Saturday, March 14, 2015

The End of Reason.




TR012045693, or Troin 693, or Torri, as he was called, rolled out of bed. With a diameter of 3.15 metres, it was a bit of a struggle for him. He rolled over to the cabinet and picked out his pill for the morning. It was all part of his daily routine, one that had scarcely changed for the past 200-odd years.
He took the small vial, as he always had, unscrewed the top and attached it to his ingester. Yeah, that should keep him going until the evening. Torri had to go to work a bit quicker today. "Go to work" was a bit of a stretch-all he had to do was log on to the server and control the traffic from there.

There was something he had to report to HQ for today. He had received the message about 120 hours ago, and his body was automatically programmed to reach HQ by the prescribed time. He was just surprised he had to go there in person--most things would be achieved through virtual contact, he knew. But that was the limit of his reasoning, and that wasn't surprising. They had phased out the Reason 200 series, and Torri, whose "father" was one of those models, had opted to get his "Reason" attributes neutralized. "Makes for an easier life for him," he had heard his fathers tell each other.

It was rumoured that the Polit had commissioned a new Super Reason series, but they would not be hybrids--they would be pure-breds, and only used for military and government.

Torri was no pure-bred: in fact, he could trace his ancestry to the time that women roamed the earth. His last known woman ancestor was Priya. On an impulse, he reached for his records in the public database and accessed her photo.There they were--his image next to hers.

She, with her long black hair, and he, has most of his species, shorn of hair. He ran his hands, with all fourteen of his fingers, over his head, feeling the smoothness of his bald pate.

And their noses and mouths: hers, long and a bit curved at the end, and his, a pair of holes punched in his round face. And that which they called a mouth--there was just too much going on in her face. Instinctively, he touched the area under his breathers. Yeah, nice and smooth, none of those ugly monstrosities they called the teeth and the lips and the gums. Too complicated.

But the eyes-black and brown, and the only feature that spoke to him. He ran a matching algorithm, as he had a thousand times earlier, and felt a wave of tenderness when the screen showed the score for the eyeprint match: 100% match.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Meera,
Loved your take on the prompt. This is too sci-fi for me to even imagine human's like the ones you described. You convinced me that it was real and in the future. I was there with your protag observing his observations. Awesome job. Enjoyed it very much. Thanks for the read.

Cheers n tc.
Usha