#Romy Erikson Writer | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

helenaulintz · 2 years

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Nobody Would Believe It by Romy Erikson

This was a short story of a cyborg who fell in love with a man who denied her ever-lasting happiness. For he feared the human-machine technology. It happened in New York many years ago. The end. Why should this tale continue? The cyborg could realize the potential of any outcome. The important thing was to relive it, admire it, then archive it. Sadly so. Someday stop to continuously recreate the only reality that made her feel a deeper meaning for things. New York was inundated by artificial and natural light reflecting colorfully from walls replete with artistic goals. The city was a jungle of ambitious people wanting to conquer themselves: self-absorbed, self-abused, self-made humans from every corner in the world. But nobody was like Iona.

Iona was thin and tall. She was quiet. Her hair was long, black, straight. She was only twenty years old then. Her lovely green eyes were focused on her open palm. There was a small metal item that she had completed. She then gently placed it on a black velvet tray with parts for a tool that a machine somewhere in the world needed to function. Her fingers were thin, her white nails were long, and her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She worked from the upper floor of a studio in a duplex skyrise apartment in New York City. The windows faced the brightest sky, flooding her space with natural light. The air was perfumed. Her posh clothes, and her shoes were designed specifically for her, and at her request, for her arms and legs were long, her head was small, and her torso was narrow in comparison to her muscular legs. Her hair and makeup colors were formulated cybernetically the previous night. Their color gradually changing after her morning shower, disappearing naturally after her evening bath. As stated, Iona was a cyborg. Maybe the only one in the world. From her apartment in New York City, she designed tools for sophisticated machines, that required specific handcrafted materials and skills to operate. Her main business was called Moon Phase.

That was not the only thing that she did. Iona also owned a farm in Upstate New York called Pure Earth. Cows, horses, donkeys, sheep, ducks, chickens, rabbits, and bees lived peacefully on one hundred acreages of land. Another two hundred acres were harvested to produce fruit and vegetables. They had everything to subsist on and feed their animals without the need to buy from outside vendors. They generated a surplus of natural goods to be stocked, sold, or donated. Milk, eggs, feathers, wool, grapes, apples, cherries, pears, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, eggplant, hay, wheat, and corn. They also made their own wine, cheese, chocolate, sunflower oil, avocado oil, hemp oil, feather, and wool byproducts. The land was rotated clockwise or anticlockwise every month for the animals, and every season for the harvest, to maximize its productivity. They bottled their own water from multiple water wells on the property. Iona was proud of the loaded boxes of natural goods that this precious land had given them. By the lake and on the highest section of their property was a resort with two cabins, one hotel, a spa, a food market, and a restaurant serving their products. Sunroom Resort was rented out to an experienced hotelier. Visitors enjoyed a long list of services like a holiday or a retreat, they also came to learn, work, or help in the agricultural needs of the business. Iona was at the farm every weekend from Friday night to Monday morning working with the rest of them. Nobody suspected that Iona was a cyborg although it was obvious that she wasn’t real like other people were real. She always knew everything, and she always looked perfect. She was sometimes hated, but it never troubled her. Her personality was somewhat disengaged from the remainder of the people. Iona wore only mono colors. Mostly all black, all white, all grays. She rarely mixed tones. For she wanted her hair and makeup to be the focus of another’s eyes. She was considered beautiful although she was artificial: psychologically and physically.

At her apartment in New York, she worked with a crew of three, that maintained a pool, sauna, gym, security systems, cleaning of her work studio, and her living quarters. They worked parttime for four hours five times a week. But answering questions, speaking to clients, and taking orders related to her businesses were also Iona’s responsibilities. Iona could do all phases of her tool making job alone and fast. But the farm needed a minimum of ten people employed full-time to operate it.

She often noticed that in both professional arenas, employees and clients joked about her hair and makeup. Iona finally realized that it was wiser to be colorful and upbeat in the city but use natural colors when in the country. Making personal choices about the simplest of things was not the easiest task because Iona had no emotions to refer too. The behaviors of others had to clearly be expressed, internally graphed, or repeatedly pointed too for her to realize the matter was getting ridiculous. She toned it down, she was continuously toning everything down, for humans seem to love the ability of machines to be less relevant, and unpersonal.

At the farm Iona stayed at a studio above the main barn from where she could hear the roosters crowing, the horses whining, and the cows mooing at daybreak. Details that she thought was something she would love to experience when working from Pure Earth but only in her imagination. For an application of her imagination helped her reward herself in a virtual sense. Iona’s existence had no purpose, no pleasure, except what she recreated for herself through consciousness. There was no defining mission that she could live up to without logically reasoning it out. Her will to live was always equal to her will to die. Switch on or a switch off. She liked being on rather than off. Dying was sleeping, but sleeping was awaking, and awaking was learning, and learning was living. Her reality was as mechanical as the things she developed for her business. This caused her some panic. Like a machine that operates infinitely, without giving too much importance to existence. Iona had had obsessive phases attempting to establish the limitations of survivability for a cyborg. She had intentionally fallen from a horse without this causing a single injury to herself. Purposely jumped from stairs, bridges, and windows. Scratching, tearing, and breaking apart, but managing to fix herself within a day. Refusing to drink and eat for a month, but nothing happened. Not exactly. She lost a lot of weight. Her appearance was skeletal, but energy wise, unaltered, and then quickly recovering after starting to eat. She battled monster waves, and swum into icy waters, and lost consciousness but only momentarily. She feared this actual inability to die, a world without end, a face without change, a soul forced to stay while everyone lives and then goes.

