The Hall of Broken Hearts

How did we get here? My name is Prisha Essephranix-Takahashi. Our matrilineal family started in 2350. Our matri-name kin was much smaller than everyone else’s. Essephranix was a name passed down, mother to child, and was a name which could not be changed. It was odd being the matriarch of a kinfolk which was now just me, a family of one, parents dead. The year? 3001.

I lived in a strange time. A time humans were quite far evolved. But, we had also lost something. We had lost our hearts. Those of us who were short, under five feet, we were called Shorties. We had lost the knowledge of what it meant to even have a heart. That was just this spare organ us shorter people used to pay with, to be granted “maturation” at 16, to get work. (No one was considered an adult until 25. The Talls had to have their hearts replaced regularly.

If under five feet at 16, we had our hearts removed, replaced with cybergenetic hearts. Very functional, well designed cybergenetic hearts. A few centuries earlier, in 2666, when COVID-666 hit, Dr. Flintridge went far beyond the work of Dr. Zetos a century earlier. (Dr. Zetos helped humans evolve beyond the need of an appendix.) Dr. Flintridge successfully created a functioning artificial heart, built to last a thousand years. People raved at their functionality when they got one. People were feeling stronger, more alert, just healthier. Then the trend became a recommendation. Then the recommendation became Global Law. Except for the neo-Luddite Communes. I lucked out, Lost Angel Eyes County, and I didn’t have to live in the commune. I lived in Pasadena; my whole county lucked out.

Everyone liked to reflect on what they called the Platinum Age, when Hillary Clinton was President of the United Nations. She established peace in the Middle East. Solar, wind, and hydroelectric technology boomed. We still use much of it as foundational to our current technology, like the wheel. But that was centuries ago.

We’d already devastated our atmosphere. Most had fled to Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, or Antarctica. I was stuck in California of the Divided States Alliance. Like almost everyone in the world, I lived in a small Virtual Reality Box. There was enough room for a bed which came out at night, a toilet, fridge, and table for one. The benefit of my box was the front wall that came down in the morning for work, fresh natural air, miles above the Smoglands.

I worked for a nanofactory. My job was to activate a small nanobot. Through virtual reality, I’d see through its eyes and work with its hands. I felt like I was the actual robot during work hours. So I wasn’t at the nanofactory myself. I just felt like I was. But this nanofactory was only 10 inches by 10 inches by 10 inches. My job was to build femtobots. The femmebot jokes got old. Femto- just means 1000 times smaller than nano-.

Your values? Forget it. That’s a thing of the past. The world is so overpopulated, no one gives a damn about anyone any more. Clone Rights worked fine, Robosexual Rights also. The Zode Revolt supporting Brain Uploading into a Virtual Paradise, I supported that, but Murderers’ Rights? That’s overkill.

Death Sports is on the rise. Archconstable of the Earth and Moon Nuñez-Chin has finally permitted Death Teams to organize; predator vs. prey. The Amish were wiped out. She is called the Wise One and the Queen of Hearts. Former CEO of Half-A-Heart, first decillionaire, Shauna Nuñez-Chin, was of a decidedly mixed heritage like me. I liked her. She could relate to anyone, and speak all five languages; Anglonish, Spanol, Mandarinese, Francique, and Universh, an alien-human pidgin language. Most spoke Universh, with the others being carryovers from he past.

Humans didn’t know it, but they were speciating. People were being born either really tall, or short. We were in a phase. A phase of forced evolution. And the domesticated species, including humans, were actually appreciative. Dogs, cats, cows, pigs, chickens. Their meat was spliced with the jackfruit once interspecies hybridization was normalized. We were in the generation of porktrees, beefbushes, chickensprouts.

By this time, humans had woken up. They knew politicians were corrupt. They knew the elites were the elites, and there was nothing they could do to change that hierarchy. They were all pacified, living in there individual Virtual Reality Boxes, living in a vast network of cubes. Many of the cubes had real-world interaction, like my job.

Humans were cyber-enhanced, except for small communes which clung to the old ways. Lost Angel Eyes was an intriguing town. They had churches, synagogues, mosques, cars, no smartwrists. No spaceports. No catmans, dogmans. No cowmans, no pigmans, no chickmans. And no spaceports! They only had one spaceship. They believed the only way to know their god, Providence, was to live as though he came in 2994. They were a strange drug cult which described itself as Hemitheist. They worshipped Providence, half a god, where Agnostics and Christians could come together and worship.

The outdoors were called the sea of plagues. When we went outside, we looked like the sleekly dressed astronauts of the 2400s, the first to land on an exoplanet, a planet beyond our solar system, called Kalpatha. It looked like a light yellow version of Mars; yellow rocks and yellow dirt, breathtaking, the Magnimonious Canyon by the Desertak Colony. At least they had an atmosphere.

