Advanced Clockwork: Young Writers Prize 2014

Advanced Clockwork

Humans.

A higher form of intelligence that has taken the world they've grown into and slowly began to create what they themselves believed was the next step in evolution. Always striving for more than they already had, wanting to reach out and take what they could greedily like a shopper stocking up on a favorite brand before it sold out. Always seeming to only care about themselves and nothing more.

Man was a puppy, ignorant of right from wrong unless taught. Always growing, always changing. Slowly, they'd developed ways to lighten their taxing work, expanding, creating, advancing further and further forward into the future that they craved to mould. Over years as technology grew and soared beyond what we of this age could ever dream of, and even before, the inevitable evil in man was pulling the strings of its shadowy fortress; the human mind. Corporations grabbed for power that should never have been offered, corruption flourishing within such places that should have given the people security, new inventions meant to make the world better that only served to spread the toxin further.

After so long, the state of mind took it's toll on both man and his home. After almost centuries, the world itself became almost uninhabitable; oceans so dull and green with waste that no life could survive within the clouded waters. The earth became barren as the surface of the moon by overuse. Man had exhausted the world they'd been gifted with, and yet, they did not stop there. Some stood firmly on the earth, blaming the desolation around them on the 'new age generation' that had helped in destroying the very place they held dear. These poor few were among the lower classes, swearing off the new technology and embracing the old ways of living, traveling like gypsies from place to place until they could find a way to reverse what they had done. But, while they sought to restore, the rest took to the air and created floating islands of societies revolving only around technology and a government was a marionette to the puppeteers known as Wealth and Power. Controlling the money allowed the unmerciful totalitarian reach over the last of the known world.

The only surviving company since the decimation of the planet was Shooting Star Co. A massive multi-continental medical and technological company that prided itself on creating those hovering Utopias, the tech to rip water from the very air faster than any de-humidifier and other helpful inventions that would effectively save the lives of hundreds that were spared from the unforgiving surface. But, as all humans inevitably give into temptation, this company became infected and perished as well. So deeply infected by greed that it grew into so much more than a money scandal or power trip they had grasped for. They were reaching for something only written about in books and sought after by every man.

They wanted immortality. Not the physical form of immortality where your body never ages, but the mental form, the personality and knowlage of the specific human ramaining on this earth without the fear of a shell that would slowly decay around it over time till it would die. Though, however impossible that idea was, there were those who pushed that boundary with both hands drenched in blood. They hid their objectives, waiting for the right time to unveil the unholy tests that would soon be in high demand. However barbaric, even demons have rules. So they waited. They bided their time for the day the perfect subject revealed itself.

That is when the story, technically, begins.

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All alone, a young patient waited in the doctor's special room. All the walls were so white and blinding that it made the little girl's eyes water with protest to all of this light. She didn't like this place, she never liked places like this. She was taught these places were a bad place, that no one came back from these places. She had been there for days it seemed, but the digital hologram in the center top of the room only told her it had been just a day spare only few minutes. Time didn't really matter to her very much, it was sometimes all just a lie.