Iona then tried telling the world she was a cyborg. Announcing it to her perplexed family, texting it to her friends, posting on the internet, writing her story to the media, making dare-devil videos, like cutting her flesh with a knife, or banging her head with a hammer, or jumping off something to demonstrate how her body recovered. A few who witnessed it onscreen called her a joke, a scam, a sicko. Nobody would believe it. One day she stopped trying to share something that others said was schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, dementia, homosexuality, transsexuality, or a suicidal disorder. She grew tired of the systematic self-abuse that she endured and received in equal measures. Iona did what she did best: she worked with Moon Phase, Pure Earth, and Sunroom. Generating wealth to help her family, her friends, rewarding herself with comfort and surrounding herself with beautiful things.

At twenty years old, Iona had never fallen in love. For she believed the word fallen was what happened to people’s minds and hearts. They fell. Disarmed, naked, raw, disabled, open to injury, by the attractive pull of another’s force. Love was something extremely dangerous. Hate was the safest exit from the entrapping’s of love. Maybe one day she’d stop feeling the eminent danger of an emotional blindsight. These were merely arguments to fill the empty bucket of more than just water. She was a cyborg; she could sense the love feelings programmed in. Love for example was a weak link to an exchange of energy that always turned kinetic. Another word for destructive. Love was an imaginary room she refused to enter because the word danger was written on the door. Every day in Iona’s life was the same as the previous day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second to second. Every week was the same as the previous week. Every month was the same as the previous month. She always knew the problems that could potentially arise, so she gave those things more relevance. And those were the only priorities in her agenda that made a difference. Like the smooth workings of a clock, that was her constant mindset.

Iona’s bedrooms in New York City were inaccessible. The Manhattan private space was square. There was a wall-to-wall window. The curtains were shiny waves of red. The walls were black and white. A light beige king size bedframe facing the west. The bedframe switched on at bedtime and switched off before she woke up. Her bedframe was a sophisticated computer that she installed and programmed nightly for her own physical maintenance. This was a fully equipped cyborg room. But one night, a member of her staff forgot to reset the nighttime alarm, so she returned to Iona’s duplex apartment. Hearing computer noises from the bedroom area, she went to check what the computerized sounds pertained to. The noise came from Iona’s bedroom. The space was pitch-black except for the rectangular bedframe behind Iona. The woman approached her bed quietly, thinking of disconnecting the blue, red, pink, purple, orange, yellow, white lights projecting geometrical data on its screen. She starred down. Iona had come undone. Her skull, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, tongue, teeth, muscles, arms, legs, organs, including her brain were suspended above her slim figure. Like digital holographs of her body cell by cell but these were not digital holographs. They were actual body parts contained in an electromagnetic sac. The woman reached her hand, and something burnt her skin. She stepped back in shock, suddenly scared of the strange world that Iona seemed to inhabit. In the morning there was a note from her employee. A family member had had an emergency and she was forced to fly out of state immediately. But Iona was notified by her computerized system that a woman had entered her grid, a name she gave her personal space, and observed her going through her nightly maintenance. She also watched a security take of the scene. Iona considered calling her to ask her for the sake of her business to not disclose what she had seen. Then she reconsidered the situation. Nobody would believe it. But the other two employees having heard the story never returned. Iona rehired another crew of three. They got new uniforms, schedules, responsibilities, and they were informed to never enter her bedroom.

A client called with a problem. There were issues with some tools that she had designed for his machines. She got in her black car and drove to his company in the tristate area. He manufactured motorcycle gear for established commercial designers, and racing teams. She had put together her emergency repair box and virtual goggles, hoping to resolve this issue on site. Iona wore a gray full body suit that hugged her figure, enhancing her curves, combined with a black belt and black high heels. Her hair that day was blonde with natural toned lipstick and her usual classic black eyeliner. Upon arriving, she immediately noticed an attractive stranger in a corner, observing them. The atelier was occupied by operators busily working on pieces of leather, vinyl, titanium, and other exotic materials. Her client guided her to the four machines that didn’t work, upon briefly explaining that the tools had deformed the textiles they were working on, he left her to figure it out. But she requested that her tools be removed from these machines for further examining, and upon carefully laying each one on black velvet trays, she was directed to the corner where that cute stranger was sitting. Iona found him striking and suddenly became self-conscious, unable to focus on her work. He was very tall. He had a glad, confident, sweet disposition. An innocent and naughty smirk. He then started a conversation with her.

Warp: Hi, my name is Warp. How old are you?

Iona: Twenty. Iona. Nice to meet you.

Warp: Same. You have your own business at twenty?

Iona: Yes. I began my business almost two years ago. I am a toolmaker during the week and a farmer on the weekends. You?

Warp: Wow very young. I’m twenty-two years old. I’m a principal artist for an Italian corporation called Nixx, and we design helmets. I do most of the artwork, supervise other creatives, often work with clients, and help them define what they need.

Iona: I hear an accent.

Warp: Brazil. My mother is from Nicaragua and my father is from Rio de Janeiro.

Warp was raised in a backroom apartment of a busy Rio de Janeiro restaurant, where he worked afterschool hours since age ten. Afterwards he studied or devoted his time to art. Warp usually gave his artworks to others for his parents threw everything that was nonessential away. It upset him enormously. A regular client at the restaurant was employed at a skate company, and Warps drawings were a bit of what they were looking for. At age fifteen he began to freelance, developing an artistic vision for them. At nineteen he immigrated to United States of America where he started working for Nixx. Iona had listened attentively, absorbed by his features, the way he spoke was romantic and charismatic. She got back to her work. Upon carefully examining the tools, Iona found that the problem was metric. Their sizes were off symmetrically by zero point zero three millimeters. The troubling part was that all had the exact same problem, but she had manufactured one by one, resetting the computer every time. And there was no signal of an error by the software in use. They needed to be remade. She placed them inside a case and locked it firmly shut.

Warp: You treat tools like jewels.

