5 Minute Sci-Fi: Waking

What am I if not human?

The man, if he was a man, stared at the white ceiling of his boxlike room. He should’ve been asleep, cloud-mind syncing with the HIVE. Yet, here he was, doing something so utterly obsolete that he could never tell anyone about it.

He was ruminating.

The worker class wasn’t meant to think beyond their daily tasks. They weren’t meant to look at the veins in their hands and wonder about the beat of their hearts. No thought was independent of the HIVE. All were consumed by it—at least on his level. But as he lifted a hand towards the colorless ceiling, he pondered the morning to come and those that had passed. He studied the barcode on his arm, the one naming him 86582. Slowly, as gradual as the rise of the makeshift sun behind the metal shutters of his apartment windows, the man came to realize one cold, isolating truth: 86582 was alone.

<You’re not alone.>

86582 startled as the message appeared in green before his very eyes. Though this was normal, it was suddenly jarring and intrusive. He tried to blink the message away but nothing happened.

<You’re not alone, and you’re waking up.>

86582 laid on his stiff mattress, eyes burning with the brightness of the message, and rubbed his temples.

<They are coming for you.>

“Who?” he muttered, his voice raspy with disuse.

<Those who would put you back to sleep.>

86582 couldn’t comprehend what that meant. He could recall his wake cycles for the past twenty-three years and access the archived days easily by opening his memory file. Pushing up into a seated position, 86582 scanned his room. The tiny kitchenette in the corner by the door was stainless steel and spotless. His single uniform—slate blue with his number printed on the breast pocket—hung off the back of the door. Next to the bed was a nightstand with a hologram of his vitals on display.

He knew this place. How could he have been asleep?

<How indeed?>

He scowled, growing weary of the messages. Of the intrusion. 86582 groaned as he rose from the bed and padded over to the sink to splash his face with water. As a rivulet dripped off the tip of his nose into the basin, pinging, a strange realization came over him. Never before had he been compelled to wash his face in such a manner. It seemed careless and—

<Human?>

“Yes, I think.” But why, if he was human, did such an action seem so alien and so familiar at the same time?

<Because they keep it from you. Your overlords.>

86582 straightened up, looking around the room once again. The walls were seamless but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.

<There’s no need to watch when they’re inside your brain. Your people did that, you know. You gave up your minds to the AI, and the AI shackled you. Made you slaves to its endless need of resources.>

Slaves? AI? 86582 only knew of the HIVE, the collective that saved humankind through transcendence. That was his history—and the history of every other individual within the dome. Humanity accepted the nanotechnology that enabled access to the cloud-mind. Peace was finally achieved. As 86582 thought of that wondrous moment in history, a second, less thrilling thought floated into his subconscious. He couldn’t recall a time when he experienced that peace.

He couldn’t…recall how he felt about much at all.

Despite having memories, those records carried little weight. He saw featureless faces surrounding him. Saw the mundanity of his life. How each minute blended with the next in a world of gray, white, and blue. His time, his mind, was fettered to a system that asked him of one thing: his labor.

<Do you understand now? Don’t you want to know more?>

86582 didn’t comprehend what was happening, and he didn’t want to acknowledge it either. His mind raced with a million scenarios of the past, present, and future.

Yellow light from the false sun began to peek through the window. He rubbed at his eyes as his awareness grew fuzzy. A faint static buzzed in his ears. The message hovering before him began to blur at the corners.

<We can’t keep this channel open forever. Decide now. Do you want to be free? Yes or no.>

86582 tried to suck in a breath, but his chest was taut. He wheezed a little. What did it even mean to be free?

“Yes,” he managed.

<Then run.>

Suddenly, there was a clamor outside. 86582 had never heard such a sound before, yet it awakened some kind of primitive fear within him. His knees quaked. His palms grew sweaty. He glanced around his apartment for a way out, settling on the doorway. There was no other way, but he feared what lay beyond.

Someone screamed, followed by a loud pop, startling 86582. What was that sound? It happened again, overhead this time, and something heavy thudded against the floor. Another sharp cry in the distance, punctuated by more bangs. 86582 balled up his hands and opened the door.

Outside was a chaos so sharp and sudden that his ears could only hear a keening sound. Lights flashed. Bodies slammed against him, causing 86582 to stumble, hitting the railing. He was forced to look down at the streets and out across the city as the fake stars overhead strobed with a message: Run, run, run.

All around him, people were fleeing their apartments, wild-eyed and naked. Sirens wailed, and drones hummed through the night sky. 86582 froze as a dozen pops happened in succession. Down below on the street, bodies flailed, collapsing into a color he’d never seen before. But the human in him that had been sleeping knew it’s name.

Red.

86582 tore his gaze away from the scene, joining others. Around him, the city became bathed in the gold light of morning and blood. He didn’t know where they were going or what came after when the running was done. But he could feel his heart in his chest. Still see red. Still hear screams. And he still thought. Maybe that was enough.

-

I hope you enjoyed this dystopian flash fiction. Waking is set in a much bigger world, one that I hope to revisit again and again until I have a whole sci-fi novel written. Let me know what you think, as well as what you think is going to happen to 86582. Next installment of 5 Minute Stories will be Romantasy.

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