The Machine in the Mirror
The reflection in the mirror was foreign to his wide gaze. After the horrific accident at his university lab, Logan thanked his lucky stars he’d escaped the scorching blaze unharmed but reality knocked and revealed he’d been deluded. He looked in the dimly lit, fractured mirror in his cramped, dark and dingy bathroom, the pale, flickering light from the weak bulb highlighting his long, gaunt features, and saw his own twisted work meeting his gaze with a familiar wide-eyed stare. He gripped the sink, his fingers cracking the basin's sides. Thoughts raced through his mind, synapses firing faster than he could process like an agonising shock through his skull, and yet his heart pulsed to an ice cold, methodical rhythm. His reflection bore no sweat on his forehead despite the stress on his brow and the panic in his wide eyes. His mind and his body, at odds with each other.
At the lab he’d worked himself past the brink of exhaustion, developing microscopic machines that could close wounds and replace lost tissue temporarily while the body healed. Now, flashes of agony and anguish washed over him as the towering, howling flames broke his bones, burned his flesh, and brutalised his body. He was entrapped on the floor, weighed down by his own agony and the thick, smothering, smoke in his struggling lungs. His cries were drowned out by the roaring flames as the fire stole his every breath and consumed what oxygen remained in the lab that may have become his tomb. As the scorching heat turns his viscera into ash, his creations writhed from their shattered container, coating the floor and surrounding him. He felt the cold, unfamiliar metal sand crawl up his paralysed body like living quicksand. It coated his bloodied flesh and buried deep under his marred and torn skin like vicious ants burrowing into a colony. They writhed and swirled methodically around his twitching charred flesh in a rhythmic unison. Wounds that burned down through the muscle straight to the bone were overcome with a shocking, numbing cold sensation as the medical monstrosities entrapped his twitching, pulsating body in a slick metallic cocoon of his own making. Deep, scorched wounds had been washed over by the machines bonding to his red, raw flesh. The fresh phantom pain that ruptured his mind was remedied by machines that worked autonomously and chillingly effectively. The pain now arched like lightning through new nerves as the machines sewed his being back together like new from next to nothing.
Now he stood, swaying shakily in his bathroom after accidentally slicing into his hand in the kitchen and thus his balance was pulled from under him as the world had come crashing down around him. His seemingly destroyed marvels wept out of the small, otherwise insignificant, wound. The sound of miniscule metal running down his hand like grains and the absence of the harrowing smell of blood bringing even more dread than the scent itself. He realised looking at his long fingers curling around his gaunt and wounded palm, his mind ached as the thought echoed through his head that if he was so badly injured there was no body left to heal, his body was still made of those artificial substitutes - that not a pound of Logan’s original, charred but still human, flesh remained. Instead it was now replaced by this healthy, perfect, and monstrous new form.
Could the pale, quaking machine in the mirror even say it was Logan? The desire to see family wept through it, the thought to beg for help ached through its mind. But if it wasn’t Logan. The pale imitation would be lying to everyone they, and Logan, still cared about and pretending they were still alive. Pretending the one they loved still had Logan, not that they hadn’t even a ghastly, twisted body to bury because it had consumed his remains in it’s own wretched creation. It stared at it’s hollow reflection in the mirror. The sensation of bile building in the throat wretched through it’s body but nothing came out. It traced it’s finger over where a scar was one bared on Logan’s head, and noticed that it’s left brow didn’t hang low like Logan’s did. The alienated face was without the flaws of it’s stolen muse, and the imitation paled because of it. These thoughts could drive a man to madness, so the soulless machine snapped, lashing out and shattering the harsh, cold, revealing mirror instead.
Written by: Ben Davies
Genre: Science Fiction/Cyberpunk Short Story/Extended Flash Fiction
Word Count: 745
Inspiration: What started as a piece of flash fiction has grown into a short story based on an original character of my own called Nanite. While the story itself doesn't lean on these inspirations, Nanite is heavily based in my love of comic book media, the Batman Beyond series in particular. As for the piece itself I drew a lot from the Deus Ex franchise. Particularly one moment in the game Deus Ex Human Revolution where (to avoid rendering a mirror that the game wasn't capable of rendering) the protagonist had smashed his en-suite mirror in a fit of rage after suffering a horrible accident.
At the lab he’d worked himself past the brink of exhaustion, developing microscopic machines that could close wounds and replace lost tissue temporarily while the body healed. Now, flashes of agony and anguish washed over him as the towering, howling flames broke his bones, burned his flesh, and brutalised his body. He was entrapped on the floor, weighed down by his own agony and the thick, smothering, smoke in his struggling lungs. His cries were drowned out by the roaring flames as the fire stole his every breath and consumed what oxygen remained in the lab that may have become his tomb. As the scorching heat turns his viscera into ash, his creations writhed from their shattered container, coating the floor and surrounding him. He felt the cold, unfamiliar metal sand crawl up his paralysed body like living quicksand. It coated his bloodied flesh and buried deep under his marred and torn skin like vicious ants burrowing into a colony. They writhed and swirled methodically around his twitching charred flesh in a rhythmic unison. Wounds that burned down through the muscle straight to the bone were overcome with a shocking, numbing cold sensation as the medical monstrosities entrapped his twitching, pulsating body in a slick metallic cocoon of his own making. Deep, scorched wounds had been washed over by the machines bonding to his red, raw flesh. The fresh phantom pain that ruptured his mind was remedied by machines that worked autonomously and chillingly effectively. The pain now arched like lightning through new nerves as the machines sewed his being back together like new from next to nothing.
Now he stood, swaying shakily in his bathroom after accidentally slicing into his hand in the kitchen and thus his balance was pulled from under him as the world had come crashing down around him. His seemingly destroyed marvels wept out of the small, otherwise insignificant, wound. The sound of miniscule metal running down his hand like grains and the absence of the harrowing smell of blood bringing even more dread than the scent itself. He realised looking at his long fingers curling around his gaunt and wounded palm, his mind ached as the thought echoed through his head that if he was so badly injured there was no body left to heal, his body was still made of those artificial substitutes - that not a pound of Logan’s original, charred but still human, flesh remained. Instead it was now replaced by this healthy, perfect, and monstrous new form.
Could the pale, quaking machine in the mirror even say it was Logan? The desire to see family wept through it, the thought to beg for help ached through its mind. But if it wasn’t Logan. The pale imitation would be lying to everyone they, and Logan, still cared about and pretending they were still alive. Pretending the one they loved still had Logan, not that they hadn’t even a ghastly, twisted body to bury because it had consumed his remains in it’s own wretched creation. It stared at it’s hollow reflection in the mirror. The sensation of bile building in the throat wretched through it’s body but nothing came out. It traced it’s finger over where a scar was one bared on Logan’s head, and noticed that it’s left brow didn’t hang low like Logan’s did. The alienated face was without the flaws of it’s stolen muse, and the imitation paled because of it. These thoughts could drive a man to madness, so the soulless machine snapped, lashing out and shattering the harsh, cold, revealing mirror instead.
Written by: Ben Davies
Genre: Science Fiction/Cyberpunk Short Story/Extended Flash Fiction
Word Count: 745
Inspiration: What started as a piece of flash fiction has grown into a short story based on an original character of my own called Nanite. While the story itself doesn't lean on these inspirations, Nanite is heavily based in my love of comic book media, the Batman Beyond series in particular. As for the piece itself I drew a lot from the Deus Ex franchise. Particularly one moment in the game Deus Ex Human Revolution where (to avoid rendering a mirror that the game wasn't capable of rendering) the protagonist had smashed his en-suite mirror in a fit of rage after suffering a horrible accident.
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