Archetype

[ i ] Birth of Prototype


Anastasia had a barcode and, below it, a serial number tattooed onto her inner thigh.
Her clothes lay in a pile next to that heap of food for rust she has become. A mound of that which hangs in the fashion of flesh and disconnect, she lies there, waiting for the renewal of her energies.

Ziv tore her to pieces. Did not want a follower. Ripping wires out. Crushing plastic limbs, until she was a pile of switch-off.

So Ziv set off, left her in limbo, torpor – a dreamless, ageless sleep. An endless repetition of nothing. No ones. No zeros. Yet ridiculously retrievable.

Ziv is a collector of fragments. Anything that had once tasted life he stole from their shallow graves, preserved and recorded. Taking them to Central as part of a larger effort to catalogue things from the time before.

Now he walks the new desert road. Past parades of broken homes. Those antique urban living spaces, now crumpled, folded over, now all so much dust.

He stops and watches as a shuttle scuttles past on a breath of disturbed air. One of the endless sweep and drop. Skimming the strands of miscommunication, telegraph wires now analogue to digital translation. Quickening itself away as it is fed with foot and pedal.

He looks to his wrist, watches as the minute hand progresses taking ground and losing all that it has gained just a second before.

So much time has passed since life was stolen. Now all that survives is fiction. Not false. Created. He is abstract humanity. That which mimes the human life, but is so far from life. Not written in that book.

Light and Dark being Light and Dark through contrast. Life ceased to be life. The balance tipped.

Nothing lives that moves, consumes, progresses through this new world.

Ziv is not human. Though more human for the attempt at that which is so far from reach, than humans ever were or could have been. For no human ever thought enough of being human.

[ ii ] Growth of Prototype


The sun is setting on that exiled archetype of humankind.

Loosed from all but the burning copper band that stretches out behind the flats like a conduit to paradise. Ziv is balanced on a rooftop. One hand grasping the battered pack, slung over his shoulder and the other shielding his face from the merciless intensity.

Ziv has been a ghost - emotion thief - for as long as he can remember, his whole existence fragmented and vomited into his mind; not just into there but into his heart. So that the heart roasts the brain. So that things become clouded. Emotion for his kind is mathematical not chemical. Numbers in electric addition and subtraction. One up, one down. He has lived in a thunderstorm till now.

He takes a jar from his pack. Inside is a preserved worm knocking weakly against the glass. He lets it drop the distance to the earth below. Ziv hears no sound in return for his offering.

“Even still” –he was once told- “feeling will always claw at your heels, you can try your best to beat it back and with each step you’ll succeed and fail. You can’t hold back that flood forever. For all things must account for themselves.”

He’s balanced here waiting for his judgement day.

So that he may finally cut loose from the curtain of light that
hounds him,
that has loomed over his left shoulder,
like a leering spectator, since that morning when
he left Anastasia.

So that he may plummet into shade.

Into cool air.
Out
of
heat.
&
light.

”Yeah, but he'll die with the wind in his hair.” – say his admirers; say those who have no clue.

“So I will cease to be” – says Ziv – “and will have lived.”