The Pilot Program 2020 -
The short story program where you choose what I write next year.
This is the third short story of the 2020 Pilot Program. If this is the first time you are reading a pilot program entry it works something like this: You read the short story for absolutely free, if you like it, then leave a like at the end of the post or comment, share it. And if it gets the most engagement by the end of the year, I will make it into the short story series of 2021. Enjoy.
Remember, stories live or die by our hands. I was born with this, I didn’t choose it. None of us do. It just started happening as soon as I had my first memory. I don’t know why it happened, but it just appeared one day on my right arm. They say that it usually appears on your dominant hand, so for some it’s on their left hand. On the bright side, we stopped lying, since this started happening. When I asked my parents when this started happening, they told me that they only know of the tales their grandparents had told them, and that it’s been so long ago that no one really remembers. They all accepted that this was something new they had to live with and tried to adapt to it. I looked more into it, and it is all so convoluted that I don’t know where to start about all this.
Some speak of a great plight that had pushed humanity on brink of disaster. Of course, the cynical voices wrote of a willing yet ignorant undoing of hubris itself when the epidemic hit. So they spoke of the illnesses that had hit humans back then. Every two or three years, there was something new, something evolving, something coming back from the past. And then, one day, it all hit at once. Fires, floods, typhoons, droughts, from one extreme to another. The human body could not handle everything that it was thrown at it. And thus people got sick and sicker, death followed suit and came to claim them. Now, here is where the story gets muddy. All the sources I had found, could agree on the fact that it was all bad and was getting worse. But none of them can agree on what had happened afterwards. Because all that stopped at some point. They do not know if humanity did the right thing or if someone came and solved all their problems, all they know is that this started happening to us.
From grandparents to parents and then down to their children. When it first happened to me, I did not understand how or why at that time. I didn’t know what was the point to this whole thing, and I still have to get the hang of it very well. But, as I grew, I think I started to learn bit by bit about it. I still remember when it happened, because it was my first memory, like a trauma you can shake off. It was my second birthday, they all gathered around me, as my mother held my hand, they all put their hands on her. My hand started to tingle as it turned black, I remember I started screaming, kicking, crying, terrified. They let go, I tried to scratch it off, I tried to do anything I could think of as a child to get rid of it, yet to no success. In my palm, my first tattoo. I didn’t understand what that was, but as I grew older, my mother’s and father’s legacy started to spread on my arm and disappearing from their bodies as they got older. The family’s whole history is now on my arm condensed in tattoos of core memories of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. But, I still don’t know who I am, so the tattoos that formed from my memories are like smudges on canvas. And it’s no easy task to figure them out. The sources I researched dreamed of the year 2400 as this futuristic easy life, yet it doesn’t seem to have gotten any easier…
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