Gone.

A hurricane of movement and commotion as machines buzzed overhead. The room immaculate shining metal, almost programmed to be this clean and pristine. Still nothing more than a factory where men and woman alike turned to machines as their memories disappeared. The cold beads of thick liquid oozed from my scalp. Pain. Stop. What. Is. Happening to me? Mankind to machine – to think that this was happening in rooms just like this all across the world, I shuddered.

My eyes sunk into the crevices of my face and my heavily grown stubble felt cold against the metal of the surgery room table. My arms itched against the restraints of the table, as machines around me beeped and hummed with the sound of conversion. Soon I would be nothing but another machine, cold and without meaning or feeling like so much of mankind already. My mind wandered as I thought of all the pain and suffering of the past months - as mankind was converted into machines.

What wasn't run down these days? Everything in sight overcome with complete and utter devastation from skyline to skyline, except – My eyes caught sight of this giant great oak that had somehow grown through the turmoil outside. I thought about that tree, about its wide branches. How it dipped and curved about reaching towards the sky – How perfect life had been before we started wanting more, before we pushed mankind to its limits. Those 4 years since the first attack I had spent thinking a lot about life and about that glorious smell of fresh rain. I could not help but be overcome with the feeling of being lost, and how much I missed the way she used to hug me during the storms.

The days had passed by slower and slower since the first attack, and as each human was converted we lost a little bit more of humanity. I was one of the final renegades, the final few. I had been free from it all for so long, venturing the stretched planes beyond where it first began, but here I was back again.

I have been running from this all for far too long - But to end up here? I wish now that I had kept running. Surrounded by nothing but a world of unfeeling machines, and crushing destruction except for-

I was cold, so unbearably cold. The feeling of cold that makes a man feel hollow inside, nothing but dust and bones.  Maybe I’d been running from this all for far too long. Maybe if I had let myself get taken all those years ago I wouldn’t have had to be alone for as long as I have. I watched as that machine overtook the city, the ones I loved some of the first to be converted.

The past so different from the present.

4 years.

Going.

I am standing on that old coastline, the one where my pop would pick those strawberries from his beachside garden. I think of the life before me, I have finished high-school now; I could backpack around the country, eat mysterious foods, and define myself.  I can feel pop’s arm around me as a stare out at the waves crashing on the shoreline, and the passing sun painting the sky a beautiful gold. The wind is blowing through my hair as I let the chilled sea breeze float me along with it.

Gone.

 I am lieing on this table as the bell sounds for the next stage of extraction. Which memories had I already lost? Will I relive those terrible times in the wild, or will those be something easily forgotten.

What did this all mean, Stop. Why would you take this from a person and then take their body too, what's left to prove? The machines already have it all, and now they want my memories too. I had forgotten what it had been like to be still without a racing heart and fear for what would surge from the darkness. To think that this had all begun with wanting something more beyond the simplicities of life that surrounded us, the beauty that was found in even the most simple a thing.

Metal shards and crunching gears replacing the parts where bones and flesh should be. Overtaking the parts that made a human a human and turning a man into a serving machine. I am me, I had a future beyond all this – I had a future with her but that doesn’t matter now. Because -

Soon my memories would be turned to ash and nothing more.  I stopped caring, I stopped empathizing hours ago. Feeling almost gone now,

Love?

Love… just a whisper to the bustle of sounds that came before it, and that should have come after it. I loved so much – or at least that’s what I remember. Though I’d  not remembered what love felt like – to feel it. To know that someone feels it for me. Everything is becoming so silent now, as it is being replaced with a grinding of gears and metal. Just like the volume -

Going.

I remember my father swooping me up in his warm comforting arms. Memories flashing past my face of embracing him as he walked through the door, and holding him as tight as my 5 years old arms would allow.  I felt the pain of watching him leave and knowing that he would not be back for what seemed like an eternity. My dad was only young then, making sacrifices for the family he loved and doing anything he could to keep us safe.

Gone.

Why am I here on this cold table being converted into nothing but raw machinery? This war, not worth the lives it would take to win.  A fight not worth the men and women that would sacrifice themselves to win it before it was done. The ultimate sacrifice –human memories, human thoughts that were thrown into a mathematical matrix and the remaining parts of them all but flesh turned to metal.

These memories would somehow help save mankind and we would never get them back. Once they were gone, they were gone. Finality. No one really understood why this was happening or why we were needlessly disposed of even how it all began. All we cared about was running from the thing that would steal our individuality and our memories from us for a better world.

Ideals, that’s all we are. An ideal for a better world.. I could spit at it. The rage boiling up inside me…. I see they haven’t taken that yet.

Figures.

Rage.  What a terrible feeling to be left with, as my final memories drift out of me as I lay here -until each and every thing that defined me is ripped from my aging bones.

Aging?  but I am filled with no memories of my aging . 29. The age I would be, If I was not being replaced with metals and gears that will be forced to grind for a cause it has no need to understand. Aging and aging fast, some sick joke if you ask me. We are forced to die for this cause, and we have to age the years through as they are stolen from us, feel what it feels to become older but feel no gain or pleasure in it. Not aging with friends, not seeing our love ones chase their dreams. Not catching that fleeting sunset as it passes behind the hills as we hold the one we love, closer and closer. But I no longer know what that feels like.

Going

The rain beaded through my thick hair as I stood staring on that hilltop, unsure of where my tears began and the falling rain met in synchronous union. So much destruction lay dormant behind my eyes. No. This can’t be, no no no. I was 25 when that crushing destructive beast lumbered itself among the tall skyscrapers of the inner city bustle. She was taken that day. She was converted. I would never get to sit cross legged across from her as we joked of places we’d travel and things we’d see.

“You know that horizon darling?” I asked her

“I know of it darling” Sarah smirked, as her lips curled gently.

“We are going to chase it one day” I replied

“I know Mark, I know” 
and we both smiled and stared off into the distance

Gone

I had wandered the world looking for a stop to it all, why had we consumed ourselves with all this advancement and forgotten about the things that truly made the world around. This world that had come to be defined – no permitted by the absence of love and understanding and had been consumed by beings that had no need for these feelings.  If only I had told her I loved her once more, before the life of our kind fell so abruptly from our grasp. If only I had held my father a little tighter but here I am alone –idiot- IDIOT. I am angry with myself for everything I ever said, I ever did, I ever forgot.

A gust of wind rushes over my gears as they grind for this life I no longer understand. I no longer have any feeling, I am made of nothing but time and destruction. Time, the memory of it all slipped between my fingers, lost to the oblivion.

Going, Everything, Pain, Rage, The fear of it all.

By Lincoln Parsons