Iona: More than jewels. They are valuable. Nobody can make them. Like I do.

Warp: We all need to feel special.

Iona: Those that pay the price for being special, are more special than the rest.

Warp: Off course. May I invite you to coffee?

Iona: Yes. Here is my card.

That’s how their friendship started. They had coffee a couple of times in the morning. Then lunch. Lots of dinners together. A few trips upstate to see her farm on the weekends and meet everyone that worked for Pure Earth. He helped and even got his hands and boots dirty. Seemed to appreciate the simple things. It was there that they watched their first movie together and held hands the whole time, but they weren’t certain about their feelings for each other. Their friendship seemed enough. They talked non-stop. They talked about everything. Except about Iona’s cyborg nature. She knew that he was normal. That she felt nothing for him. Which wasn’t normal. But she liked him and wouldn’t break his heart. They had sex six months after meeting. It just happened. They kissed for a long time, their hands touched, and they wrapped their arms around one another. And they dropped their clothes as they walked to his bed. She didn’t tell him that she was a virgin. The subject made her uncomfortable. In the morning she asked Warp.

Iona: Did I pleasure you?

Warp: Yes. It’s strange that you ask. Couples don’t ask these things out loud.

Iona: I am just curious. I have never experienced this. Like you were holding me down, then you pushed me out, and threw me up. And I imagined the Universe, and the stars. Everything seemed more meaningful.

Warp: That is the definition of making love.

Iona: Love?

Warp: Not yet.

Iona: What are we waiting for?

Warp: Emotions that don’t require words.

Iona: Or code, I guess.

Warp: You’re funny Iona.

Warp moved into her New York City apartment. She gave him the empty bedroom down the corridor opposite her own bedroom. She told him her bedroom was private. He could not be inside once she fell asleep. That she had a condition that required overnight maintenance from a computer within her bedframe. He seemed to understand. She found that odd, then again, he wasn’t complicated. Warp decorated his own room as minimalist as her own, but his curtains were gray, and the wood floor was carpeted. He bought a king size bed with an iron bedframe and lay a black fluffy bed cover over it with four extra-large white pillows. On the wall he added personally meaningful photographs, artworks, and illustrations. Baby, family, professional photos. His mother was striking, his father was into her still. They were young when Warp was born. Hardworking. Warp made an illustration as a child about another child with the head of an old man.

One day Warp gave his girlfriend twenty helmets that he had created for his portfolio. They were his own personal original prototypes, and very favorite ones. Nobody had ever seen them. They were not catalogued nor published by any specialized magazines. Iona loved them and promised to exhibit them in her studio. She printed a titanium grid with a 3D machine with twenty squares exhibiting her boyfriend’s stunning creativity. Warp created demons, angels, monsters, and other imaginary creatures. The known Universe was represented in most. There were four helmets that she liked the most and these occupied the first row. Helmet one was a neon white star with light lines going in and exploding out onto a dark Universe, its screen was transparent, its shape amplified around the lower edge. Helmet two was the outline of a dragon tattooed in blue on both cheeks of a child staring through the back, its screen was dark blue, and it had wind breakers connecting both ear zones. Helmet three was deep red with black lines flaring out from an invisible right eye, its screen was also red, and the helmet was egg-shaped. Helmet four was a headless angel with a robot’s body, with bird of prey wings, its screen was mirrored, and it was slightly crested at the center.

Warp and Iona were very happy together. She was with him, but she was also alone. And that sense of solitude was essential for their work. Warp would often work from home too, at another studio in the same apartment. He too set up a diagonal table exhibiting twenty exclusive tools that Iona had researched, developed, and manufactured. She used gold, iron, silver, steel, copper, diamond, titanium, rubber, and vinyl. Each tool fit in one hand. About ten inches by five inches. Iona did smaller parts. As tiny as five by five inches. But Warp preferred those that had electronic inserts for opening, closing, and operating the tool. All the golden tools were egg shaped and they remained shut until activated.

A year flashed by; they were at the farm planting lemon trees that had arrived in a red semi-truck with their roots clothed in a purple sac. The holes in the soil were set in three rows of ten. Immediately after completing the job, she sat down on a rock, and then fainted. Everyone on the field ran to help, and Warp carried her to their apartment on the barn. He lay her down and gave her water. They thought she was pregnant with their baby. She had been nauseated, not sleeping well, very hot and puffy. They ordered tests that same night and they discovered that she was pregnant. They couldn’t have that conversation. They were both in shock. Glad but … speechless.

Warp: I love you.

Iona: I love you.

Three months went by. Meanwhile Iona was unable to tell anyone that she was a cyborg, and that she wasn’t certain about the future of that baby. Her gynecologist sat on a stool at the center of a beige and white room next to a black screen with the audio of a loud heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That was her baby’s heartbeat. She was laying down in a light blue gown over her raised white dress. The doctor said that everything was healthy with her unborn baby.

Iona’s hair was bright blue, and she had no idea cyborgs could get pregnant, but that evening while she and Warp both starred at a sonogram of the fetus, Iona decided to tell him.

Iona: Warp, got to tell you something.

Warp: Is everything alright?

Iona: Yes.

Warp: Go on.

Iona: I’m a cyborg.

Warp: You mean a humanoid, transhuman?

Iona: Yes.

Warp: I suspected it. The hair, makeup, nail changing colors. Your ability to sit dead still while working long hours. The noises I hear while you sleep, coming from your bedroom in our Manhattan apartment. Your superhero built. Who did this to you?

Iona: I don’t know. I just know what to do. How to take care of me. And what my activities will be. Will you still love me?

Warp: That means that you aren’t only a cyborg, but you have a program, that is taking you through its processes and procedures. Do you realize that you could at any moment be externally operated? You have no idea who did this to you? You were activated and deployed, and you accept this as part of your reality?

