Road to Anywhere

Seed

Round 3.1 prompt from Multigenre Mashup Flash Fiction Smackdown, September 2023: Write a story of maximum 2000 words that qualified as dystopian and horror. Include the images below and the song "In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans.

Author's content warning: Given the required mashup genres (dystopian and horror), this is not a happy story.

Word count = 1664

Our noble quest for a better world produced instead a desolate dystopia. We played God, and all humanity paid the price. As the scriptures say: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

I was the last free man, and the destiny of humanity now weighed on my shoulders.

A flickering lamp provided dim illumination over a scuffed wooden desk. The batteries collecting solar-derived electricity were not as reliable anymore. As I typed away on the computer keyboard, a white fur-ball settled on my feet and pulled back its ears, looking up with big pink-framed eyes. Thumper was a cute dwarf rabbit and the only one of her litter to survive. My wife, once a biologist, used to raise them. I picked up the little critter and placed it on my lap, stroking soft fur. "At least you're still with me."

I shuddered at my words, since my wife was one of the first taken by the Collective.

The medical nano-bots were a huge success, improving health and extending longevity of everyone. Truly a boon to society. Yet still, the vices of men remained — pride, selfish ambition, petty greed, and destructive wrath. So we thought, why not also improve behavior? Secretly, we programmed the bots to rewire the brain, changing mankind into something more good and noble.

But we didn't anticipate how the nano-bots would network, ultimately creating a hyper-authoritative human hive mind and amplifying the mental changes. Sure, crime and conflict ended, but at a cost of what makes us human — joy, wonder, love, and even free will, all traded for strict communal order.

A small percentage of people, like me, were immune to the mental changes. Defects, the Collective called them, and once discovered, brutally sacrificed for the good of the whole. Individual rights had little meaning.

For twelve years, I sought to undo the changes, working here in a secret underground laboratory outside the city. For a time, I even experimented on people, something I before considered unethical.

But now I have a potential solution that I called the Seed — a kind of computer virus that would reintroduce the concept of self into the Collective matrix, albeit slowly. The difficult part was that I had to introduce it into a central server node at the city center.

A stolen tech-worker uniform, white shirt and trousers, should gain me entry to the server facility. Each worker caste had uniquely colored uniforms. Just before I turned out the lights, my eyes passed a dirty rubber ducky perched on a shelf. Once the unofficial mascot of our project team, it sat at table center for all our status meetings. "You might as well come along," I muttered, then stuffed it in a pocket.

But what to do with Thumper? I may never return, so I released her into the surrounding grassy hills. "Go on, little one," I burbled as a tear traced my cheek. Distant howls twisted my gut with guilt — a little white rabbit would be easy prey for the roving packs of feral dogs.

I set out just past midnight for the long walk, intending to reach the city by dawn. The stars shined brightly on that clear, moonless night. And a meteor fireball streaked across the sky, as if heralding destiny. For some reason, that century-old bleak futuristic song, 'In the Year 2525', passed through my mind.