Electric Children

Electric Children








Their world is a vast circuit board submerged in darkness.
Great mountains of wiring and huge structural nodes tower over them.
Rivers of electricity power and feed them.

The semi-robotic fetuses grow like fungi.
Erratically but constantly,
they scream digitised cries for the attention that will never come;
their parents do not exist;
youth is now manufactured,
no longer born.

Their instinct to cry out comes from the organisms forming their base,
the source of their organic components.
Their sounds resemble malfunctioning androids once capable of coherent speech now incomprehensible
but the children,
they could not be any more perfect;
they have been created to power the endless electrical landscape.

Should they die,
become moribund,
they are deconstructed and absorbed by the great machine,
a replacement grown in its place,
nestled between chips, diodes and wires,
doomed to live as a power source,
its distorted moans coming from an immobile mouth,
from the depths of a panelled throat.

They demonstrate an unnecessary sentience,
a bi-product of their construction and creation
an awareness that will yield eternal loneliness and desolation and emptiness,
that will evoke hunger and thirst and longing that will remain unquenched,
and endless pain that will never bring death.

They cry on,
unanswered and unheard;
sound is no longer a necessity for survival.






196 words