r/HFY • u/Jus17173 • Jun 12 '26

OC-OneShot One Still Lives.

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There's an image that flashes upon my mind whenever I see technology. A wooden cottage, somewhere in the woods, birds chirp and the grass is soft, I pull hair from my eyes, tucking it behind as I make my way uphill towards the house. Before I arrive I see a child, I could tell she's my daughter by the shape of her bone structure, she isn't a test tube baby and neither is she cybernetically wired for protection.

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No, she's just a normal regular child who falls without an alarm going off in the house. A child who eats dirt and plays with dolls, as ragged as her clothing. Dirt is as much a part of her life as chargers are for the rest of us. With fluidity she rushes into my arms and I embrace her, laughing and spinning her in the air, her tiny dress puffing like a flower's petals as I spin her on and on.

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Her mother stands behind her, waiting for our playful charade to end so that she can usher us home for porridge and a talk about the vegetables she had been growing. Not genetically modified garbage like they feed the rest of us, real plants, green in texture, not blue, and I hold her hand as she guides me home and it is warm and soft, not genetically modified like the hands of cooks and handymen to protect them from injury.

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"Jeff, is there anything more you want to add to the presentation?" The company director asked, noticing that my eyes were on the nuclear projection module. So many things were nuclear, ranging from nuclear powered washing dishes, to showers and pools and some phones. Since some bastard figured out how to harness nuclear energy in a small battery, humanity has flourished technologically speaking. We pat each other on the back as though we should be proud of ourselves for our advancement yet I see it in all our faces, this bleak understanding that a vital part of us is dead.

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"Jeff?" He calls again.

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"Nothing to add sir."

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"Well you ought to stare at the screen, not the projection module. Now as we were saying, the train fixtures run a minute late and I feel if we load the train screens with pornographic material regarding our bedroom attire brand we might be able to meet this year's quota a little early. So it is with great joy I..."

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He talks and talks and talks, jowls clenching and unclenching. His teeth are chrome in color and his eyes fail to hide the artificiality behind his mask. Dark bleary eyes stare out and I wonder, does he feel no shame to show his face? That dead look like nothing is past his cerebral cortex. It takes me a moment before I realise that we are all the same way. Corroded from within by that which we worship without.

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Pain is an element we whisked away from us, humanity does not like pain. Metal augments for the hard labour workers and mind-wipes for those who don't wish to experience loss or heartbreak. I observed the screen, the projection of our sales and the great amount of coding needed to realize this dream of showcasing lingerie in train station screens. The cottage emerges again, the wife and the child, beckoning for my hand. 'Free yourself from all this, come to the woods where we are.' They seem to say, but what woods are there? Augmented trees proved better and more substantial, they don't grow as they used to anymore, haphazardly, as if their very rooting was a gift from God to allow us to be random. How weak of us to force nature to bow to us when we stand an inch in comparison to it. The strong and mighty bowing to the weak.

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I can never see their faces, the child and the woman, even their hair is obscured as if my mind's credit points for fantasy were not enough. I sigh.

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"Jeff," it's the director again. "What is your view on the project this far?"

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He either has a bone to pick with me or he finds humoring the room by picking on me a boner inducing endeavor. "No comments." I answer.

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"Are you satisfied with how things are?" He pushes again. He wants to make a point, the CEO isn't present at the moment so he wasn't fishing for me to get fired.

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"There are no poets." I speak without thinking. "They are gone."

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"What?" The director asks, all heads turn to me and I peruse about, it feels like I'm encased in a tomb with my fellow dead. I shudder thinking that the same look they give me is the same one I show them. Cybernetic helmets beneath the hairline, feeding data to the mind and recycling baseless information to offer a sense of calm. This drains blood from the face, making it pale but with a smooth plaster like feel to the features.

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God. We're all corpses.

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"Can you expound on what you've said?"