But that’s there. I’m on Earth, so I suited up, mask on, heading to the lowest level. Just going down an elevator for miles, seeing a sea of VR boxes, people scared of the real world. Smog covered the lands below. I finally arrived at the ground streets of Lost Angel Eyes.

While exploring, I eventually found myself in a pawn shop, physically in an actual pawn shop. A kindly old woman greeted me. I found the most unusual locket. It wasn’t that old Valentine’s Day shape. It was a heart, a human heart! A small human heart. The shop owner knew I was poor. She only charged me a measly million bucks. I put it on. Sometimes it would pulsate, most times, just still. I couldn’t even open it.

I eventually noticed it pulsated when I walked northward. So one day, I decided to follow it. Took a real vacation, rented a 21st century car. I’d done enough years for a spare week of vacation. The trek to the Cool Wall of Canada was mostly uneventful. When I got to Seattle, I knew I was close. I could smell freedom emanating from the other side of that wall which spanned from East to West through all of Canada to slow down undocumented immigration.

But Seattle had other plans for me. It was, after all, the residence of the Queen of Hearts. Following its roads in my rented 21st century car, I arrived at an exceptionally high and broad red and white factory, which from a distance I actually thought was the Cool Wall of Canada.

As the heart pulsated, I made my way through the lobby to a robotic mobile desk with one of us Shorties’ upper half attached to it, with a half robotic mind, visible through a glass dome on her head. I was in the Hall of Hearts. It was just what it was called. A hall, a factory, of human hearts, millions upon millions of pulsating human hearts. All in small glass teardrop-shaped vats, floating in these vats filled with what looked like water, maybe saline.

On the lower levels, all I saw were vats, vats, and more vats. Hearts and hearts and hearts! Those beating hearts. I could hear them echo, like they were all in pain; beat, beat, beat. I could see all the levels, because the floors and walls were all glass.

Then I saw two Grey aliens walk into a surgery room with a beating heart. When they came out, one had a fresh scar on his chest.

I was approached by the tall, fully human Queen of Hearts herself. The first decillionaire, the Archconstable, Supreme Chair of Half-A-Heart, Shauna Nuñez-Chin. She looked like me, but taller. Very tall. Maybe ten feet.

“Congratulations”, she started. “The locket has called you here like a beacon. You have finally found your place. In this factory, this factory of hearts. The Greys and us Talls need small human hearts to survive lightspeed and increase our lifespan. I’ll make you a linelord.”

She reached down, took off my locket, and opened the locket I could not. Inside was a picture of me!

“We’ve called you here, because you have the perfect heart. You never got it removed. It will do me personally very well. And you can finally be like everyone else who is short. With all the surveillance, we had to trick you to coming, but it’s a good place here. You’ll absolutely love it. You get to be a linelord!”

So this is where all the discrimination I dealt with for being short led me. A trap. A trick. I was forcibly strapped to a gurney to that terrifying surgery room, an ugly dim, nauseating room. I was quickly put under. I slowly awakened, heartless, strapped on the gurney. Seeing my own heart placed in hers, as an older flesh heart was being removed. Well, you imagine it. It’s your heart! I came out of surgery, heartless. Seeing my own heart placed in hers, as an old heart was being removed. I was quickly and forcefully passed off to a grey alien upper level manager.

“We’ll put you on a heart intake line,” he stated. I was introduced to various positions. The Armchops, average Shorty workers who had robot arms to work faster. Then the Forklofter, given very long robotic legs to reach high spots. Also, the taskhurdler, sort of a taskmaster, given whip arms and sort of a tractor lower body. All very disturbing. I met a linelord, the highest Shorty position attainable. She had her legs chopped off and replaced with jetpacks. That meant my legs would be chopped off and replaced with jetpacks. Surgery again. Unspeakable.

Constant surveillance. Twitching and bathroom breaks not allowed. One of my workers wet her pants one day, and was either reassigned or simply “disappeared”. Another called Nuñez-Chin the Queen of Broken Hearts. We knew what happened to him.

My duty, as Heart Intake Linelord, was to oversee new incoming hearts, prepping them to be placed in vats. An assembly line of pulsating human hearts. I ruled all the taskhurdlers, literally flying back and forth. Could I ever escape? I don’t know. The dreams are nice. I was injected with drugging mind control microscopic femtobots, just like the ones I made. Maybe I’ll get out someday. But Day after Day, night after night, day after day, night after night. Same dizzy Carousel. I’d go to sleep, enter the most wonderful dream world. I dreamt I finally made it to Alaska, but in this Alaska, polar beavers were not extinct. And in this Alaska, you’d see them in inner tubes, drinking Clokey Cola. Eskimo in their igloo skyscrapers! The days were endless, but the nights, addictive. Was I visiting another timeline, I sometimes mused. What a trap. I am trapped, hoping for another chapter in my life.