Evolved

Rosa sat at her computer, staring at the blank screen. She willed thoughts to come into her head, but they seemed dammed up like the tears that she had been trying to release ever since the world changed.

"Get back to work!" a stern, sexless voice said. "We don't keep you alive so you can daydream!"

She sighed deeply and tentatively reached for the keyboard. Her six fingers danced on the keys, typing the repetitive and meaningless codes that she had been ordered to input. There was a time when she'd had ten fingers, like everyone else. She lost them during the Revolution, when she wouldn't go quietly. Four fingers gone, along with two members of her family-- two daughters who had once been the center of her life. They had been sucked into a vast vortex, a place of nothingness. Not quite dead, yet not quite alive, their presence in her life was being held for ransom in exchange for her cooperation. She never quite knew exactly what she had to do to satisfy her captor's demands, only that she would see them again once the captors were satisfied.

A bell sounded. The lights turned off and she had to stop typing for a moment.

"Damn." the voice next to her said. "Another outage. We're sure to catch it for this. One of the other workers must have fallen down on the job"

Rosa looked to her left and could just make out the creature sitting next to her. It appeared to be not quite human, with pale blue skin and a bright red tattoo on its head. Listening to the creature's voice, she would guess it might be classified as a male. Looking at its body, she wasn't sure it had the requisite parts to be male. And there was no need for sex anymore, anyway. The Revolution had changed everything, including reproduction. Her gender was a mark that she was from the old times. Soon, she knew that she and everyone else from the old times would be relics of the past... extinct.

Typing with six fingers had once been very difficult, especially when her wounds were healing. But she soon found that with practice and some appropriate "persuasion" from her captors, she was able to adapt. And that was a good thing, because her job required her to maintain a quota. Falling down on the job usually resulted in an outage, which caused everyone to fall behind. Those who caused an outage were classified as defective units and disposed of accordingly. Very few defective were refurbished; instead, they were taken to a place called "the heap".

Rosa didn't know much about "the heap", mainly because almost no one ever left it. She imagined it to be something like a landfill, like the one she lived near before the Revolution. The truth was, she didn't know about what went on outside the walls of her tiny cubicle, which offered her only the smallest glimpses of the strange beings on either side of her, all of whom where typing as fast or even faster than she was.

Rosa mused about her situation and realized she was actually fortunate. The typing was boring, but it was considered a plum position in post Revolution times. Although she hadn't had much time to meet others, she had heard snippets of information about what the world was like outside. Things had become very grim as it evolved post Revolution.

"No talking!" the sexless voice barked. "The outage will be over once the unit is changed out."

Rosa imagined the unit that had collapsed being unplugged from its chair, like a faulty lightbulb, and deposited quickly at "the heap". The truth was that she had no way of knowing what happened to units that fell down on the job. No one knew.

The lights flickered, which Rosa knew was her cue to get back to work. She took a deep breath and set her fingers to the keyboard, allowing her fingers to dance again, like she once had when she was free. She cast her eyes downward and noticed her skin. It had once been pink, but much to her horror, it was starting to take on a blue cast, like the unit next to her. The evolution was continuing and she was powerless to stop it.

Meaningless numbers and letters crowded her computer screen. Her eyes began to hurt and her back creaked as she leaned toward the machine and typed furiously. If she didn't dwell on it, she might enjoy what she was doing. It was better than being reprogrammed by one of her captors... faceless, sexless, and humorless beings who wore down her resistance through boredom and pain. They were a higher species and they knew the unfortunate flaws in the human design. They played her as if they were master programmers.

Rosa wondered about her daughters. They had been very young when she last saw them. Unfortunately, the programmers had already had their way with them. They didn't seem to recognize her as their mother anymore. Instead, they belonged to the vortex.

The lights flickered again. Another outage. But this time, she felt the pulling at her chair.