It’s a time beyond memory, a time beyond reason. A time where the good guys are allied with the bad guys and the bad guys are just wrong. When every step could be the last one you take on your own feet, where you can’t turn to the authorities for help or even medical assistance, because they’re no doubt worse than the people you need help from...
Where murder is rampant, robbery the course of the day and hatred oozing in the air. This is where he grew up, in this mire of misery, this swill of self-pity and hatred. My brother, my only living relative and the worst of the lot. He moved from the mire to the shadows and from there became one of the ‘good’ guys. The public love him, he seems to be genuine in his promises but I know better.
This is the tale of my brother, the story he doesn’t want told, not now, not ever, so I cannot speak but I can write and the world knows that he’s my brother so he can’t make me vanish. I’m the mute, the freak, the one he pulls out when he wants the sympathy votes yet in his eyes is the hate, the hate that is instilled from birth into each and every one of us.
He’s my brother and I love him, but mostly I hate him, for what he’s done to me, to the world and how nobody ever notices. I can’t let him see that though, not from me. I’m his only support, the only one he feels he can count on. I’m the only one keeping him human because he knows how much I hate the ‘bots, cyborgs and the AI’s. Everyone else loves them. In this age, with these advances, you don’t get sewn up, you get a transplant, a substitute, a mechanical, electronic replacement.
He’s my brother and I love him, but how I wish he’d left me my tongue! I can walk, I can see, I can write, I can hear but I cannot speak. I am pitied because I –could- speak, I’m one of the few that the techs would love to get their hands on, there’s only about one hundred of us, out of all the billions of people in the world. We can be formed, improved, into something more, something that is like a god, or even higher, yet I refuse to get the transplant, the substitute because I know the techs wouldn’t be able to resist going further and ‘improving’ me. Because I refused to let my brother pay for my improvements, I am both revered and pitied, I am both more and less than them, in their eyes. Sure, I could be more, but I would lose my humanity, my me-ness, and that’s too high a price to pay, for some bits of metal.
This is the world I live in, where the quality of your electronic ‘improvements’ and the quantity of them matters more than who you might have been. This is the world my brother was born into and the world he rose to power in; this is reality, one of science and fantasy. This is what I hate, the cold impersonality and this is what I want to change, to give Mankind back its humanity.
