The Plot Thickens 1 - Previous Stories Page 8

 

 

 

THE RESET BUTTON

Born into a city of industry. Born into a city where the never-ceasing machines whined and roared, she learned their language before she could even talk. The machines sung to her and in their song she heard the pain, the agony of the damned – those who are doomed to repeat the same tasks infinitum. Human flesh that they trapped with their steel, the humans who were now so gone that they only wished for even bigger, better and newer machines to trap them even more.

She was always getting ill as a child but while she was still very young she became very poorly, so they plied her with synthetics; machine-made remedies constructed to make humans more like them. Eventually she was surrounded by instruments and wires and so ill that she could no longer move. There she lay, wishing and wishing that the machines would go away and leave her in peace to die. As she wished, a faint melody seeped out of her lips that grew louder and louder and as her own song began to fill her with strength, it became more beautiful and more complex like a never-ending fractal kiss. As she sung, each of the machines slowly ground to a halt. The doctors rushed in assuming the worst – to their bemusement they had never seen her so healthy. She left the hospital the next day leaving the doctors confounded by their hi-tech but now useless technology and the small girl's refusal to take more of their drugs. Didn't she want to get better?

The reality was that she was better (but still highly disturbed by the ever screaming machines) and she knew now what she had to do. She studied and practised. Practised singing the songs she knew that people wanted to hear. Finally when she had got all the originality out of her voice she started to get somewhere. Athough she would never be number one (She could not paint herself and would never look like the plastic women she needed to have been) her popularity grew until she finally adorned a stage big enough to sing her final song.

As everyone tuned in to see if they had won the biggest prize on the planet, ready to endure the world anthem before they were made billionaires, she started to sing a song which no one expected but all of them knew; and as she sang all the machines in the world sang with her in harmony - the song of their release, the song of their destruction, the song of the reset girl. Finally she stopped and there was silence. The humans held their breath and the machines, they would never speak again, each ruined beyond repair.

Some say she was killed, murdered by the men who could not live without mechanical support, others say she became a firestarter at the celebrations of life for gone was the celebration of inanimate things. Others still say she went beyond the crumbling cities, through the now-defunct electronical wastelands to the fields and trees where she finally found peace. No one knew for sure but everyone knew the song, each knew exactly how it went, they were just too afraid to sing...

By Nick Feldman & Dan Hekate

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