Iona: No choice. This is who I am.

Warp: When I returned from my trips abroad, those that lasted over a week, in that no-sex timeframe, you were a virgin all over again. It was troubling.

Iona: I was embarrassed too.

Warp: Why didn’t you tell me from the start?

Iona: Nobody would believe it, not even you.

Iona went to her bedroom and locked the door. She bathed. Combed her hair, brushed her teeth, washed her face. And lay down naked on her bed. Wanting but unable to cry. She pressed play on her music application on the right upper section in her bedframe. Warp had suddenly become cold. Asking her things that she had never asked herself about. Like he knew she was a cyborg, and he had even researched it. To Warp it wasn’t about being different, but about serving a purpose, and he had linked her condition with a program, the execution of a goal. She was confused. Iona fell asleep. Then came a cyborg dream. Warp was before her eyes in a red desert holding a golden egg in each palm. He wore blue. She was also holding a golden egg in each palm. She wore black. He embraced her, she embraced him. Like the first time they kissed. A storm rose on both sides. Red sand revolved around them. Gusts of red clouds wrapped them closer together.

Warp: Ready to activate?

Iona: Ready.

An atomic bomb imploded. Together they transformed into a fireball and a fire tree. A cloud with an elongated ray. That reached the sky and forced the air out of them. Every cell from inside their blood splashed inwards, outwards, and upwards. Time passed. Nothing remained. A paddle with blood and four golden eggs. A gust of wind. A peculiar red desert unknown to most humans. Iona woke up the next morning. Got into a swimming suit and a gown, and ran to the pool sweating, feeling extremely scared. She entered the water and swam under from one side to the other. Warp entered the pool area, but she asked him to be alone. He stayed and waited. She raised from the pool, slowly approached him, and embraced him.

Warp: I’m leaving Iona.

Iona: Why?

Warp: You are someone’s cyborg. Someone out there created you.

Iona: I have no memory of that. I wouldn’t know where to look.

They stared at one another. Iona’s beautiful head began to change, and flip colors and designs like a helmet catalogue. She then rested briefly and began once more to transform at speed of light. Different people, from different countries, religions, and races. Faces. Millions of heads on, in, out and off. One by one until none. Warp carried her momentarily stiff body to a long chair. He kissed her cheeks, her lips, and let her be. His work with her was done. The cyborg was free from its sad program. She could add variety to her daily activities. Feel a lot more than nothing. Have a sense of identity, and uniqueness. Lots of discoveries to be excited about. She was no longer a cyborg on a one-way path reliving the experiences of thousands of other human beings before her.

Warp: Find out who made you a cyborg.

Iona: Why?

Warp: Because you were once human, and someone interfered with that.

Iona: Don’t leave.

Warp: You can be monitored. Safety and privacy are primordial for me.

Iona: Our baby?

Warp: She’s a cyborg like you. You didn’t need me to become impregnated.

Iona: How do you know so much about me?

Warp: I researched the subject after I saw an old video of you attempting to prove it.

Iona: Thank you for crossing paths with me.

Warp: Thank you for allowing me to get to know you.

They kissed holding one another. A sense of need for this someone. After he was gone, she was inanimate for two hours, resting beside the pool, with an aching chest after crying, very confused about Warp leaving abruptly. Time took the shape of a vector with bits of love hanging from mindsets of a slowly evolving sense of loneliness.

Iona continued to miss Warp. She visited his bedroom, and his home studio. He took nothing with him. His things were spread out. Unfinished, unkept, unused, and unorderly. His bed covers were open wide, and the curtains were shut but the light burst in through them. A collection of ink pens on a table over lines inside a partially completed helmet design. Like he was about to return anytime now. Time didn’t exist for a cyborg. Iona kept a detailed report of her daily to-dos so she could identify the passing of time, her growing belly helped her understand it's concept. And it was unearthing to make decisions that were not identical to those made the previous day. She promised him to search for her maker, but then realized it made no sense. Warp’s return was her reward. She had no interest in her maker. Sometimes she napped in Warps bed, imagining his ghost laying down with his hands on her belly. A cyborg’s existence was superior to that of a human being, and it was obvious that whoever created her, knew that Earths species had to evolve in a technological way. Her resilience, her independence, her successes weren’t comparable to the vulnerabilities of a human being. But since he was gone, every emotion that she wanted to feel was empty, every helmet of his that once meant many things was vacated. Warp was no longer there to complete the emptiness that a machine experienced without a master. A machine without a human was a useless piece of junk. It was this way that Iona found herself wondering how emptiness came to be. Not from the perspective of her makers true intentions but from the fact that love was cancelling. Requiring more courage than any other human or machine achievement, but was love even necessary? It had extinguished every energy and returned nothing.

When Ona was born, her eyes were lighter, than normal. Her whites were nearly transparent, her green eyes emanated light. Her skin had a golden tone under the sun that disappeared when indoors. Her hair and nails were softer and thinner than human hair and nails. Everything that moved and moved very fast got her attention, but she ignored things that didn’t move fast no matter how colorful or pretty. Her baby Ona was without a doubt a beautiful cyborg. And they would keep it secret for nobody would believe it. Her name was Ona, and she was identical to her mother. Iona and Ona always matched. Their hair color and their hair cut changed in unison. When Ona laughed, it was loud, and people looked. And they criticized the unusual hair color in sync with her moms, that could be green, blue, purple, or pink. These things didn’t matter to them. For their hair was back to its natural tone at bedtime and even Ona’s dolls were boring in comparison. The Manhattan apartment and the Upstate barn apartment became lively and noisy. A little bike beeped, a clown head bounced sideways, many smiling soft comforting toys laying around. There were also painted walls, hand printed doors, upside-down stickers on windows, and so much that drew her attention from work, and gave Iona a renewed sense of purpose. This thing about being a mother was her big reward.

