My Body At Home

Written by Taiomah

Prompt: Wasted

Word Count: 2247

Where moments ago there was nothing, now there is a structure. Amino acids mesh together into a curtain of protein. A web of cells spreads itself against a void in search of fuel for synthesis, to replicate itself as all beings must. Bits of detritus, the refuse of more complete entities, serve as meagre sustenance. With no other organic matter in reach, it is only able to catch and enfold the unmoving slabs of metal and plastic floating atop the crushed silicone sediment that makes up the firmament below.

Probing pseudopods ooze into every available port of discarded and scattered devices, some still brimming with the gentle flow of electrons. The cellular mass adds them to its body whole and pulls them along. Energy is energy, after all, and the more matter it absorbs, the more complex it can afford to make its own structures.

It comes to another plastic fragment. Smooth, round. It seems it can be prized open like a shell to get at whatever bounty of energy could be locked inside. A pseudopod is wedged inside, and with a click, the front plate of the device opens up. Inside there is only a reflective surface. And in that reflective surface...

Is me!

I don't recognize the image as myself at first. Its shape and its colours register in my fancy new photoreceptors, and I touch the thing I see in the tiny clamshell mirror, pressing myself against it in an attempt to atomize its form and add it to my own. But I'm met with nothing there that the enzymes I collected can break down. No tingle of flowing electrons either.

It backs away when I back away. It gets close when I get close. I raise a pseudopod, and it does the same. That settles it. It's not a being, like myself. It's simply a phenomenon ‒ a reflection of me. That realization brings with it a unique feeling. There is a me. I exist. Not only that, but there are things that exist that are not me. The notion sets every cell in my body prickling. Something inherent in me that I don't yet understand is imploring me to learn what this me is, and what, by contrast, all those things that aren't me are.

My body is made of similar things to some of my surroundings. There are protein structures that can expand and contract in order to move around. Everything that I can eat is of similar makeup. Fishing around in my mass, I find a number of inorganic bits and pieces that I must have collected before I realized that I was me. Most of my surroundings are made up of things like that. They don't move on their own, but they contain a movement of heat and energy inside that I can relate to.

And if I can relate to it, perhaps I can interface with it.

I press myself into a device, connecting the flow of my organic electrical signals with the flow of its artificial ones. And just like that, the device and myself become one.

The device and I interrogate ourselves as one ‒ a string of electrons either positively or negatively charged conveying information. Yes or no. On or off. One or zero. I learn that I am called a cell phone, and that within my copper and silicone structures, there are contained worlds far larger than my tiny plastic casing should permit.

I'm able to reflect on images, stored in a section of my new brain, encoded as another series of ones and zeroes. These images fill my vision with scenes completely unlike what I was able to pick up with my photoreceptors. There is no trace whatsoever of the mountains of crushed plastic and silicone debris or sparse organic waste. Instead, I see branching structures of green reaching towards fields of blue above and below. There is a label. "Trees on the lake. Summer vacation."

I peruse the images one by one, and learn of birds, of sunsets, of cities. I learn of backyards, mushrooms, cars, statues, and lots of restaurant meals. In comparison the things that surround me look like nothing, or less than nothing. Trash. The discarded. The life of things after the fact.

Of all the subjects contained within these images, however, one set of figures lend context to everything else. The most common objects are those figures that stand taller than wide, with pseudopods like mine ‒ no, there's nothing pseudo about them, those are real limbs ‒ who use them to go about all kinds of business. In nearly every single image they are seen exploring, touching, eating, embracing all of the other subjects or each other. These are real entities. People.

I should be people.

People get to live extravagantly. The impression that the images in my brain leaves tells me that their every day is an adventure. They don't have to sit in a wasteland of trash, picking through sediment for little bits of protein. They get to roam long distances, watch other animals perform for their entertainment, build massive machines to do all their work, and they get to choose what and when to eat every time!

Their lives must be so exciting that even this cell phone wasn't worth hanging on to for them, even though it stored all those moments as data memories. Most importantly they gather in groups where there is more than one of them. There could be so many me if I were people.

I already managed to become me, so if I can accomplish that, then there shouldn't be anything stopping me from becoming a person.

Firstly, I need to look like one. It takes a good while, but I manage to subsume enough detritus and incorporate enough wires and circuit boards into my mass that I can construct four limbs and a head. Knowing what things are now changes the whole experience, too. My body mass is made up primarily of soy proteins and chicken bone meal. Cell phones, tablet computers, and vacuum cleaner tubing form my nervous system and bones. As a personal touch, I arrange lipids derived from corn and petroleum to create a soft and huggable outer skin. The lens on the front of my original plastic brain acts as a better eye than my rotten old photoreceptors, so that becomes my face.