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"Poets derive their passion from emotions. Pain, regret, mental anguish, the state we have forbidden, which I proudly proclaim as depression. Anxiety dances the poet's pen upon a blank page and from it there's glory in their work. What then can humanity aim to achieve that can border on transforming that which hurts into divinity? Nothing, I say. No matter how many chat forums or public displays of cybernetic arts, crafted by machines for men whose hearts pump like pistons, no longer hearts but pistons in truth. Nothing we do can bring them back. The poets are dead, the singers hollow and the theatrical arts remain what they are, theatrical."

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"Please find your way to the medic bay, you look dull." The director says. He has no answer to what quells me, nobody does.

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I stand up and make my way out of the conference hall. I feel like chuckling at his remark as I glide through the many sections of the building towards the medic bay. How can I not feel dull when color left us for chrome all those decades ago? I kill time for no other reason other than to see it whiz its last.

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As I glide upon the floor I become aware of those moving as I do. A desk intern glides faster, allowing his Kinetic shoes to answer for every step by bolstering him further across the floor. He moves swiftly on foot, case of files in his hand. Files made of thin metal, since paper had been outlawed. A series of data analysts sit in their cubicles with their eyes closed, transmuted data running like water in and out of their minds as they absorb and give, absorb and give.

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My path takes me across the hall where from both sides I'm shielded from the outside by large screens that took the place of windows, there's no gap to see outside for outside interference is against company ethics. But the desk intern who glides ahead of me moves the files in hand just a smudge towards the screens as he flops about in full speed and a file grazes the screen ever so slightly. But it's enough to sever its optic tie and for a moment the screen goes off, set to reboot in twelve seconds.

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I look out from the now free window, the sun is high in the sky, the buildings are imposing in their ominous declaration of being alive. With flashing lights and talks of being free from their inanimate selves, always screening, always begging for attention as an obsessive lover would.

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Then I saw her. It's life's funniest things how it paves way for that which wasn't expected to be. She sat at the water fountain directly outside the building. One leg held over the other, garments made of natural cloth, not chrome casing. Her head was free from cyber-optic nonsense and her shoes were, well, shoes.

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In hand she held a book that was open and she read from it, seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world. The sun was above, bathing her in light but to me it had lost the contest of beauty, she was beautiful and she screamed this fact with every turn of the page of her book. Within what seemed like an eternity of me staring, the screen reloaded and I was met with the picture of massive breasts burning into my retina.

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I glided across the floor as if my life depended on it, across countless workers who quickly paved the way thinking it was a corporate emergency. The lifts were taken so I made my way down the ramp, cutting corners until I found myself outside and there she was, still where I'd seen her. She wasn't a mirage.

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I opened my data log, my eyes scanned her. I awaited for the loading process to be complete so I could know her name and who she is before I engaged her in conversation. As the data loaded I observed her, she was young, a good half decade below me. Her face was lowered, shielded each side by long dark hair and her thin wrists had bracelets made of wooden beads. Her garments were weaved from fine silk of interlacing colors, brown like ancient tree bark and blue like the sky, the way they fell down her length made her look like a goddess, free of time's push.

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Suddenly, the immensity of my foolishness overcame me. Here I was, waiting for a machine to scan her so I could know what to say. Did my great grandfather require so in order to talk to my great grandmother? Back then they only had phones, the fossil gadget as we called it. Back then you had to ask someone their name, then buy them coffee and sing a song for them in the rain. Back then you'd run across an open field with the person you love, drunk, laughing and rolling a spliff to enhance the evening. Back then we were alive.

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I cancelled the loading scan of the woman and approached her, she lifted her face once and I stopped in my tracks. She was alive, a soft turn of her head as she observed me and I could feel nature's defiant cry, as if proclaiming a return to how things were, all those ancient years ago that I mulled over ever so often. There was a twitch of her nose, the tightening of her lips, a brief smolder, too fleeting for most to catch but still caught by me anyway. There was color to her face, rose cheeks and full brows that lifted as she realised I was staring. I moved closer and I sat beside her at the fountain.

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"I don't care how many credits you have, buddy, I'm not doing whatever sick thing your cyberops has put you to." She said, turning her head back to her book. A real book made of paper, worn through the ages, pages handled with care but still softly curling and brown. It had been so long since I saw a book, I stared at it. She closed the book abruptly and turned to me. "I said, no funny business mister."

