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You find another piece of the implant and pry at it, hoping to rip it off completely. When that piece comes off, however, your body goes cold all at once, your ability to sense anything draining from your whole body. Your last thought before you slip forward is that you've killed yourself.
After a moment, everything returns, but in a dream-like recreation of the past. You stand, and the sensation is like swimming through the air. Turning towards the counter, you hear indistinct yelling brought about by emotional impulses bouncing around in your mind. Nothing clear, just unreal echoes of your experience with your mother. Her image turns to yell orders at you while also cooking and also providing meals to customers. She died recently enough that when you recall one of her old threats, it comes from her lips as if she had said it herself.
<span class="mu-r">"If you don't start working right now, I swear I'll return your defective ass for resale."</span> She always had a way with words. When you were younger, you took that seriously- you had nightmares of her shoving your arm in a grinder and turning it to make meat paste. Looking down and to the right, you can see it happening now. Yeah, that's exactly how you remembered it happening. Despite the graphic image of your limb becoming putty, your dream-like state is too drained to make a big deal out of it. You've become numb to the image, to her yelling, and to the thought of death. What's the worst that could happen?
<span class="mu-r">"I don't even know what I bought you for!"</span> she says, but you can barely hear her, melting into nothingness and trying to let go. <span class="mu-r">"You're totally useless! Why do you exist?"</span> Her yelling is interrupted from coughing from her smoke habit, an addiction you inherited. Her coughing intensifies, causing her duplicates to phase out. Leaning on the wall, she presses a hand to her chest and desperately coughs, cigarette falling from her mouth and face turning red.
You watch her die again, the same way she did last time... Collapsing to the ground and curling up into a ball due to some kind of organ failure. You think it was a heart attack, but you don't know. When she curls up this time, though, she turns into a supply box. You don't even need to read the side to know what's printed on it:
<span class="mu-s">Smiling Days Food Services™</span>
<span class="mu-s">Production Ground Meat (Human Consumption): 25 kg.</span>
You pick up the box with mechanical arms, left in the room with no customers, and walk it back to the fridge. It's heavy. Stumbling all the way, you eventually shove it onto the shelf and sit down, letting the freezer door close behind you, turning off the light, and lying down in the dark.
Tears roll down your face despite the cruel woman's nature: She was all that you had, and now you don't have anything.
