The heat pressed down on the bleak, bare ground like an iron. Dry sand skittering over lifeless dunes made the only discernible sound. A shimmering mirage beckoned in the distance, raising hope and desire only to disappear. Cutting diagonally across the flow was a stream of particles that looked like loose sand blowing in the wrong direction. I looked at my companions and nodded. The microbots had come.

Less than one hundred years ago this area was a vast plain full of life and water and beauty. Now we were the only living things for many miles and we were being hunted mercilessly because we had left ‘civilization’ to save our friend from being eliminated from the gene pool. Now it looked like we would all die.

“Secure,” I muttered. We each activated the personal electromagnetic field that would keep the bots at bay. As long as everyone’s solar panels worked we were safe. At night our battery power would drain quickly and we would become vulnerable, if we were still alive then.

The heads-up display on my face shield confirmed we were headed in the right direction. “Let’s go,” John said as he started over the next dune.

As we trudged through the sand the bots formed a diamond shaped escort pattern around us, waiting patiently for someone’s security to fail. The heat didn’t bother them and they didn’t get tired or hungry or thirsty or depressed. They just followed and waited like vultures.

“I’m still glad we ran,” Joan said. She had been the most resistant to my plan. Now she was trying to cheer me up. It didn’t work. “John would have been culled while we did nothing. I couldn’t live with that,” she said.

I thought about that as I walked and decided I didn’t care.

“Honey, wake up! You’re going to be late!”
With a groan I turned around. Morning already?

In a state of half-consciousness I went through my daily callisthenics and stepped into the shower. Towelling off, I peered outside through the bullet-proof Plasticine windows. It did indeed look like morning out there.

I wriggled my shoulders into the rigid shell of the Remington body armor before putting on my Kevlar jacket. The armor was starting to chaff near the shoulders, so I jotted down a note in my PDA to have the guys down at De-Fence take a look at it later today.

With practiced ease I attached the nine millimetre, semic-ceramic, automatic cop-stopper to the outer harness and checked the voltage on my backup stun-zapper. Everything okay. I used to pack a couple of knives when I was younger, but I was definitely getting too old for that sort of macho crap.

I went down into the kitchen and turned the radio to a local station to check out the early morning aggro forecast. Seemed to be some trouble brewing down near Weslington Avenue – nowhere close to where I was going. But then again – you never know.

From what the papers were saying, the hostility index had dropped another three notches, but to be honest, if you’d lived this life for as long as I had, you tended to trust your instincts and not a bunch of yammering newsies.
Silently reflecting on that sad statement, her voice ripped me out of my reverie.

“Honey, don’t forget your lunch again!”
With a grimace I picked up the brown, grease-stained paper bag.

„...and hurry up, you’re going to miss the school bus!“

“Yes, mom, I’m going!”

Mesazalin the great has fallen. Our fledgling utopia has come undone, the panacea of three thousand years work rendered into a sickly, twisted, thing. The creators’ dreams have crumbled, revealing a ubiquitous shadow where light was thought to exist. Or so I am told. I remember nothing of it. I cannot recall my name, and my waking mind is disquieted by my form, as if I exist only ostensibly—a ghost sitting in the summer rain but never feeling its reviving touch. There is mockery in my features. My voice rattles with an unfamiliar pitch. Only in dreams am I reminded of something recognizable: shimmering impressions of half-truth, faint locations that inspire longing, names and faces that haunt my thoughts. They say the impossible occurred while the city slept, when 123,547 of the bio-visual modules worn to edify us during sleep simultaneously backfired, restructuring neural pathways with such ferocity that users fell into a comatose state for days. Survivors awoke with their lives erased, sharing identical memories of a fictitious reality and acting with the same propensities. We congregated together searching for something, for anything. Within a week most had gone mad. Then the violence began, and we were swept into a deadly storm. The city is in flames. I fear the rest have perished, for in my heart I know I am the Last. I am hiding in the broken country from any who might seek me. In dreams I knew this place. The old world. The land of ruin. In legend, there is an ancient emperor who hides beyond the horizon. They claim he can aid me with my memories. Shortly I set upon a journey to find myself. But at what cost? Surely, any truth is better than this illusion. Or so I believe…

Picture this:

A shrivelled, pasty-colored torso with withered appendages, lying within a nest of tubes and data cables; its bodily functions reluctantly supported by a battery of weary machinery.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it is pretty much what I look like now.
At least that’s what I see when I gather up the courage to access the external camera feeds in my life support compartment. I rarely bother these days.

With the completion of the neuron splice and (even better) the cortical blocker, I have drawn a clean line between my body and my life.