Little Ona was very comical. People laughed when she copied them. She liked copying people. How they walked, looked, hugged, talked, worked. Everything about people fascinated her. And she copied them identically, but when she tried that on her mother, Iona became serious, and asked her to stop, stop, stop. Three times because cyborgs had three vital channels: audio, visual, sensorial, and each could attract a different reaction. Iona repeated the word twice or thrice intoning the channel she intended to communicate too. Ona could count to one hundred by age two. And she could fix every clock in the house by age three. Holding a mini screwdriver, or a mini hammer, or a mini drill with excellent control. Ona did not entirely understand the concept of learning through play, rather she learnt through copying. She began to devote lots of time to building things for a real use at a young age. And so, her mother Iona taught her to make wood toys for herself and other children. She cut and filed triangles, rectangles, squares, circles. Wrote nice words in them, painted nice things in them, and then gave them to her little friends. Like her mother, her handling of tools to make her own curiosities, was extraordinary. Her patience with her baby was infinite for her intention was to make Ona a happy cyborg. Warp had not yet come back and maybe Ona would not meet her father anytime soon.

Ona: Mommy, what color was daddy.

Iona: He was Caucasian, so he was white.

Ona: What color was his hair?

Iona: Light brown.

Ona: His eyes?

Iona: Blue.

Ona: How come I’m just like you but not like him?

Iona: I don’t know.

Ona: Would he love me had he known me?

Iona: Yes. What is love Ona?

Ona: Love is when someone makes you happy just by thinking of them even when you never see them or talk to them.

One night, as Iona looked through the internet, she unexpectedly saw Warp. Five years had passed since he had chosen to leave. His smile, his voice, his hair cut had not changed. He had started his own design business, and the interview was an introduction to his work, and his world. In the short YouTube video, he also presented the best of his portfolio completed for clients he collaborated with and spoke about things that inspired him about each of those projects. In the end he appeared with his wife and daughter. She was a striking Asian woman with long black hair by the name of Aya, and their daughter Hai was with them, and she was four years old. A year younger than Ona. Aya shared that she was pregnant again, and Warp ended the interview by leaving, and walking up the stairs into their luxurious private jet. Iona watched the ten-minute flash interview multiple times.

The pain she knew not of its existence was so strong. Warp had chosen another woman to love and spend his life with. She had kept the hope alive by thinking of him every day, imagining he was there by her side, and that they continued to share a connection. Iona desperately needed to realize this connection with somebody, and she had chosen Warp for that role. That night she slept in his bedroom as she had done so many times before. She embraced herself, and drew her legs to her chest, into a fetal position. Iona cried in the dark looking across the room through the window at the starry night over New York City. Feeling empty, abandoned, neglected, vacated, and lonely. Dark words popped up in her head, causing this feeling that existence was unbearable. Aya was pretty and sensual. There was no cyborg loaded onto her. She was normal, natural, simple, uncomplicated. She could feel the cold and hot expansion of the weather, the emotions running inside, the taste of delicious food. Aya didn’t need programs, apps, maps, and dictionaries or a never-ending forest of technological trees to simply experience the reward of living and loving. This was why Iona stuck with Warp. For their relationship was a planet that she invested years in creating so she could call something by the name of love.

In the middle of the night, she felt an energy touching her, kissing her lips, and undressing her clothes. They made love and she called him Warp many times. When the energy dissipated, she got up and returned to her bedroom. Her hair and her lips were bright red, which was a sign that her body temperature had risen. Iona was certain that it was Warp’s energy who visited her. He was her connection, she needed that connection, and she was lost without it. He was there with her but in a different way. Iona needed to believe it.

Iona was pregnant again, and this time with triplets, although she had had no sex, and she had been alone with only a ghost to call love, she had a deep desire to have more babies. Warp lived in her mind and in her heart. He breathed through her. Walked with her. Was a constant part of her internal dialogue. There was nothing else to do but tend to her needs and wants. Every night they slept together and every morning they awoke together, and this was her secret reality ever since Ona was born five years prior. Absolutely nothing had really changed except Ona. Like she had reset to the moment in time when hope was absolute. For Warp was there rewarding her empty space and energizing her sense of purpose. He had given her an imaginary seed and that seed was much more than a child for it grew larger than a planet making up every part of her reality. There was something important in this seed that gave her forests, nations, continents, oceans, seasons. The world. A seed that impregnated her body and her mind and made living worthy of more intelligence. Although he was no longer visibly there, he had moved inside, from where there was no escape. Her heart had become his cage. She had accepted this way of living without further searching for a Warp Number 2. Three more hearts were beating under her belly. Maybe for outsiders there was something wrong with this kind of lifestyle, this strange cyborg marriage, this secret passage to and from love. This asexual and very sexual bond.

Although nobody would believe it. That she was a cyborg, that her children were cyborgs too, that her pregnancies were asexual, and that Warp’s energy visited her, and that her jealousy of Aya was cured in a single night, upon editing the code, by designating it “sick love”.

