The boy draws attention, as his owner hoped he would.
He is a fine specimen, thin and tall; lithe. Time seems to slow for all who pass by his glass prison. They marvel at the dry brown hair growing from his head, at his cracked white lips. He is sick; he is weak; his eyes manage to look simultaneously dull, yet strikingly intense, throwing the light back like those of a lion.
He is human.
He sits in a cube made of fortified glass . Nothing gets in or out, bar the too-bright fluorescent lights from the lamps that creak and swing overhead. (Rust everywhere. There's nobody alive today who's seen a world with no rust)
They stare for as long as they can. His skin fascinates them, the way it clung to his ribs and his hips and his elbows. His collarbone shows through his skin.
In another time he would have been considered beautiful.
In another time, he would have roamed free, just as he does in his wild daydreams. (The sky is draped in the brightest jewel tones he could have ever imagined; there is green grass, which he has never seen but he imagines that it is as soft as that one woollen sock he'd had as a child.) Some would have thought him pitiful, pathetic, for living inside his head. But what can he do? In all truth, the world has nothing for him, and his imagination provides everything he needs: trolls and fairies and unicorns and humans and everything else that no longer exists.
What can he do to escape? He would die should he ever set foot outside of his glass case, and it would be through no fault of his own.
But the air is too warm, too acidic, too dirty. If they're lucky, the Earth's convoluted wind system might blow the brown-green clouds of gas away to allow a momentary glimpse of a blue sky. Periwinkle blue, although few people have ever seen flowers.
The police will show up then, because people are moving too slowly. Like everyone else, the chips in their arms beep and flash with each movement of their arms. Iron and steel have been welded to the places where their skin is the thinnest. Their bare heads shine in the light as the crowd flows faster past the case, metal limbs clanging and clanking as strangers rub shoulders.
And the boy continues to daydream, deciding that his imagination and intangible hope is good enough for him.
In his heart, he yearns for a freedom the world can no longer give him.
YOU ARE READING
The Last Human
Ciencia Ficción- because we know that this is how the world will end. He tells himself that it's fine - he can live on his dreams and stardust alone. (It will never be enough. The whole world was not enough for his ancestors and it will not be enough for him)
