Earth Heart - Part 1

Earth Heart

I swung my hand playfully at the shimmering wall that separated me and the three cat-like creatures within it. The wall rippled as my hand passed through it and my feedskin glowed where my hand touched the cage. Residues of electricity still clung to my feedskin, crackling softly. Their cage was latest technology on the captivity of hybrids which supposedly made them feel at home. I looked at the animals, no, chimaeras, hissing at me, crouching low their tufted ears flat against their axe shaped skulls. Recalling my lessons I remembered that they were modeled to look like the lynx, another long lost and extinct animal, one of the last true animals to slip away quietly from the lush green world we once knew. Each cube stack was required to house at least one species of hybrids to aid in bringing the life back to our planet. Even now the world was not what it used to be. And these hybrids, they didn’t even look as if they belonged here, latest technology or not. My heart tightened in sorrow as I saw the lost, empty look in their eyes. Eyes that were blank beneath the luminous green-eyed stare. Why were they created to suffer here? Merely awaiting their time to die, entirely dependent on us, humans. They had no feedskin to sustain them. My own feedskin beeped, reminding me that it was time to return to my cube. I stood still on the rooftop, hardly taking in the artificially manufactured scenery. It was beautiful but in a plastic, boxed in kind of way, like the plastic toys sold in boxes on toy store shelves. The clouds, when there were any, didn’t move, the wind smelled stagnant and didn’t carry even a whiff of nature. Didn’t even carry the smell of life in it, not the freshness of leaves or the smell of cooking. Yes, even cooking was not something I could enjoy. How can you eat when there’s nothing to cook and killing hybrids were forbidden? My feedskin bleeped loudly, announcing the curfew time and interrupting my thoughts. They were about to shut down the artificial daylight. Cybertracks couldn’t work well in the feeble replacement light. They ran on solar power. I had to go. Waving a sad farewell at the chimaeras, I ran to the edge of the rooftop I was standing on and leaped into the air. Freefalling, and yet I still felt stifled, even in midair. The distance between me and the ground grew smaller and smaller. Fifty feet, forty feet, thirty feet. I still kept falling, my hair whipping past my face like cobwebs against my skin. Twenty feet. Silver boards slid out neatly from the feedskin beneath me and attached to each other with a soft click. My fall stopped. Hovering in midair I surveyed the roads. People walked past underneath me, hardly noticing that I was even there. But then again cybertrackers like me were a common sight. I leaned forward slightly, pushing my weight against the board and the sleek silver plates slid forward over the thinning crowd below. Daylight was over; I leaped up into the air, aiming for the sky which was slowly turning dark amber. In the distance I could see my cube stack rising in the dim light, silver-gray against amber and the familiar shimmering dome which housed the hybrids topping it. Home. 

~Rei Shiori