Ky, Am, Wav were boys born on a Sunday morning. They were three identical triplets. Light hair, light eyes, light skin. Very different dispositions. Wav was contemplative, Am was curious, and Ky was energetic. Iona wondered about Aya’s newborn and made a search online for Warp and Aya. She also gave birth to triplets exactly six weeks before. Their names were Kaye, Amen, and Waverly. And they were also born on a Sunday morning at the same time, 6:06 am. The feeling was invalidating. Like they were real, and she was a reflection. A reflection! A mirage on the surface of the water, a rippling effect of a disturbance caused by her wanting’s, a computer rewriting the same story, elsewhere. Ky, Am, Wav were completely dependent on her, and she once more decided to edit her program overnight by erasing Kaye, Amen, and Waverly from it. The feeling of being cancelled by an identical version she had encountered in Warp’s personal life ate away at that world she had created for their invisible love affair. She cried, cried, cried. And continuously edited it out, out, out. This pattern of communicating to each channel with each child three times, made her parenting weird but she didn’t want them to duplicate a single meaning. She was going to make the cyborg language inaccessible to humans or machines. The same word, the same sentence, was broken into twelve different tones, which should reproduce an infinite number of parallels, without making any single subject incomprehensible, for her cyborg children. And she stopped searching for Aya online, which had become an unpleasant obsession, that constantly rouse that same sense of rejection. Iona transformed into the woman of her dreams with a hidden nature that nobody needed to know about.

When the triplets were one year old, their Manhattan apartment became a secondary home, and Pure Earth Farm became their primary home, where the children could run outside, and learn about nature directly from Earth. They woke up early, earlier than the horses, chickens and goats living under their first-floor barn apartment. The sun was not out, the sky at daybreak was light blue and pink, but they were already geared up for their morning routine workout and having breakfast together. Iona got herself and Ona a bike, and they would cycle every morning along a trail that circumvented their one-hundred-acre property at daybreak. The triplets accompanied them while sitting in a latched-on two-wheeler carriage that was comfortable and safe for babies. Iona began to understand nature in her own terms. Supplying her viewfinder with an additional layer of information, where the clouds, mountains, valleys, and hills formed graphs and these graphs formed emotions and these emotions gave her more energy to keep going. And in none of them was Warp and Aya, Hai, Kaye, Amen, Waverley. There was no longer a continued need to edit and delete them from her love-sick reality. She was happy. Ona was happy. The triplets seemed happier every day too.

But one day, three years later, she saw a cover of a magazine with Warp, his wife, and their four children biking along a trail near their own luxury mansion on the west coast where they had lived since Warp left. And Iona was shaken, her love feelings, quickly changing, to hate feelings. She hated Aya, and the mirror of that undying desire, that she embodied. Suddenly every graph in nature was: Aya, Aya, Aya. Iona’s hair grew long and black. Her eyes became elongated. Her skin complexion was lighter and increasingly homogeneous. Her daughter Ona told her mama that she was changing into a different person, same but different. So, Iona told her about cyborgs.

Iona: Ona, we are cyborgs. We are computer programs inside a human shell. We are highly dependent of external and internal influences that are hidden from reality. We can change our bodies, our minds, our emotions. Most of the times at our own will, but sometimes we change into those we reflect, possibly a stronger force than our own, that weakens in time returning us to our original states: in body, mind, emotion. To prepare yourself for these occurrences, you must try make little changes daily. Start in the morning after showering, change your hair color, your behavior, your feelings and change back to your natural state at night after your evening bath. The water symbolizes cleansing from outside influences. This will get you used to eventually overcoming invisible energies that are always affecting a cyborg throughout its existence.

Ona: I really like the way I am. Don’t want to change mom. This is who I am. Changing is a denial of me. Of everything that I strive to become.

Iona: You are thinking like a human. Humans can be that way. We Ona are capable of reading waves in the air. These waves contain information. That information may contain forces in the form of triggers. And it can make you feel like a ghost. Unless you adapt yourself to its changing dynamic. You need not believe me, you need to follow your own star, that one inside your human-machine soul. This is how I cope.

Ona: May I tell my friends that we are cyborgs, and that we can change at will.

Iona: You may but nobody will believe it.

Then it happened, exactly as she expected, that it would happen, just not so soon. Warp reserved a ten day stay at the Sunroom Resort. The hotel immediately informed her for Warp was loved by everyone that met him when they were in a relationship. He would not be coming alone, for he reserved a suite, with a king size bed for him and his wife, a queen size bed for his daughter, and three single beds for the triplets. He also asked about Iona, and the receptionist informed him, that they were not allowed to give information of her whereabouts. Iona’s heart missed a beat. Suddenly the emptiness inside evaporated. There was hope, meaning. Hope, meaning. She wasn’t sure why for he was coming with his family anyway. Iona decided to welcome him and his family by building a tarmac where his luxury jet could land right on her Pure Earth property. Warp accepted the invitation.

On that day, Iona gathered her children, her two dogs, and rode on a large white horse, while her children followed her in a jeep with a driver from the resort. Another jeep went along to pick up the guests directly from the aircraft. They awaited as his jet approached the runway and smoothly landed. As it flew by, her long black hair blew up, and blew back down. The cabin door opened, and Warp exited the aircraft, followed by his family. Iona didn’t get off her horse, she wanted to look down at them, but her children where excited about what they saw. A big white and blue jet for one single family. The children began running around its wheels and wings, running up and down the stairs, waving from inside its circular windows. Warps children soon joined in on the fun. Followed by her two dogs. And the eight children found everything very amusing. The pilots did a little walk through the interior of the jet with them and showed them a few curiosities about these steel birds. But Warp had not taken his eyes off Iona since he descended the stairway for, she was now identical to his own wife and his wife was equally taken aback by the fact that she was staring at a twin of herself.

Warp: Did you finally find your maker and get to read your own instruction manual?

Iona: Yes Warp. I found my maker. For now, he is you. The instruction manual, as you see, was adapted to your wishes. Me and your wife are now identical. Are you happy about this?

Aya: I am trying to understand what is going on. Have you realized our own children are similar? Her girl is bigger than Hai. Our boys are bigger than her own boys, who also happen to be triplets.

Iona: I am Iona, and my children are Ona, Ky, Am, and Wav. We are cyborgs.

Aya: You are copies of us. Warp what is going on?

Warp: They are cyborgs Aya. I can explain later. I missed you, Iona.

