
susceptible to torture, unwilling to press on through a hail of
bullets for fear of being hit.

I haven't felt any pain in four months now.  There's only two
more months before my invulnerability kills me.  It will be a
minor injury, probably.  A kick in the chest that should only
wind me, a bullet in the shoulder that anybody should be able
to live through.  But it will be enough, just enough, that my
body will simply give up on life.

I've begun to forget what pain feels like.  I hear people,
normal people, describe their pains as sharp, dull, throbbing,
aching, tingling, cramping, sore.  It doesn't mean anything to
me any more.  I don't feel pain.

I think about the people who can still feel pain, and I notice
such a difference between them and me.

They have an understanding of one another's injuries.
Sympathy, tears--those are what make us human.  I have no
capacity for them any more.  I have no humanity now.

I don't feel pain.  They do, and it reminds them of their
mortality, of the delicate balance between life and death.  I
will die, but I won't feel it happen.  My death will be just
as numb as my life.  Death doesn't matter to me.

Their lives will be normal, long, utterly human.  I could have
lived to be about eighty.  But I didn't want the pain of life,
so I let them give me this chip.  I didn't realize it would cut
my life so short.  I wouldn't have volunteered for this if I
had known.  I would have wanted to live that long, joyous life.
I would have thought pain was worth those extra years.

It makes no difference.  What's done is done.  I'm a machine
now.  Insensible.  Passionless.  To be used like a tank for
somebody else's war.  All because I've had my capacity for pain
erased--and my capacity for joy and pity and sadness erased
along with it.

My lost humanity does not grieve me.  I have no capacity for
emotional pain, any more than physical.  I only feel an
emptiness, a hollow place where my soul used to be.

But that emptiness doesn't hurt me.  I don't feel pain.
 
 
 

[ END ]