Hope Chimes

Jayla had always known she wanted to be a mother, there was just always an empty ache inside of her from an early age. She never really found it very shocking considering she hadn’t ever really met her own. She just didn’t always have the best of luck with men…or fertility. So imagine her shock when she did finally end up pregnant in times like this after a sad drunken, the world is ending so why not, one-night stand. Talk about bad timing.

As the months went on the times only got darker, there was less and less food everywhere, people were only getting harder to trust, and nature was ruthless. There really wasn’t much left for the planet to give after the final war and nature was ready to take it back. Jayla was always a fighter though and so was her sweet little daughter once she arrived. Being the fighter she was and determined to keep her daughter alive, once she could no longer thrive on breast milk alone Jayla needed to find a way to live off of very little.

Thanks to her background in biomechanics she did just that. Following the war with so few healthy people left to maintain anything, humans found a way to modify to survive. Evolution at their own hands since their bodies weren’t doing it quickly enough to match mother nature’s harsh evolution of her own. Little by little, she swapped out what she could to lower her need for food so anything she could get her hands on could go to her daughter.

Now for a long while this really helped her sustain the two of them, even helped her protect her daughter against countless seemingly friendly faces. That is until the day she could’ve never seen coming no matter how hard she prepared. She had accounted for everything, every threat she could, everything but the new settlers. They arrived so suddenly and it seemed as if the earth rebelling now made sense. These beings seemed to have some way of controlling the elements that she never could’ve predicted.

This lead to the death of her daughter which left her with only ashes to remember her by. Jayla gathered as many of them as she could as she fled their wrath and welded an intricate and tragically beautiful little heart-shaped locket with Hope etched into it. She sorrowfully tucked that locket into her chest and it became one with herself and her mechanisms. From that day on, she wondered aimlessly wondering her purpose, for if she didn’t have her child then why continue to live?

The beings only continued to eradicate all human life they could find, Jayla seemed to be able to narrowly escape complete death with them because they couldn’t tell she still had human in her. She must’ve forgotten how much of her original form she had swapped out to protect her daughter. Eventually, she started to notice that many other parents attempted to protect their children leaving behind many small orphans hidden in places the beings wouldn’t think to look.

This realization seemed to spark a new light into Jayla, she began collecting all of the children she could find and created an impenetrable home for them. The beings arrival seemed to calm the earth and it began sprouting with life again. This made it infinitely easier for her to provide food for her children this time. She just had to continue to find new ways to disguise her children from the beings. So she built more machines like herself to continue to protect them.

With time she watched the beings and taught her children how to care for the earth the way they appeared to. Eventually, the beings did find them, though thanks to her teachings they were a better breed of humans, ones the beings were willing to accept on the earth. She had no need to really stay anymore because they had assimilated so well and after watching a few generations of her children grow she finally felt she could rest.

The day she decided her children didn’t need her anymore she pulled her beautiful little hope out of her chest. She needed to let her see that though her life was brief it lead to the bettering of humankind. She fastened her Hope to the bottom of a rather intricate wind-chime she made of a collection of small trinkets from all of her children over the years. When she was ready she climbed to the top of the branch on her favorite tree that held the swing she had pushed so many of her children on.

Jayla sat there for what felt like an eternity after she hung Hope for everyone she loved to admire before she finally powered down for the last time. She left her body there with her daughter watching over all the children that came after her. Until eventually, she was nothing but rusty dust on the soil but Hope seemed to last forever etched in the locket her mother built to protect her, watching over all of her siblings just as her mother did.