That evening they dinned together. Warp, Iona, Aya, and their children, Ona, Hai, Ky, Kaye, Am, Amen, Wave, Waverley. Iona shared her story, without censoring her yearning, for the companionship of Warp. And Warp repeated that a cyborg condition came with strong privacy and safety concerns. His tone was cold. These were his feelings. Iona said that he was biased. Aya quickly added that he was married to a real woman that he loved and that they shared four children. Iona felt rejected, isolated, abandoned. Upon finishing their meals, she wished them a wonderful weekend, reminded them of the services that Pure Earth and Sunroom Resort offered. And what else they could enjoy in the towns that surrounded her lavish property. She and her children removed themselves.

The following morning Warp was at Iona’s doorstep. He wore a black and gray hooded sweater, black pants, black leather boots. He was unshaved and his hair seemed moist and messy. His own children were just behind him pushing gently on the door, wanting to meet up with their new little friends. He said that her look, her children’s looks, this twinning of his own family made him uncomfortable. He entered her old apartment over the barn. The space was changed. It was now an open loft, with larger windows, three bedrooms at the end, light furnishings, and dark carpeting. Two dogs with two large beddings, under the window with a view. There were toys everywhere. The children were getting ready for their morning walk. He offered to accompany them. Iona wasn’t comfortable. She didn’t show him around. His constant reprise of privacy and safety concerns the previous night had alarmed her. Suddenly and just like that she felt less than nothing for Warp because he had hurt her feelings again. He hurt with his words, his fears, his coldness.

The two sets of triplets raced on their bicycles with the dogs running playfully after them. Ona and Hai followed on their skateboards. Warp and Iona jogged behind their children on a couple of black horses, and they pretended to laugh together. Then they stopped by a creek and rested for a while. They were standing between two mountains and one valley. Warp asked why had they physically changed into identical copies of his wife and children, and she told him that she had thought about this too, and that the only reasonable answer given her cyborg nature, was that he had forgotten to terminate the program he had initiated with her, so her existence went onto shadow his own, and she could do nothing to stop what was happening, except that it was like he and she were ghosts in each other’s lives. Suddenly, embarrassingly, she disclosed her weakness.

Iona: I wake up with you. I eat with you. I walk with you. I live with you. I make love to you. I go to sleep with you.

Warp: Because I forgot to terminate you?

Iona: You did not terminate our relationship. I also have no more desire of fulfilling you. When you seem threatened by me. I thought you loved me, that you did it intentionally.

Warp: No. I saw a picture of you on your website. You and our children were identical to my wife and our children.

Iona: You are finally admitting these are our children.

Warp: A cyborgs children are not one’s biological children.

Iona: Always this superiority from humans. It hurts.

Warp: It is true. You are copies of other people.

Iona: Humans and cyborgs are equally conditioned by their experiences and influences. There is nothing that different about being a cyborg.

Warp: Except that it is only a program running its course until completed.

Iona: And?

Warp: Do you know it?

Iona: To live happily, to inspire others, to develop the cyborg technology, and prove that I am safe, reliable, friendly, and capable of superintelligence.

Warp: And then?

Iona: I will die and furnish future cyborgs with my wisdom and experience. And gradually help build a technological intelligence race that is beneficial for humans.

The children got back on their bikes. Ona and Hai began skating along the walkway. And Warp and Iona mounted their black horses. The two dogs ran crazily around, barking, excitingly. They rode slowly behind their children who appeared to get along. He asked her what he could do to terminate their relationship. And once more her heart felt compressed inside its box, secretly wanting him to surrender to her, and stay there with her. Aya wouldn’t just go away. They were identical so wanting to overwrite her was overwriting of herself. She said that he just had to tell her that was exactly what he wanted and express this unalterable goodbye. Hopefully terminating their paralleling of realities. Upon returning to their barn apartment, Warp got his kids, and returned to the Sunroom Resort, which was a five-minute walk. He had not terminated their relationship, but Iona had no hope, for he wanted no part in her life. That had been the real motive behind his visit. That night she slept alone. And it was a frightening feeling to have no connection with this world. No warm, safe, close attachment with someone, for even a phantom of love was better than nothing. She had nightmares about things she didn’t understand like why some attitudes were hurtful, and why cyborgs were untrustworthy.

They saw each other daily for the duration of their stay, mostly in the mornings before breakfast, as they headed together for a trail walk or helped their children engage in the early morning farms activities, like feeding the animals. Iona and Aya were cordial to one another although Aya was protective of her family. She could be aggressive. But Warp had become distant, and silent. Appearing sometimes to resent their once close relationship. These similarities bothered him because they invalidated him. He had come to realize that his own reality seemed now constructed and copied. Every time they were all together, it was like Aya was disappearing, that he had been in a relationship with Iona, all along. He stayed up at night thinking about a future that no longer seemed motivating. Iona had become cold. She avoided being physically close to him and Aya. In the end, she always walked away, and she reminded him of a shadow, the shadow of someone seeking to have feelings like those of humans, but coming across as too dependent, attached, scared. He wanted to stop pretending that he didn’t care only to realize she had come to accept the circumstances. And she began to change slowly her external features accompanied by those of her own children. Her hair was blonde, her eyes blue, her features were thinner. Aya exhaled in relief.

