Of Gears and Humanity

| 04.2

{DAMIEN]

As the moon settled high in the sky, I sat outside my Sector home. The steel of the building shimmered with moonlight, reflecting back the stars scattered throughout the sky above. Sometimes I'd look at the stars and try to connect them. Astronomy had been an interesting topic in my childhood and, well, it kept me entertained many nights when I was a boy.

Once the sun found home beyond the horizon, I was at peace, by myself, without the eyes of an Attribution calculating my every move. Night served them no purpose. It was the morning that powered their batteries, their way of life; night only granted them the time to rest and converse the energy for the following day. While they rested, closing their eyes to mimic sleep, I stayed awake.

"You're my friend," I said to the moon as I leaned back on my bench. The pillow behind my back shifted lower, but in a good position to relax my shoulders, my weight. My hands slipped away from my thighs, but I kept hold of the journals I brought outside with me; the very reason I stepped outdoors.

After dinner, I had spent an hour trying to compare the fallen journal to the book I'd kept hidden for so many years. The penmanship wasn't the same, but the ink was similar. The two tales, though so different, matched in their own way. Detailing the wars between the Attributions and humans, depicting the plans to build and construct the wall to separate the two sides of the world.

I had always been told the wall was built to keep what was left of the Earth safe from the toxins and ruins humans had left behind. The two books in my hand both said something entirely different. Yet, they matched each other.

The Gate was built to sever the two worlds. The Gate was meant to protect yet hinder, to separate and impede.

But who? And why?

"And these people..." I looked down at the books in my hand. My thumb had saved pages within each, the parts which confused me the most. I, the last human, was saved by the Attributions just a few years after the war that abolished my kind. I was fully aware of the current year and knew my birth and time on this Earth. Yet, when I compared it to the handwritten accounts in each of these books, none of it made sense.

According to the words of human accounts, and the shadow on the other end of the Gate, the war happened and ended over one hundred years ago. The time of ages shifted, starting again from zero, at the completion of the Gate.

Now, either I was an immortal, gifted with some sort of magical ability, or I was truly an Attribution built to believe I was human, what I believed to be the actual dates of the war had to be wrong.

I wasn't over one hundred years old. I barely turned nineteen the year that passed. And if I was the last human within documented Attribution history, where were the others when they found me?

"What people, Damien?"

At the sound of a soft voice, I quickly turned towards the door on my right. It opened, allowing the light from within my home to cut through the shadows created by the night. Unique, the Attribution built to be my mother, stood within the open doorway. Her hands were at her side, her lips lifted into a small, unnatural smile.

I gave her a look so similar.

"Mother." Closing the books in my hands, I put them together and held them on my lap. We stared at each other for a minute. Her eyes, violet in color, shimmered in the moonlight. Sometimes I thought I could see the dark hazel tone of mine in hers if I looked hard enough. When I did, I saw a lot of human in her, too; so simple, just like me, without the advancements of the Attributions who built her.