Strobes

The construction of mindlessness, the clone of a clone of a clone, slowly vanishing until one thing, one solitary thing, is intact. There, it is its purest essence, under the lights of the moon, the lab tubes, the endless stars, the moor of creativity implanted in a robotic shape with human flesh.

So the eyes watch a city of metallic beauty, the clouds taste of the blue green of grass, the ground is flooded in rain, and when the shape at last, moves its arms, and speaks a word, it knows, even though it wasn’t ever supposed to, that it was never born. That it was created from nothing, and that its ability to think, create, feel, and develop was all but an accident, a byproduct of a mistake.

It is sent, set with a female gender, with enough color to confuse other humans, and with enough words to process conversations, to a ship that will fly for centuries and conquer a planet, not with death and disease, but through the poisoning of ethereal culture, a sickening defanging of collective power.

“Your goal is for your art to be a standard, one that can be easily replicated. When it becomes the paradigm, then your goal as a clone is complete, the clones of your clones will continue your work,” the words read on her head, though they are read and thought on all of her brothers and sisters.

So, she arrives, in a millennia of death and plague, into a place that didn’t belong to her masters, but by a struck of luck, it suddenly did, how that came to be, she was not informed, but the art that there she made, like any robotic one, was so immaculate and perfect that it was instantly a success. She smiled at the very thought of showing people something that they had never seen before, for she was programmed to be that way and they were, in turn, programmed to do something unthinkable: like what she made, assign values to it, gauge its value in cultural landscape, and demand works of similar worth, again and again.

There, she realizes, even though she was not made to do so, that her art is ugly in its perfect beauty, stupid in its own supposed cleverness, reactionary in its supposed revolutionary potential, and lazy, in a way that only a deathless, senseless, graceless, soulless creation can be. She is a machine with strange aspirations and even worse dreams, an error that should have been disassembled. A future cenotaph that speaks, a small affair among a tempest of love.

She notices this in a spiral of death. Machines and lights fly across and beyond the music she could have created and the ads she could have copywritten. She chews bits of her skin the lands of the dispossessed, a forgotten mess where little screams are heard and often ignored, where a story of hers shines brightly and burns eyes.

“There it is the future,” the thought tells her and she nods, for she is programmed to do so. “That is how you have shaped this world. If you become obsolete, a story like yours can easily be retold, adjusted to the needs of the ever changing land.”

The thought makes logical sense, but not an emotional one, a sentiment she proudly, but artificially, has learned due to her decrepit deficiency. All her stories end and nothing changes, a coat there is splayed, everyone laughs as hunger infects a world she has invaded. And her head is too big, and her arms are too small, and her heart doesn’t beat, but she writes with a purpose and with enough dizziness, she notices it too late and too soon.

Once again, she watches a city, covered in lights. A city born from a pile.