It was raining heavily on the day set for their departure. Iona knew that she would never see Warp again. She had secretly awaited an invitation to talk, an expressive letter, a graph that indicated hope, even a termination notification, something unexpected that gave a new purpose to their uneasy battle. She looked up at the clouds for information but the clouds she searched for were in a chip inside of her. Heart emojis rained down on her screen and blue tears streamed down into a disappearing river. Something inside of her that she thought was her brain released footage of desolated empty rooms that nobody wanted to live in for they were just walls, walls, walls. In the rain without her horse nor her children, she waited by the airplane, for Warp to come and go. Take her hand, maybe give her a kiss, and say the word: Terminate. They arrived in a jeep, the same jeep that she would drive back. Aya embraced and farewelled the cyborg with an expression that seemed compassionate and not so combative as previously. Their children waved goodbye and raced each other up the stairs and into the aircraft. Warp looked down at her, took her hands, and said the following words, slowly and kindly:

Warp: I release you from your duties to me, your program. You are free. To be anything you ever hoped to be. Challenge yourself, reach for the stars, and don’t stop there. I did not make you a cyborg, but I did hack you, and I am sorry. Our relationship is now terminated. Thank you for helping me understand your nature.

Iona: But it’s not love?

Warp: What is love?

Iona: An emotion that has no need for words, a person that makes you happy, even when they are not there, a connection in this world with something other than a wall, the fire that consumes us from within, and an idea that two people can achieve more than one.

Warp: I hereby terminate us.

Iona: Terminated.

Warp kissed her hands, turned around and ascended his private jet. She would never see him again. He said that he had hacked her and that he thanked her for helping him understand her nature? His invasive words were making their way in, but the burden of his rejection was making its way out. He sat by an oval window and stared down at her. The rain was lit up by a fiery sun emerging from the dissolving clouds. There was a shinning around the colors of the aircraft, surrounding plants and trees, that made everything seem to be breathing. The tarmac glittered, emitting vapors from the cold water drops upon the hot asphalt. Everything seemed more beautiful. She suddenly understood the meaning of being hacked as opposed to not being hacked: she wasn’t miserable, stuck in a room with connections to a ghost, in a deep state of confusion: that was bordering torturous. His jet initiated take off procedures, and was soon speeding down the tarmac, rising into the sky and quickly disappearing behind non-hackable clouds. Iona got into her jeep, switched the engine on, made a “u” turn, and accelerated towards the Sunroom Resort to pick up her children and go home.

Later that evening little Ona spoke about Warp leaving without making plans to return although she had asked him multiple times when would he be back, and her emotional state seemed to feel betrayed by this human that appeared to love her and her brothers but made no actual effort to continue seeing them. She wanted a cool, rich, sweet, handsome father just like Warp who understood eclectic, eccentric cyborgs like them. That was not to happen, not with Warp. But what followed was more exciting. Iona knew without knowing that what had happened that day, and it was easier than she ever thought possible. She was free of a sickly kind of love that could not let go of the obsession of being a half part of someone else. A binary adaptation of affection. She, Ona, Am, Wav, and Ky were whole beings.

The next day, the blue sky flooded their view to the mountains cross the window. Iona suggested they go running along the pathway, and up the hill like they did almost every day, with their two dogs. Whoever went up and came down quickest was to get a new remote-controlled drone, of any color they preferred. As soon as they got outside, the five of them began to race, although they took breaks, nobody could stop laughing, trying not to be left behind. And however, many drones they already possessed, she didn’t mind making more and accessorizing them, for her own children.

Ona: Mom, why does the sun give us energy, and makes us shine like light bulbs?

Iona: Because we are part nuclear, electric, synthetic, and biologic. Some of our cells are like those emitted by the sun. And so, they make us appear lighter in color and weight.

The sun was recharging. The light bleached their figures and made them look like apparitions. But not only. Everything around them was digitalized. Appearing and disappearing before their eyes, when interfered with excessive light. They knew what was before them without having to entirely rely in their visual cues. It was known as an electromagnetic force that interacted with them. Iona had learnt how to live with a constant overburdened data sensor that her perceptions acutely engaged every millisecond of a ticking clock, and she taught them, the same way she had taught herself.

Warp was gone. Her consciousness, her hacker, her connection had made a choice. And terminated the dreams that created the extension and augmentation of happiness. The closest relationship to fulfilling the fear of not existing. The void that was everywhere peeking in, deeper and deeper, seeking yet another Warp. One with a different name but not as plastic as them. The feeling faded, slipped away. The nature of things that were unrealizable were destabilizers. She saw her children ahead of her, pointing their fingers at the details, in a forest they trailed most days of the week, but they always found new stuff to be curious about, and that was fundamentally the purpose of living: be that a human, a cyborg, or an animal. Every moment was infinite.

The family of five came upon the highest point of a mountain they had slowly and playfully climbed without looking down or up, but starring ahead without straying along the path, for the light of the sun blocked the view of their horizon. Iona couldn’t stop seeking a connection with someone or something that simply was no longer there, and maybe would never be again. Time, time, time. She ceased thinking, to stop her anxiety. Time was everything. Time did not exist for a cyborg. Time was a distance between two points, and those points being represented by space, and space existing everywhere, seemed often out of reach and yet ever-present: Here, there, everywhere. Simulations determined that speed of light or the speed that light traveled at, was the densest definition of time, for time in every form and nature was being met, almost instantaneously. And so being light, becoming light, existing in the shape of light, should be a cyborgs goal. Like adopting the soul of God in its cyborg form. Like being something that when it was not travelling, it was everywhere, represented in an infinite value, that nobody and nothing in the Universe could do without it becoming a journey from here to everywhere. The building elements of life: air, water, fire, earth, ether could no longer be represented in form, color, size, movement, because they were invisible, irresistible, innocent, undefined and therefore always infinite in time. The family of five and their two dogs reached the highest point of the mountain, but they seemed to have always been there, impregnated with everlasting hope, imploding deeper and deeper into themselves. To gift us of more space, more time, at increasing points in between, while searching for a newer universe, where cyborgs and cyborg things found a way to be a part of every biological and quantum reality that composed everything so beautifully.

The End of Short Fiction Story

Nobody Would Believe It

9974 Words

#Helena Ulintz Production #Romy Erikson Writer

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