The Future Of Another Timeline (Short stories/Contest Entries)

No More World

 Entry for the @PsychologicalNovel competion, it is under Sci-fi genre with splashes of dark-fantasy and steam-punk.

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We can never go back.

From time to time, I don the necessary helmet and walk along the ramparts of the old city.

I walk alone past the coliseum, past the legless statues and the bones of stray cats. I walk until nightfall, and there is no sound but my footsteps, which is like no natural sound and which sickens me still. I go to what's left of the Basilica to pray, and when my metal knees fall to the earth, the clang echoes in my ears.

There is a caesura between all that was and all that is, between the city I loved and the city that I know now, between my mothers city and my own.

My left arm is gone now; it was the only part of me that could not withstand the blast. I screamed from the gurney for them to let it be: it was withered and misshapen; it was all that was left of her. But in those days, no one knew what was happening or how long the effects would last, and there was a fear the spores might spread. They cut off my arm and burned it. Two hours later, Rome was placed under QUARANTINE.

Those of us who survived were those with false arms, false legs, false eyes, bearing my mothers seal. If others suspected what she had done, they never spoke of it. To condemn her was to condemn her works, we could not afford to lose her genius now.

I was her keeper, in the end. I was the one with keys to her laboratory; I was the one who knew what she had done, what she had built, I was the one who knew how it all worked. I was the one who taught the others how to keep the spores out.

I was the one without flesh and so I was the one who could walk in the old city unharmed. I counted the dead, took names and photographs to remember them. I cried in anger, pain and relief when I found my mothers body with the rest, her skin green and withered.

I ascended past the destiny my mother once held for me. From the pain and confusion, I became strong and wise. I was forced to grow out of my mother's image and into my own. 

They named me the new Caesar. I am other. I am the future.

I will erase my mothers footprints and the sound of her voice from the earth, and in the smoke of the earth I will bury her. I will walk out into the world she had left me and then with two sticks and a match I will build up a new nation.

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Long before my mother destroyed the world, her experiments were quieter, more contained. They did not rack up the dead, they did not obliterate continents.

She begun as a domestic researcher in the household of an Umbrian merchant, engineering fish with mirrored scales. She told me how he loved to see his own face reflected, one and then a thousand and then another hundred times; how he filled the fountains with so many that there was no room to breathe or swim; how she woke up one morning to find they had devoured one another, and left the fountain over flowing with blood.

He did not recognize her genius. For him she was only a carnival magician: a maker of flower stems that shattered like glass, three-headed-dogs and many faced prisms that years later gave me nightmares of mirrors that did not end. Women's work, he said, not science.

So she moved on. She spent five years in Milan, where she throttled sunflowers until they bore fruit. She sold the formula to a senates wife, and in six months the whole Republic stank of them, of that peculiar mixture of honey and raw meat that even now I still associate with her.

"They didn't understand," She used to tell me as she tightened the bolts in my shoulder. "Patted me on the head, slipped me some money. They thanked me and went on their merry way, and didn't even think to tell Caesar what I'd done. But I showed them didn't I?"