20190227

Day 1,636

You first met him when you worked as a receptionist. He was part of the cybernetics-based broadcasting centre - one of their thousand or so monitors. He brought you coffee whenever he came to fill out his forms and always remembered your name.

Shortly after the closure the world came to an abrupt halt. Some kind of old-world disease was released and before we knew it "organics", and those who were pretty much techless, were dropping like flies and the few of us that remained suddenly had to form a society from scratch.

We went out to the deep woods, me and my guy. A whole group of us stationed ourselves in an old firewatch tower and acted as a central communications point for the whole state. Every single piece of information flowed through us and then towards the appropriate place.

For a while it was working great. Then reality began to set in and the food drops slowed to a gradual nothing. As mostly organic, you didn't live on the feed gel that the others did and you still had enough of your digestive system to thrive on whatever you could hunt and forage in the area.

The others weren't so fortunate - your guy wasn't so fortunate. They may have been faster, stronger and better equipped for their jobs than you could ever hope to be but in that moment you realised just how fragile they all were.

When his telecom implant stopped working, you buried him out by the train tracks. It seemed a kinder thing to do than watch him waste away like all the others and it left you with more than enough feed gel to keep the other cyborgs up and running.

Sooner or later it would run out though. You'd have to pick and choose and debate and try to keep as many people alive as you could and feed them all their information and keep the world running when your own world ran on feed gel from a factory that closed almost four years ago.

Still, one bridge at a time.

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