Dumb, Deaf, and Stupid

“Look up,” the commander demanded before plopping a rifle in my hands, “This is your best friend now.” I looked at it, it was inanimate I have no idea how it could be my friend. “You will go nowhere without this.”

“But I’d rather have anything else. If I get caught with a gun I get drafted.”

“Don’t care, never really did. Surprise! Your mother’s dead and I killed her.”

This came as a shock, but not as shocking as him widening himself and covering the entire doorway, “This is your moment, son. You’re gonna do what I did to my father, and what his father did to him, and so on for the past eons stretching back through the halls of time. We treat our kids like trash and this is how we end it, as I assume you will to your kid.”

I furrowed my brow, “No way, this is really weird. I’m not gonna kill you, no matter how much I’d want to.”

He rubbed his temples, somehow frustrated at the prospect of not dying, “Okay, let me see if I can make this clearer. Destiny is a thing that exists. This destiny has been fulfilled by every ancestor stretching back—”

The blast of gunfire and the smell of cordite filled the room. The commander smiled as he looked down, and saw the red hole in his stomach growing wider and wider.

“Finally, took you long enough,” he said, collapsing onto the ground. “Wait, before you leave I have to say the thing that every single one of our family patriarchs have said…what was it?”

I was really starting to get bored and began walking over to the door, “Wait! I said wait god damnit!”

“You’re dying, aren’t you? I think I’ll be alright with letting you be as I leave.”

I swiftly evacuated as he hurled abuse and threats towards me. They were about as hollow as they could be, coming from a man who had maybe a minute left on Earth.

“That which does not bind, constricts. That which does not constrict, crushes.”

The city was not much different to the idea of patricide. Shooting someone in the stomach is all well and good and sometimes even ethical, but the fact that the city won’t let you be without getting in a few gut punches first really sucks. I was the turncoat. I saw everything, the neon, the flesh of the humanoid robotics lab. I’m not omniscient, it’s just that every single street in this city is the same copy-pasted layout and setup across the entire world. Every street has the aforementioned lab, the grocery stores, the neon ads which were kind of superfluous because they always advertised the same few stores across billions of streets. Finally, there was the apartment building. But, it only housed one resident. I was a resident, my father was, my mother was, and presumably a great deal many other people.

I turned around and behind me was the same street with the same signs and the same stores. I wanted something else but every kid is separated from their parents at birth, meaning that this was my solo reality since I was born. I wanted to go to school. But not a standard one either, one that had overhangs and afternoon class with orange sunlight streaming in, giving one last breath of the day before it went away for the next twelve hours. I’ve looked, but I can never find anything that matches that description. The closest would be my apartment but I can’t fathom being in that place for a second longer than I already have. Human lifespans are perfectly calculated to fit the time it would take to get existentially bored of your surroundings. Just the right amount of stores are set up to give just enough change of pace to keep you alive, and to keep the brain from rotting.

I have no idea how I have the money to pay for things in the grocery store. I buy food, I buy so much food but never have money ready. It’s just there.