Wounded Generation

The city was built from 'modern' ideas and hopeless broken bones. Shadows lurked beneath the pavement, in between the cracks in the sidewalks that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Clouds left gray trails in their wakes, touching black and breathing white. They were anorexic and thirsting for the abundance they once had, for the lakes and the oceans, not the waste from toilets and sinks that were scarce as it was. Trees were plastic; their leaves were sewn from nylon and cotton, their trunks hammered together with alloy nails expertly hidden. Flowers wilted, the scientists hadn't built those yet. No one was awed by the metropolis anymore.

The mother screamed beneath it all, beneath the layer of chrome and fabricated dreams, in pain, oh, how she screamed.

Great-grandmothers’ voices rasped on about their day and age, to children and grandchildren who were too busy with their touch-screen this and floating that. Holographic soldiers fighting wars created by infant minds raged on carpeted floors, brilliantly developed by veterans who knew they wouldn’t be drawing their bullets ever again. Inside this plastic dreamy world there was peace, as far as the weak-minded citizens knew.

Her mind had been covered in stitches, ridges, bandages, and scientifically developed foreign tissue. The blue-gray hue that had once glittered in her eyes had faded to a dull silvery color, blind to anything but what she had been programmed to see. A skin-tight suit stuck to her perfect body, where all the excess ugliness had been chopped off in the lab. She could not breathe; she didn’t need to. Joints sliding perfectly, only her cellular monitors were aware of her metallic innards, even if it would be obvious to anyone who investigated. Yet, everyone doubted that anyone else would investigate her. Perfect, airbrushed beauty had become absolutely ordinary; nothing to be envious or hateful of. The human race was used to live Barbies walking down the street; no one remembered what Barbies were.

Robotic, electronic people roamed the streets barely noticed as strange. They served people in households, they, without question, performed the community service the citizens were too lazy to accomplish. The governor controlled them, had their video game joysticks in his hands. They were toys; shiny new toys, that everyone wanted a piece of, everyone wanted to play with them. Not one of them could not think for themselves - not openly - and it was the greatest thing that ever happened to the population that didn't even believe that this was the defiant return of the Confederacy's slavery.

Yet, the androids were the only ones that could hear the screaming; they were the only ones who had been broken down and built back up from the ashes. They were the ones, who knew just how their mother felt, and they listened, and they prayed, and they did what they were told, like good porcelain dolls. They allowed their arms to be torn and their fabric frayed, and never spoke in anything but a dead tone. It was their programmed way, their programmed duty. Like the soldiers, like the holographic soldiers, they listened to their generals.

Underneath their stitches, ridges, bandages, scientifically developed foreign tissue, magazine-cover beauty, and perfection, they screamed. Beneath the layer of what the world wanted, they screamed.

Oh, how she screamed.