Have you ever seen a dead body? The perfect imitation of a person you used to know. Nothing’s changed, every hair, every atom is still there, but it isn’t them. And then you realise, it wasn’t ever them. The glass is not the wine. This pile of flesh and bones, this skin bag is not the person. This is not dead, it is just empty.
These are not bodies. These are machines. This tangle of tendons, this mass of firing neurons, throbbing veins and outdated technology is not a person.
I remember when I was new and my mother would tell me of how we came here, before the machines. We lived in essence and in being, we felt all, we saw all, but this physical world was beyond us. How we strived, how we reached to touch it, to hold it, to experience it. We shaped these bodies around us; we hammered our very atoms into place. We forced empty shells from the mass of everything, machines to hold us. In our haste we bound ourselves too soon, before we had perfected our cage to stand the test of forever. All of time and space stretched before us, and we trapped ourselves in the moment, bound to dying machines.
I don’t know when they all forgot. I always knew I was a machine operator, as my mother and father before me, and theirs before them. This is my legacy. The secret I can never share. This tangle of tendons, this mass of firing neurons, throbbing veins and outdated technology is all they have left.
Every morning, I wake up, and I can feel it, this cumbersome machine of mine. This thing that is not me, but is all people know of me. I sometimes wonder if they know, if they realise they are going round and round, over and over, in one machine after another. Then I see them do things like go to psychics, being who once saw all of time, go to psychic’s to discover IF they had past lives, like they didn’t chose this endless ride. They look back on the very history they lived with blank disinterest, and lose themselves in meaningless diversions, creatures who’s knowledge once spanned forever, waste their lives in repetition. This was supposed to be our pinnacle, our chance to walk in the physical world, to progress further than ever before. But instead they turn on each other at every chance.
For generations my family have been charged with the heavy weight of knowledge, what was, what was supposed to be and what is now. Now there is just me who remembers. The last machine operator.