Ones and zeros

“The only requirement is that you must include a heart-shaped locket,” read the baseline of the writing contest. Ran stopped scrolling. Somehow this flyer had gotten into his feed. Then it flew away. He halted because it was such a strange word: ‘heart’. “What’s a HEART?” he asked himself, shouting out loud.

For those not familiar with Ran’s world: a shout was an official statement that a Zero could make on the different media presenting the Zero’s persona to their world. Ran’s world was limited, at that point in time, to the vast Zero Zone. He was one of the Zeros trying to get into Ones.

Ran’s shout stirred some commotion amongst the Zeros. It had that vibe, that potential to become a One, so many Zeros clung to it, desperate to get the fuck in.

A UFO appeared out of nowhere. It came in with blinding white light right above Ran, incinerating the bunch of clingy Zeros and raising Ran high above, boarding him into the ship.

Ran. Was. In.

First they paralysed his body and proceeded with the tests. They squeezed his body from all its juices. So far all went well. There were heavy operations involved. Lots of agony, many revalidation days. Until some of his organs were grafted onto a completely different body. A very sophisticated, indestructible body that could maintain organ function for much longer than his previous one.

The only inconvenience was that his memory started to fade. And slowly but surely, as he was getting more integrated into the new body, his brain began to produce new images that had more pertinence in understanding his new world.

He was brought to a site where many similar looking and behaving organisms were hanging out.

It looked like a barrack of some sort. It was the One Place.

Ran was inserted into a household as a remote kin of a lord. The chief-like figure began to speak: “Ran, you have finally joined us. We shall plot together now an action that will destroy the world you came from.”

So they spat him back, with his indestructible body, into the world of Zeros. Immediately he started to burn everyone and everything to the ground. When he got to the final Zero, something in him wavered. He could not understand, was it this female that made him halt? He had no idea. She was a regular Zero, nothing outstanding, nothing extravagant. He scanned her feed. Mostly pictures of her with her cat. Nothing special, nothing that revealed something extraordinary. He could not understand. Then his optometers detected a substance around her neck. A locket shaped in a strange shape. He had never seen such thing. He was bewildered and utterly confused.

“What is it, great One?” she asked him.

He wanted to delete SILENCE! but instead he lowered himself to her level.

He shouted: “Is that a HEART?”

The shout burnt all the servers because of the intensity of its algorithm.

The feed of the female was literally blown away, leaving a blank space.

She was blown out of her media, into her mind and into her heart.

She spoke: “Yes. It is mine.”

A drop of oil leaked out of his ocular sockets.

“Can I see what’s inside?” he pointed, not knowing how to speak, not able to speak.

She opened it and showed a picture of his old face.

“I am this man’s daughter” she said.

Ran ran away. A concept so strange to his new body it didn’t know how to respond to it. And he fell apart, like a bubble that sprang. His organs evaporated and Ran was forever deleted.