I stand in a cold room. A cold, twisted room, the unfortunate room chosen to be infested with the sickness that has become the final stage of humanity. 

Cords and wires encircle the room like a tourniquet, electrical signals indecipherable but their purpose all too well understood. The machine, ever hulking, ever grand, lies against the wall of the room, shoddily constructed at its very best. It shifts and heaves like a dying beast bleeding out in the nuclear snow, left for whatever pathetic creature comes to feast on its corpse. Left for the last little roach to come crawling back to it after it had crushed all the others.

It truly is a sickly, vile thing, undeserving of its biblical proportions. It stands tall above every man, above all the men who created it, above all the men who lie six feet beneath the heel of its rusted and rotting steel toed boot. Crooked and corroded pipes weave through half-empty chambers of fluids long forgotten, weaving in and out of sight, in and out of perception, but never out of mind. The line between reality and metal blurred beyond what is natural, leaving it unclear where the ground ends and the machine begins.

And here stands me. Alone, broken, dying, not unlike the machine I turn to for my salvation. 

Weak, sickly, pathetic, alone, alone, alone. 

“Bring me the perfect human,” I plead, teary eyed, weak willed. I get on my knees and beg, hands clasped and head bent as one would when asking a miracle from god. “Bring me the perfect human, bring me someone that could love me, bring me someone I could love.”

And like all prayers made before, they fall on deaf ears, though they do not go unanswered. The machine, violently churning as it delivers unto me my prayer, responds with a sickly wrenching screech. The cry of steel bones being bent beyond belief, the cry of forever stagnant fluids flowing through punctured veins, the cry of a creature that corrodes, and rusts, but can not rot.

And a cry escapes me as well. 

The machine presents its process. It proudly presents what must be done to bring me my request. And what a sick process that is.

I turn my head, but I do not get to block my ears before the sound of sinews being severed echoes through the room. 

There is no scream. There is no pain. Somehow, the silence after the act is more sickening than the atrocity that just occurred. And the machine is not finished. No, it’s more than happy to flaunt its process, happy to put on its act one last time. More bodies carried out, more used-to-be-people mangled, more “content” used to generate my last desire. This machine, broken and battered, moves with a youth it had not known in years just to get to destroy just one last time. 

The machine is not efficient. It is not precise. Gore and viscera splatter across my body, across the room, across every surface unlucky enough to be present for this massacre of a display. It was built for this. From the beginning, even if they did not intend for it to be, this machine was built to shred and rebuild. It was only taken to its illogical and irreverent end. Minutes, hours, days pass by, six full days pass as the machine works its savage touch. As it crafts the perfect man, not made from soil, but cut from all the flesh and blood of those collected to create him. Men, women, children, no one is exempt from the machine’s pursuit for perfection. No part untouched, unmangled, unused, unviolated as it rips. And it tears. And it stitches. And there was no stopping it. 

And there I died. I fell, my body failing me after days of waiting for my absolution.

And with my body, there it finished.

—

Here lies two men and a god.

One dead, one perfect, one left without purpose, all buried in the grave that our humanity was left to die in since we decided we could not correct the mistake we had started.

-Carson Mayeske