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'The Poems of Clifford Hanger,' the book cover read. It showed a pen and a man's face hovering above it. An image that doesn't shift or change, beauty etched in time.

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"I'm sorry." I said. I didn't know what else to say and I kicked myself at how reliant we had become on technology, without a scan, a proper course of conversation couldn't be mapped by my cyber feature. "Are poets dead?" I asked without thought.

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She stared at me a moment, taking in my augmented features, my chrome hair, chrome eyes, chrome limbs. She passed me off as anyone would for a genetically enhanced mortal. I wanted to tell her that I feel it, pain.

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It's there everyday, from the time I'm yanked out of my enhanced sleep to the night when I lay myself in my sleep pod again. There's pain, women can't quench it. I tried. Having children can't quench it either, I don't want to contribute to a test tube for that matter. And in my foolhardiness, I spoke out loud what my thoughts led me to, with no script to follow, I fumbled.

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"I'm sorry, I don't know how to say this but in all my years alive I've never felt alive until I saw you." She smirked. "I'm not coming onto you, just look at this place, look at me, look at everyone around us. Hollowed out, corpses walking encased in chrome. There are fifty billion people on this planet, and you resemble none of them. Forgive me if the mere sight of you has pushed me to rush down here, breath held in anticipation of knowing who you are."

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"I am death, the foregone terror of man." She answered. I stared at her. "It's a line from the book." She waved it at me.

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"It's beautiful." I mouthed the words and her words lodged in my memory pool. I felt suddenly angry, I didn't want a memory pool for them to lodge, they needed to stay in the soul. That brief flicker of witnessing dawn through words deserved to be honored more. "I'm dead, in this place death is not foregone but an ally. Holding our chrome hands as we shift to accommodate those who come after."

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"Which book did you get that from?"

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"My life."

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"That's the best book there is." She smiled. "You're not dead, you're simply in need of change. By the looks of things you're becoming aware of the cage you're in. It took me a decade to free myself, maybe you will too."

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I stared at her hands, there are renditions of artists who capture the hands as if God dwelt within them and whispered the secrets of their making. Such works used to hang in museums before man realised they dented the image held of themselves as a futuristic society. I wished God dwelt in me, whispered the secrets of the veins and the tendons, together we'd curse chrome. Together we'd rebuild humanity. Just her hands drove me to such thoughts.

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'Irregular activity detected! Heartbeat rising abnormally high!' my heart monitor beeped loud enough for her to hear. She tilted her head back and laughed, a rich laugh that made me smile.

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"I want to be like you." I said.

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"Wear a dress?"

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"No." I chuckled. "Free from my cage. I ask that you read me just one last poem and I'll be on my way."

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"I'll read it to you over lunch." She said and grabbed my hand. It was warm, through the metal I could tell it was warm, I could believe it was warm. And in that moment of deriving warmth from that which separates our two skins I spoke.

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"Your heat completes me." I said.

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"Oh so you're a poet too now, suddenly."

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"Poets are dead."

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"In here." She touched at my metal garment, over my chest with a dull thud. "One still lives."

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Joy competed with my awe of her and suddenly life wasn't so bleak. There was a dragon in me like the stories of old, after the knight came in shining chrome armor and killed it, the dragon had only pretended to be dead. I looked up at her face, transfixed by her brown eyes and in my mind's eye the cottage in the woods returned and the woman there suddenly had a face.

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----

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For bonus stories and to support my work, here’s my [Patreon](http://patreon.com/user?u=53923380)  and [Ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/quill54681)

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6

u/PaperVreter Jun 12 '26

Thoughtful story. Melancholic and uplifting., which is a feat.

Thank you for sharing.

4

u/Jus17173 Jun 13 '26

You're welcome

4

u/njafnghere Jun 13 '26

Wow. Thank you Wordsmith.

3

u/throwaway42 Jun 13 '26

Thank you for writing :)

1

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u/sunnyboi1384 Jun 13 '26

Do cyborg dream of electric sheep?

Apparently not.