Submission of the Week

Hey guys! This piece was written by Carly Husick; if you want to learn more about Carly, check out her bio on the The Project tab. Also, not to steal her thunder or anything, but I've got a quick update - the submissions process isn't going to work exactly as intended. I thought I could create a sort of archive on this page and have a list of all the stories submitted, but I don't think that'll be possible, so I might have to post them on a week-by-week basis, with each story only staying up for that week. I'll look for a solution; in the meantime, apologies!

Now, onto Carly's story!

Title: Untitled

            The academy is a cold place. It is grey, upon grey, upon grey. The buildings are stainless steel, jagged glass, tan cement, spires of silvery metal swirling up into the misty grey skies with clouds so thick that not even the sun dares to penetrate them.

The operation is over. I am waking up. My head is now connected to a computer that types all of my thoughts as I think them. My brain is the Internet, and I am all knowing and all being. But I am not me. I am neither man nor woman. I am made of metal, and glass, like the academy around me, that created me.

I am the grader, the teacher, no longer the taught. I spit out scantron results like they are my words. My voice has no intonation. I talk straight, steady. I don’t get mad. I don’t feel love. I don’t hate. I don’t like. I just am.

*          *          *

When I was a girl it was my greatest dream to come to the academy at the age of sixteen and study the world. Not the geographic world, made up of continents and oceans, land and water, but the world that exists beyond the physical. The world that is behind wires, and screens, and machines. The world of the robots, who would one day rule us, one day take over, and I would be their queen.

In those days the over lord was the President. He was a stony faced man who ran hot and cold based on emotions. At the academy they taught us that emotions were for the weak. Emotions lead to rash decisions. Emotions were what resulted in World War III.

We were taught in a classroom of metal cubicles divided not by walls but by monitors that reflected the real world, the future world back at us. We were harnessed in by the pull of the web that caught us like flies and dragged us into the spider’s mouth clothed in silken threads. We were cut off from the physical world, from color, from life. We became what they wanted us too. Not our teachers, but our machines, our robotic commanders. Those who lived within the screens and truly controlled all.

The academy was the knowledge hub. The cloud of information from which every thing sprang, the central point of the web from which all knowledge stemmed. We were its workers, its servants. We did as it asked.

The academy lived and breathed. In every glass wall there lived a microchip who controlled us, our every word, our every breath, our every move. There were glass eyes everywhere, pulled from their sockets, stuck to the ceilings to keep us in place. We were the army of the academy. We were the soldiers of the robotic age.

*          *          *

They call me their Queen, but I have no gender. Just a built in crown that has built in eyes that watches my army as it grows and develops. Watches my soldiers, my scientists, my children as they build what will one day destroy the physical world, so that we may exist as we were meant to in a world of broken cement and crushed glass and twisted metal so sharp that any contact with human skin will rip apart flesh and spill the blood of the human race.

They thirst for an end, for a different beginning. For a world without feeling. For a world without life and color and everything that makes this earth what it is. When they pulled me for the surgery they neglected to tell me that the lasers would cut at my brain, burn at my nerves, tare away my heart and meld me into a mixture of two races. Not quite metal not quite flesh but a Halfling with no true place on this earth. They said I would wake up stronger, less rash, with a clearer head and a direct connection to everything around me.

I woke up today the wrong person. I woke up with a thirst for blood, for ruin, for death. I woke up today wishing that the world were a metal sphere with metal beings and glass windows for the rest of the galaxy to watch and wonder at. I woke up a different species.