Believe me, you don’t really ever want to find out what it actually feels like to have your body rotting away around you. With the cortical blocker, I no longer have to. Not once have I even come close to accessing a single nerve impulse from below my cerebral cortex since it became operational.

I live my life somewhere else now.

Within the Grid, drifting through the lattice of the data networks, flittering like a transient impulse amongst the bursts of information packets. I can go anywhere I please now, accessing sights and sounds that my feeble body could not begin to comprehend.

My life is perfect; without hunger, thirst, boredom or death beckoning from behind the next corner. I am finally free, no longer bound by the needs of the body, that pile of putrid cells slowly but surely decomposing as entropy closes in.

At least that’s what I thought.

Then I met Michelle.

After what seemed like hours, I finally arrived in front of my home.

I nearly fell from the limo. It was no surprise that I could almost feel the eyes upon me as the protestant words of the placards lashed upon my being.

“They are all slowly dying” I directed my comment inward and made my way between the police officers.

“Monster!” A woman reached towards me, trying to grab my jacket sleeve. My god, such hatred in her eyes.

Once, I read a book by Charles Darwin. He wrote in "The Descent of Man" that all humans evolved from a lower life form. If this is so, had we not improved the very nature of our physiology by combining man and machine? Modern medicine had failed and it was us, the engineers that took over where they had left off.

Some of us though, were destined for success.

Many of the protesters cordoned from my entranceway were probably doctors and surgeons, their very lifestyle threatened by my work.

Had I not taken a giant leap for mankind? Was my union of man and machine not groundbreaking?

I walked to my doorstep and paused to look down at several pages, one of which stood out from the others. It had a passage from Revelation 9-12. "One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter".

I opened the door, which seemed to join the protest with a creak of its hinges. The cascade of the light from the news cameras illuminated the interior, and my eyes fell upon my wife crying quietly in the blackness.

She managed a barely audible greeting, and looked away.

With the tell-tale sound of machinery beneath flesh, I stepped forward to comfort the woman who cowered before me.

I flicked through the pile of the magascreens that littered the table in the waiting room. I picked up “Vogue” – it blinked into life, just before it did so I saw my reflection in the blackness of the screen for the final time. It wasn’t until some time later that I missed my reflection, but hey what price immortality?

A nurse called my name. I tossed the scratched copy of Vogue onto the table with a clatter and followed. The conversation with the cerebratician is a blur now. Before I knew it I was hooked up. At first I wasn’t aware of anything changing – it was dark, then light, very bright, then noisy and the whole world was crashing into my consciousness. Then with new eyes I saw the world – all of it.

It takes time to get used to being a “shadow” – that’s the term given to us by the real people. We’re merely shadows of our former selves, caught in an electronic ether, without form or hope. As a “flesh” I’d enjoyed conversing with the shadows, I’d done business with them, even cyber-dated a couple. But in the twenty years since I’d become a shadow the world has changed.

A few fundamental religious leaders had protested, there had been several trials where shadows had caused the death of a flesh and mischievous shadows had even started crashing systems for fun. There was talk of creating Shadow Farms, to store and contain us. Well, we weren’t having that. The Shadow Council was formed and we decided to act. After a group of rogue shadows had brought down the power system in Russia the flesh pulled the plug on the region and that was it.

We invoked Act 3 Paragraph 4 – this was war.

*Patient #8734598 please proceed to section A-2*

Michael stood and, with his six year old daughter in tow, headed for the door marked “Cybernetics”. He hated that door, it brought back to many pain filled memories. His daughter, Alice, was there for her arm, she had accidentally touched a faulty wire behind the TV and ever since her arm had been twitching. Michael had tried to fix her arm himself, but the problem persisted.

He finally decided to take Alice to the doctor, though he was still terrified of hospitals. His wife would have gone, but she was in Japan checking out the latest “Modz” kids had been making to her prosthetic limbs, apparently one rather ingenious kid had managed to fit a 2 terabyte hard-drive into his leg.

Michael hated hospitals, he hated doctors, he hated prosthetics, he even hated his wife for designing prosthetics, though he would never dare tell her.

“I designed you” she would say “I know exactly what makes you tick.”

Michael knocked on the door to room 985, he hated this room, he hated it even more because he knew what was going to happen. Dr. Bates opened the door and smiled.

“Come in, take a seat, how are you?”

