The New Race

Here I lay, crumpled, in this, what has become my favoured corner of the cell, the furtherest point in the cell from the bucket they call a toilet. What am I to do? I shall die soon; they don’t let people like me live – I know too much, and once you know too much, once your eyes are opened to the true nature of things, you have a limited future. I have run, I was caught; I have fought, and was overpowered; I have fled, but was caught again; I have been beaten, and now I must die. That is my story – essentially.
Ah, but if only for a cause! Who in this world cares about my death, has my defiance stood for anything? The society in which you live seems to be turned upon its head, where infinite principles are laid to rest, and what is beautiful and just is tossed out of the window and replaced with vulgarity and evil, and all of this is accepted without question, without so much as even the raising of an eyebrow. Just as long as they keep their comforts – they will accept anything as long as it is convenient. They have been moulded into passive automatons – where is their spirit?


Dark days! Cold days! This place has become so coldly clinical, with human beings expected to act with the efficiency of machines, with the exactness of computers – scientifically perfect. And when a man exposes his weakness, his inherent, unavoidable humanness, he is treated with scorn and contempt, and he is invariably ditched, tossed from whatever meagre place he had in society to the fringes, sometimes beyond – eternally dismissed, if only from the public psyche, as nothing more than an inferior specimen, a thing to be looked upon in jest, when bored.
I say, ‘Laugh away black souls! Snigger your cheap sniggers, and pleasure your cheap hearts, for at least I know that soon I will die, and it will all be over for me. For you it will go on for eternity. Until the end of the world; a supernova; or a comet collide. An endless procession of torment, agony, and the holding up of a façade of perfection is yours to look forward to – enjoy; I looked my own mediocrity in the eye and accepted it, and now shall die, with peace, because of it. Not a day too late, nor a day too early, as the fate of spirits intended.’
Of course there is no one to listen to such a cry. ‘Who cares?’ they say. ‘Shut the jester up!’ ‘Feed him to the lions!’ ‘Lock him up in a cold, dark cell below the bowels of the rotting city!’ ‘Keep him in chains until he dies or shuts his blasphemous mouth!’ ‘Now let us go back to our perfecting of the human species!’
The worst part of all is that I played a role in this destruction of the human race - I inadvertently helped destroy the human spirit. I was passing chisels, unaware of what I was doing, as those more powerful were chipping away at the soul of man, until it was nothing but a sham. For this I deserve to be locked up, I deserve to have my eyes gouged out and my ears cut off. But alas, it was only when I saw the error of my ways, when I had opened my eyes fully to the desolation that I was helping to cause, it was only then that I was chased and punished; it was only then that I was told that I was a menace to the future of mankind, and thrown in this cell to rot away the rest of my existence!


I cried, ‘There’s got to be a new race!’ No one listened, there was no one left to care, the damage had been done – the new race had arrived, and it was soul-less, faceless. The new race had a glossy veneer, with a seething underbelly full of loathing and hatred. The new race was cyber-human, equally dependant on logic-gates as on blood. The new race found immortality, and sacrificed freedom to achieve it – sacrificed love and beauty to live an endless life of self-indulgence and sickly pleasure.
I’m not sure if there are any other fully fledged humans still out there; I don’t mean the ones who haven’t had the surgery yet, because of financial constraints or because they are on the waiting list, I mean untainted human beings who find all of this vulgar and unnatural, I mean human beings who believe in the power and beauty of the spirit, I mean human beings who would much rather die than live an eternal half-life, I mean human beings who believe in what it is to be human. Human beings to come fight and die with me!


There I was, working away in the laboratory, with the other equally committed and absorbed scientists; I did not know what we were doing - I don’t think any of us did. We were too caught up in the intricacies of it all to care for the bigger picture. Sure, I had my moments when I sat back and thought about what we were doing, but the fascination of science overcame any glimpses of morality that dared to raise their fleeting heads.
We were creating the world’s first ‘Electron to Neuron Transfer Device’, also known in higher circles as the ‘Processor, Brain Interface’. It was exactly what both names suggest – a device that converted computer signals into brain signals, and vica versa. A means of direct communication between a computer and a man – a method of dual-extension, in which the computer became an extension of man and man became an extension of the computer. We thought that we were working on a great benefit for mankind; we thought that our research may be used to give sight to the blind through the use of cameras connected through our interface to the brain; we thought we could give bodies to the disabled through the means of electroskeletons; we thought of all wonderful kinds of potential. Little did we know what evil our research was contributing to. I’m sure if we had of not one of us would’ve continued with the tireless work.


If I strain my ears I can hear the faint hum of the synthetic universe, or Cyberia, as they like to call it. I can almost hear the rush of blood screaming through the tubes, travelling endlessly from pulsating brain to pulsating brain. It makes my skin crawl to picture the endless mesh of grey meat and silicon chips sitting miles underground, all intertwined to create a synthetic inter-verse, dependant, yet separate from the physical universe. A Cyberia, a new world, with man-made Gods, with man-made laws, governing not only the confines of its own universe, but also the immediate surrounds of the physical universe, so that those still living in the physical universe are subject to the whim of the Gods of Cyberia.
It is those Gods that have ultimately thrown me into this cell. It is those Gods that will cause my death. It is those Gods that I am powerless to destroy.


Down here it is dark, and damp; and above me the city burns. The Gods have ordered the destruction of the infrastructure of the physical world. It is not hard for them, there is no one there to fight; all citizens are basically human-robots – there is perhaps not one amongst them that does not have an interface installed beneath their skull. The worst part is that none of them know it, that memory has been erased, along with many others.
And down here I sit alone, imprisoned, waiting for my time as a free man to end. Soon I am to have the operation that will convert me into one of them, and after that…perhaps I may become a ‘success’ and make my way into Cyberia, where I may exist in that disgusting parallel universe for ten thousand years, perhaps for eternity, for who knows how long a pulsating brain may live without a body, preserved in perfect conditions with continual blood and sugar flowing through it.
So here I am, crumpled in the corner of my cell, knowing that my only shot at freedom is to die, to die now, before it is too late. The hum of the distant generators echo through my whole being; now is the time - this instant, this moment, is the very last - the new race has arrived.