Messengers of Mankind

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Here's what I remember. There isn't much I recall about my childhood, but there's always this scream. Obviously, I was too young to know that it was something to be alerted by.

Oh, there was that scream again in the medical bay.

It has always been there. Every so often, like a malfunctioning alarm, it'd sound at irregular intervals. Although seemingly elicited by different people, they all convey the same intense emotion that was agony.

I was too young to know what it meant.

It seemed ever-present and ever-lasting. Through the metallic walls, across the empty hallways, over the often empty facilities. There was always that scream full of pain and shock, yet nobody, not one person in the always bustling complex, took any notice of it.

Before everything, I had known that I wasn't from here. I remember a large, warm home and my own comfortable room. It had light violet walls and small, phosphorescent stars of different sizes plastered all over it. As far as I could see, many photographs of different people were hung up with strings and thumbtacks too. Whenever I lift my head, I'd see a ceiling of deep violet and blue painted to resemble the night sky. I remember two vague faces, but I can no longer distinguish their features. They were just two blurred out memories, like a picture taken by a camera that could not focus.

It brought comfort; the words cooed by those two vague faces and the slender arms that used to pick me up and rock me to sleep by. They brought warmth.

It was beautiful, I'll tell you that.

What I can't tell you is how my room deteriorated to cold, silvery walls. No decorations, no small glowy stars, no pretty colors, nothing. The two lovely people were gone too - I don't know where they went. It was like they vapourized into nothingness, as if they were never there.

The transformation was just over one night - I fell asleep within soothing violet and blue walls, and woke up to the stinging smell of disinfectant and silvery grey walls made of metal. I never know how or what happened, and they never told me.

They told me it doesn't matter where I am or where my.. loyalties... strange word, huh... lie. I am a resident of the complex now, and will forever be.

The forgetting of these words spoken with malice was accompanied by a tingling sensation down my spine. It felt like static electricity, but something a lot more persistent. Through my clouded senses at the time, I knew it to be more than just electricity, but I could not stay conscious for long enough to continue that thought.

The next time I woke up, I heard that scream for the first time.

I remember vaguely crying out to the men in white coats, pleading for them to stop whoever was screaming, begging for them to help the person in distress. I remember getting slapped in the face for doing so, and that my cheeks were swollen for nearly a week.

Yet they never helped. They never helped whoever was in pain - and that's when I had the suspicion that something was wrong.

I have to admit, my biggest mistake was letting my suspicions slide and to continue my life in the complex as if nothing was wrong. Now the damage is irreversible - forever done and nothing could be changed. 

I'm such an idiot... 

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(UNEDITED)

Published Nov 24th.