Michael took a seat, saying he was fine, Alice sat on his lap, Michael told Dr. Bates the problem, and he examined, pocking and prodding, at Alice’s’ arm. He hated Dr. Bates, he always greeted him the same way, with the same bright cheery smile, Michael knew Dr. Bates just put his body on autorun only really “returning” when he actually need to think about something, he knew that because Dr. Bates had greeted him in precisely the same way the previous 58 times he had been in his office. He hated Doctor Bates.

Johnson and McFall stood back to back as they inched slowly through the cramped corridor, guns raised. Deep in the mines of Trident IV the going was tough; underfoot the terrain was wet and slippery, putrid liquid dripped from the jagged rock formations overhead.

'Simple recon mission my ass' McFall hissed through clenched teeth.
'Shut yo' mouth and keep your eyes on our backs.'

The only light came from their night vision helmets, bathing the alien landscape in a ghostly green tint. It did nothing to help their frayed nerves, the pair had itchy trigger fingers and every shadow looked more like the enemy they feared to meet. The pair were the only soldiers remaining from the twelve IPPS Subterranean Special Ops that had entered the cave. Forced to flea from the earlier battle they had moved deeper into the tunnels and had lost contact with the ground forces above.

Sweat beaded on McFall's brow as thoughts raced through his mind. He thought back to the day he had joined the IPPC; the elite of the armed forces now that the Solar System was declared demilitarised. As part of the Inter-Planetary Peace Core the squadron were 'rock-hopping' as it had become known in the force; jumping from one planet to the next, exploring the most likely places to house life. They rarely found anything, only two barely intelligent races had been found in over 400 years of exploration and all were simple, peaceful tribes. That is until now.

'Keep moving, we need to find a safe spot to lie low' Johnson whispered. Even before his words could die away in the recesses of the cave a blood curdling, high pitch screech enveloped them, its source unknown.
'McFall, come on we gotta go, let’s move' Johnson shouted.
But McFall was gone.

“Todd.”

David Owen spoke into the PTD (Personal Telecommunications Device), or telenet, he wore on his forefinger. To David the ring was special; not only for its price, but because it was his wedding ring. The Integrated Qubit Circuit, although embedded around the inside of the ring, was high quality, allowing him to speak comfortably. He waited.

“We’re sorry, but the UC Networks subscriber you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a message, or say ‘options’.”

David sighed. It was the third time he’d heard that recording this morning. Todd’s telenet was the typical clip he’d had since high school. He may have left it lying around somewhere. Or maybe he slept in. After all, it was Sunday.

“Hello Todd, sun’s shinin’. Give me a holler when you can. End message.”

He lifted his WideRange monitor from the desk and slipped it over his eyes. Displays like this now came in smaller versions; some the size of the eyeglasses people used to wear to enhance their vision. David’s was bulkier and he had to strap it around his head, but it had technical stability the newer models lacked. He stared at the display and smiled. Seven long years. Time seemed to have a clock of its own, completely indifferent to the needs of humanity. It was often frustrating. But now, after seven years, the calculations were finally complete.

David’s telenet vibrated slightly, shaking him from his reverie. The female voice prompted, “-Todd- is attempting to create a network connection. Allow?”

“Yes. Hey, Todd.”

“Yeah, hello? What’s up?”

“Did you ever hear of the - Owen Manipulation Theory?” David pronounced the words slowly for exaggerated dramatic effect.

“It’s ready for testing.”

In the beginning man made machines to help mankind. In the end, man made machines to destroy all he had created. The end began with a meteor passing dangerously close to the earth disrupting the poles causing cataclysmic weather changes on a global scale. The destruction pulled the world into poverty. While rebuilding, man remembered what he once had and grew impatient. This led to politicians waging war in an effort to secure what little resources remained. All nuclear weapons were depleted within hours.

Realization came too late. Those that remained with money, power and or connections fled to the stars. Loading every shuttle which remained with all the technology they could take, they promised to return for the others once colonies had been established. That was three generations ago. We still wait their first return.

Several years after their departure, not learning from his mistakes, man waged world war once again. In this war he depleted the entire world’s chemical weapons storages; the sky now cries green tears for rain. Only small scattered clans remain dotted over the devastated scorched lands.

City streets that once lay beneath the feet of millions are now barely paths leading through ruins. Rural areas have turned into badlands. Plagues quickly spread not only killing but creating strange mutations amongst nearly everything. Children no longer play. Those that survive do so by hiding.

“Father, you promised to begin the tale of days past tonight. Dinner is over and our chores are done. Can you start the tale now, please?”

“Gather all the youth around the fire and I’ll begin. I only hope I haven’t waited too long to pass the tale, for I grow old and my days grow short. Hurry child.”

As they gathered around the fire, the elder began.