i.
In a time not far from now, the world has returned to green.
The air is vibrant neon, and if you place your hands out or extend your arm out in front of you, you can create swirling, viridescent patterns in front of your eyes. Everything is viewed from the inside of your gas mask. This is limiting, of course, but the smog is so thick and green and putrid, it would burn your stomach like the sun.
It is quiet here, everywhere: inside, outside, within. The quietness of your mind is the quietness of the landscape. There are no slopes or hills; it is flat and barren as far as the bionic eye can see. There are no disruptions here, save for the old rubbish that heaps and piles in arbitrary mounds, strewn across the land in no distinct order. Where once the mounds grew so tall you would crane your neck to see their holy and wondrous bodies, their pillage and plunder has left behind only fragments of the useless and the old. It is best not to walk with your neck craned anyway, for the ground may open and swallow you whole. Besides, your apparatus is not as new as it once was, and you wouldn’t want to risk catching the hinges and locking your nape askew.
Your survival instincts are not what they once were. You sleep through the night and wake to find bones at your front door, evidence of the creatures that stalk their prey in the night. You know the nearest predator must be closer than you assume from this small happening, yet even this could be thousands of sandyears away, so you proceed with usual caution. Without harm to your person (only the foolish leave their homes after dark), these days are a treat, for displaced bones are often fresh. Once cracked, you can gently pry away the marrow from its casing with your fingernail, and feast and feast and feast. It is best to bury the bone back in the sand once you are done to avoid upsetting the balance of the universe. The future was once told from old bones like these, but now your third eye is shut, your legs are battered silver, and a small cavity in your hip grits and grates against your femur raw.
No matter, anyhow, forget about your deterioration. Surviving here relies on your response to sound. You must be able to perceive the soft creak of rusting metal fused with the flesh of bodies that could not afford the upkeep, or had sourced their parts from scrap yards once the Optimisation was announced. If you hear them, you must run, as far and as fast as you can, into the green. If they find you, they’ll take you alive.
ii.
When you rouse from your sleep, you oil your joints to keep the bolts and screws from rusting. This requires great care and attention to detail for neglect of this process may ensure your demise. You begin with your feet, starting in the order with which you traded. Once sleek, your prosthetic foot is now misshapen and warped, destroyed by the pieces of detritus and debris that lay strewn across the waste. You cautiously navigate these obstacles, but even still, microparticles cut your exposed flesh in fine little knicks that draw fresh spores of blood. Slightly higher, you reach your knees. Your left hinge softly creaks, causes a slight limp when you try to walk. It carries the memory of age, the strain of navigation, and parkour across the refuse of the wastelands. Despite your infallible metallics, your mind carries the score, astutely aware of your malfunction when confronted with an obstacle (of which there are many here) Finally, your elbows. Exposed, shiny silver against your weathered, grey flesh. Jarring as the
crown-cap on the tooth of the man who sold you your bionics. Oil seeps into your joints and mechanisms, alleviates your groans and aches.
The toil of this physicality is no match for the accustomed trauma of your living. Your body seems to imply more, metal poking out of flesh like a bionic dream. But your person flinches, your mind screams and spasms when you have to bend or manouevre or curve or crank. As potent as physical pain, as traumatic to repress. Your agony is mildly alleviated when the weather begins to warm again, though you know these months will be followed by harder toils, too. In summer, your metal begins to sear your remaining skin. You must show extra care in protecting your fleshy bits from touching your metallic bones, though it is inevitable that you will be singed at least once. In winter, your hinges freeze and begin to ache against the cold. Autumn and spring bring relief and reminder again that you are temporary and will soon return to sand. You have lived through more cycles here than you care for. Oil drips through your fingertips and across your metal black.
iii.
If you deviate from your usual path, and walk a little further, the green gradually turns to a muted brown-beige. The waste begins to die out, into nothing at all, where left turns into right, and up into down, until you are surrounded by pure colour concentrate. Here, you can stand and look into the distance forever. It is unlikely you will encounter another being here, but if you do, you won’t know until you are face to face, and you can feel their breath upon your neck, and it’s too late to run. But, do not be afraid, for it is most unlikely you will meet anyone at all in this place, where nothing stretches out and across to the end of time.
It’s quite peaceful, if you let yourself submit to your surroundings here. The ground is no longer hard, but soft and suggestible. You may even be tempted to stay here forever, to scoop up all your belongings and erect your home again. This is an alluring idea, you are not the first one to have it. In fact, it is a feature of the land that surrounds you. You must not give in, like the others before you, who let themselves fall and lay, until they too became part of that peaceful brown-beige. Besides, this is the place where disaster happens.
In your body, there is fear of a force so sudden that it wipes you away. There is no explanation for this fear, it is primordial and innate, fortified by stories of long, long ago. There is worry of this force, rising out of nowhere, taking you under and fading once again into the ground, wiping everything out in its path. You do not know the materiality, nature, or manifestation of this force, and I cannot tell you. You do not know if it is real or unreal, and you are scared to allow your limited imaginative faculty to be free this way. It is like a muscle shriveled with disuse, or a bone you replaced long ago with steel.
It is best not to dwell here; pick up your belongings and leave. In the evening, the greenness takes a darker hue, and you know you must return to your homely cavity buried beneath the sand and wait until morning’s light brings back a cool chartreuse. The land does not take kindly to travellers who stay past their welcome. This is the law of the Waste.
iv.
But, today is not a day when you deviate from your usual path. Your concentration remains on the mounds of scraps before you, before you can attend to your wounds. You search for anything with a
semblance of colour. Sometimes, you hit the jackpot. A dirtied piece of a pink satin ribbon, a silver coin covered with a frayed and faded piece of rattan rope, a small brown stone. Once you have found enough to satisfy your curiosity, you scoop the articles quickly into your pockets and hurry back home. Only when the latch has been drawn, tightly and securely, do you dare to spread your trinkets on the floor. Today, your haul consists of a piece of grey-blue chalk no bigger than your smallest fingernail, a fragment of seaglass, and an old, abandoned, hermit-shell.
Pressure from your thumb breaks the chalk and shell, and the seaglass is easily pumelled to a powder by force from a pestle-shaped tool. Once the articles are crushed to a fine powder together, you add water and mix. You must be careful, you cannot afford to waste even a drop from your water store, and too much water will quickly ruin the paint. This is a fine line you traverse with ease, well-acquainted with the procedure you’ve curated for yourself. With the remaining materials, you create derivatives and variations, until you deplete your store. Today, the paint is pale grey-green.
You place the paint in its vial, it fills the small cylinder to its brim. The glass is placed on the shelf, and so it takes its place against all the other colours you’ve manufactured. The wall is a sea of greys, of muted, dull hues. Deep in your core, there is a space that remembers another. You are unsure whether what you remember is a colour you cannot name, or a reaction. This is a legend of sorts. Somedays, you are sure you are imagining that there were ever other colours at all. Yet, in the dark, alone, you can almost see it again, pressed against your eyelids. It never lasts long, and you know that this, despite your best attempts, is irretrievable. When your metal begins to rust unconsolably, and you too lay down and become little sand-fragments of steel and rust, this too will be lost with you forever.