Secondly, I need to act like a human. As far as I could tell from my image record, being a person mostly involves taking pictures of yourself in front of what you're about to eat. Luckily, I have dozens of cell phones within reach, so I am able to leave an entire archive of images of myself posed in front of piles of organic waste. Now there will be a record of me ‒ that I existed ‒ just like there was of the people who came before me. I only wish the scenery that I could capture was prettier than the absolute landfill that stretched on in every direction around me.

In the most memorable of the pictures that people would take, they would capture the skyline of their city, with its pattern of buildings framing the sky. Something about those pictures most of all told me that they were pictures of more than moments. They were pictures of home.

My final step is to find other people. There certainly aren't any in the area that I've crawled around since I emerged from nothingness. That means I need to put my new legs to work, and travel, however long it takes, to find where people have gathered.

It takes me another thousand feeding periods before I manage to find anything else that even moves in this landscape of rubble and decay. Off in the distance I see an enormous body of metal, scooping up every loose bit of refuse in front of it, and belching smoke behind it. I wonder if this could be another being like me ‒ another would-be person?

I approach, though from the thing's size, it was actually much more distant than it appeared, and it takes me another few feeds to even reach the ground where it walks. It must be thousands of mes tall. Giving it a closer look, this thing is nothing like me. It gathers garbage, but not to consume or subsume it. It simply crushes the world around it into towering cubes before spitting them out in neat rows. A machine. Nothing more.

I begin thinking that it would be amazing to be able to interface with a machine so massive, and try to see what I could learn from it, or maybe even interrupt its grand mission of cube making in order to add its body to my own. I quickly learn, however, that this thing is far too large, far too complex, and far too active for me to connect to it or influence it as easily as I could a cell phone. Any further attempts would be the end of me.

I leave the oversized trash compactor behind and carry on in the direction it seems to be plodding towards.

More than once I need to replace my worn out legs with another pair, growing them from the ever-scarcer bits of organic waste I manage to scavenge. No matter how many feeding periods it takes, no matter how many times I need to replace my broken limbs, I carry on towards the promise of there being people out there.

I've long lost track of how long it's been by the time I find a trace of them. Against a sea of discarded circuit boards, capacitors, and batteries, is a shore of buildings. I see the skyline of a city, black against the dull orange sky. It's a skyline I recognize from the thousands of pictures that I pored over. People would point to the buildings, hold them in their hands, and even take pictures where they would try to eat the tall and skinny towers.

This was the city of my awakening. But where are the people?

I run around to all of the places that I had seen, all of the places where I imagined that I could have my first meeting with people. They were supposed to see me ‒ my head and four limbs, my face ‒ and recognize me as a fellow person. They would touch me, and feel how the lipids of my skin felt exactly like their own. We were going to celebrate my arrival by going to the fabled trees on the lake. I was going to be more than just me. I was going to be us.

Summer vacation was cancelled.

And yet, the city still stands, despite being completely depopulated, as its own kind of image archive. As long as it remains, there is at least proof that people had been here ‒ my friends across a gulf of reality. If this city was a museum, then I would be its curator and its warden, so that the memories of each person would remain. I would polish those exhibits by visiting each place, each site of each birthday, proposal, celebration, and meeting, keeping the dust off of every remembrance.

If only that trash compactor hadn't arrived.

I see the plume of smoke heralding its approach, as it mindlessly crushes and categorizes the world into tightly compacted cubes. It's on a course directed right towards the city ‒ a course that it has no intention to correct.

Should that behemoth machine reach the skyline of my city, it would topple the buildings, uproot the streets, and atomize every memory of every birthday, proposal, celebration, and meeting.

I could run away. I could simply get out of its path and leave this place to be compacted. That would be the only way to guarantee my survival.

Though survival alone certainly didn't guarantee my personhood.

And I would not allow humanity's memory to be thrown out like trash.

My limbs, all but mouldered for a lack of any more sustenance to put into them, only just take me to the base of the giant trash compactor before giving out. I have to rely once more on pseudopods to crawl my way up to an access point. That's fine. I can still be a person, even if I don't look exactly like one.

I squeeze my way back into the machine's circuits, connecting the flow of my electrons to its own. And just like with the cell phone I had first integrated with, I become one with this engine of undoing.

Its size is too great, it is too complex, and it is too active for me to remain in control of. The electrical currents in its countless cables and wires fight me off like antibodies. I cannot survive this. But if I am fully integrated with the would-be ruiner of my city, then I can guarantee we share the same end.

My gigantic body finally grinds to a halt, belching one last glut of choking black smoke. I managed to come to a stop only a body length away from the first of the tall buildings of my memories. And although I will never be able to wander those streets, or meet the people who lived there, my body will remain as a part of that skyline.

That skyline that so many people loved enough to keep pictures of.

Images of home.