The Cyborg Wilderness

The Cyborg Wilderness is the story of one cyborg's search for something, anything, in a grey world ravaged by a great war that ended everything. It is a story told as simply as possible. A story of hope in a hopeless world.

Such a hopeless, empty world must be shown in a certain way. And so, this is a story told with no commas, colons, semi-colons, apostrophes, exclamation marks, question marks, hyphens or dashes. The language is as empty as the world. But perhaps that is not such a bad thing.

Excerpt:
The cyborg could feel her time coming to an end. It had been a long fight. A long war. A war for the land that died long before.

She stumbled through the world. The last of her battalion. The last of her people. She did not know if they had won. Her people had certainly lost. Regardless of who won.

She wandered. She did not know how long. She did not know why she tried. She wanted to die. She wanted her circuits to fizzle out and end. She wanted to lose everything. Once and for all.

She instead found herself moving. The sun had risen. It had fallen. The moon had risen many times. She could not tell the days. She never grew tired. She never grew hungry. She never wanted for anything. Except an end to it all.

An old road guided her. She did not know where it guided her. It went somewhere. The markings on the signs were foreign to her. Her human life was locked away. Damaged and discarded. She looked at her hands. One was dark. She turned it. Covered in dirt and grime. But dark beneath it. The other was grey.

She lowered her hands. None of it meant anything. The war had been for something. She was sure the war had been for something. Her body had once been human. Perhaps it had been for humanity.

She did not know if she was still human. She hoped she was not. It was humans who made her into what she was. It was humans who changed the world.

She could see the work of humans around her. The dust. The unending desolation. A nearby building turned to rubble. Corpses strewn across the road. They had faced whatever had destroyed the building. She assumed it was a bomb. Or a missile. Or a tank shell.

She continued her journey. The unending grey of the world. No humans. No fellow cyborgs. There was nothing left. She had no hope. She could not remember having hope.

She found her way to a building. It was like every other building. It was nothing special. Grey and destroyed. Like everything else. But the first drops of what had once been blue fell from above. She wanted to stay in the blue. She wanted to rust away. But she could not. Something compelled her to keep moving. Something pushed her on.

She felt along her head. Metallic alterations adorned her. One of her hands was still human. The other was grey. She did not know which she preferred.

The blue drops increased in size. She stepped inside and hid from the falling blue. She saw something. It was in the centre. Appearing through the cracks. It had once been a parking lot. A place for humans to leave their vehicles. Some spaces were empty. Others were filled with destroyed machines.

It was in one of those spaces. Cracked. Broken. Life crawled through. A single sliver of green. Amidst the grey.

She approached it. It stopped her in her tracks. She could not leave it behind. She could never leave it behind. She collapsed to her knees and watched it. It was unknown to her. Something other than the unending grey. The unending destruction.

Her fingers reached out. One touched it. Her dark hand feeling it. Her lips curved upwards. Something like herself.

Dettagli