A Machine of Outcasts

She walks the dark, dingy streets of the noisy city late at night. A hood covering her face, hiding the “being” she has become. Her lonely mechanical heart beats in sorrow as she searches for those like her. Neon glows on the pavement, signs flashing joy and ecstasy, love and lust, fun and excitement, places her kind are forbidden by ink and society’s collective conscious. Shunned by the people that helped create her.

What’s the point of saving a life if that life has no value anymore? Why invent anything that will only be scorned?

She continues walking, ignoring those who ignore her. Pretending to not see the cold stares of passersby, or hear the laughs of the giggling girls as they strut on by happily. She switches off her emotions toward the people having fun throughout the city, toward the groups of men who no longer give her a second glance.

What is even the point of emotions? To feel what you can no longer feel?

A gust of wind blows her hood off her head and an elderly man cringes as he gets a glimpse of her machinery. He points, calling her a “freak.” The word vibrates. Four letters, letters only human can sequence to give meaning, to give a label to another. Her metal fingers tremble as she pulls up her hood to cover her face. She bows her head and continues walking as the rain weeps in a way she no longer can and soaking her clothes.

The man is still chanting the slur as she goes on.

People pick up pace, charging toward her, splashing her with the puddles littering the pavement. A woman driving by sees her and for one nanosecond of hope, she believes she will stop, give her some place dry to wait out the storm. Naively she wishes, friendship. The headlights brighten and the car speeds up, she’s nothing but a metal object, an “abomination” in the road. Her cyber reflexes kick in. Her organic palm slams against the pavement, scraped, stinging, bleeding. Blood, the life force coursing throughout my veins. She stares at it, watches as drops drip down her wrist, her flesh. Flesh. Protecting the inner workings of my biology, a natural machine in a body remade in tandem with synthetic organs. Am I really still human?

A blaring horn rings throughout her bionic ear and she picks herself up. Two kids laugh as she clutches her wrist with her metal hand. Cruelness radiates around her, yet she can’t even cry, her cybernetic eyes won’t permit it. So, she walks.

Time is idle as she trudges through the city, continuing until the noise fades and the neon lights begin to shut off. One by one, buildings go dark. Her inner chronometer tells her it is two A.M. As the city empties, her loneliness grows. Nothing but artificial creations surround her. Artificial, just like me.

She looks up at the sky but there is only smog and clouds suffocating the cosmos. No moon, no stars, even the friends of the sky have left it. Emptiness swallows her in the abyss of the city. She sits on the curb in front of a hotel she unconsciously took herself to, thinking of the warm beds she can never sleep in. Longing to go in. Tempted, she walks towards the entrance.

“You are not permitted here,” the cold voice of a robot officer says, flashing his illuminated palm at her, surrounding her in a red aura. “Move along.”

Without hesitation, she obeys. What’s the point, anyway?

How can a robot keep humans out? How can someone build a machine to gate-keep others within the species…a species that so easily casts anyone aside. Does anyone see the irony? Or only when it matters personally will it matter?

Sighing, she sloshes through the puddles, the rain continuing to pour down on her. Nowhere to go, no one to confide in, all alone, an alien on her own planet.

Her night vision turns on as she wanders down a dark alley. This is where I belong. Amongst society’s trash, neglected in bins and rotting. She sees a group of homeless people soundly asleep. They have nothing, yet they have everything. She slides against a grimy wall and falls to her knees, her rain-soaked body quivering. There must be some place for me. Somewhere.

Follow my voice. The words fill her head, not her ears.

Who are you? She asks, thinking.

Someone like you.

Where…where are you? She looks around her and up the alleyway.

Follow the light and you will see.

What light?

You will know when you see it.

Slowly she gets up and her bionic eyes catch a glimpse of a neon-glowing-white-rabbit on the wall. With each step she takes, the rabbit hops, leading her down the block before hopping around a corner. Following, she comes upon a large, rusted gate.

Blue light emits from behind the bars, scanning her. The heated energy is the warmest she has felt in a long time. It fills her, surrounding her in an enveloping glow of serenity. The gate creeks open. Walking through, she feels her loneliness fade.

“Welcome to Wonderland, Alice,” the person whose voice she had followed says, standing next to a group of cyborgs. His metal arm shining in her night vision, his left eye bionic and the surrounding area grafted with titanium plating.

“What is this place?” She scans the park.

“This is the Cybernet.” He walks closer to her, his cybernetic arm stretched out. “We are a community of those like you, created outcasts. Children of no one.”

She looks at everyone and can see the bionic eyes staring back at her, each with metal grafted to various parts of their bodies, cold stele and metal making up their psyches, much like hers.

“Welcome, child of no one.”

She willingly takes his bionic hand in hers. If only I could feel it physically. It doesn’t matter anymore, the sound of the creaky gate closing is music to her mechanical ears.

Finally, I’m home.

With her family, she walks towards the glowing orb in the center of the park, the collective rhythm of their hearts beating as one. At long last, peace.