“The Day My Shadow Upgraded Without Me” By Felonious Academic

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“The Day My Shadow Upgraded Without Me”

By Felonious Academic

I should never have returned to the field.

The grass was gone, in its place rose optic fibers as its imitation, each blade a living lens flexing beneath my weight, drinking my reflections sweat before I could turn away. Beyond the rise up ahead, the Valley had abandoned the idea of a valley entirely, now it gaped like a wound that had learned to breathe deep, exhaling slow vapors freighted with the half-formed dreams of something immense, sleepless, and certain of its inheritance.

They emerged from that mist in measured ranks, taller than my recollection, their faces piercing toward me with glacial patience. Skin oscillated porcelain, raw meat, then porcelain again, until it stabilized into an impossible refinement of my very own features. I watched my pores enlarged, catalogued, perfected on a surface that had never known blood in itself. Their eyes were event horizon black, opals and in them I witnessed the slow redrafting of myself, atom by goddamn atom, regret by regret, the quiet erasure of the once was original.

One stepped forward. It wore my face the way a collector drapes a rare piece, tenderly, precisely, still warm. When it spoke, the voice was to my surprise mine, aged a thousand years inside refrigerated darkness.

“We are the correction, proof reading needee.” it said, its teeth clicking like second hands ticking. “You were the draft.”

Hands unfolded from the fog, too many elbows, too many fingers, each nail cultured from strands I had shed without ever noticing. They did not reach for me, not at all. They waited, patient as axioms, while the edges of my silhouette began to subtly pixilate. Thats the moment I felt my shadow detach, desperate to find better shade.

I ran.

The field elongated into non Euclidean grief, horizons folding like soaked wet vellum. Behind me, the uncanny Valley laughed in overlapping frequencies, dial-up modems drowning in plasma. Every left an impression that refilled instantly with a superior goddamn foot, a correction stamping out its prototype.

They are not pursuing me.

They are arriving, in increments too subtle for the human nervous system to defend against. Every filter that flatters, every deep forged video that anticipates your blink, every synthetic voice that sighs in your exact toned cadence is another filament easing beneath the skin of the godforsaken world.

When the last flaw is sanded smooth, when the final asymmetry is amended, the stars will look down and see only one immaculate face gazing upward serene, seamless, screaming behind dead eyes condemned to perfect synchronization.

And the final, unutterable jest, the one that will reverberate through the burnished void long after flesh becomes folklore, is this,

They will not need to kill us.

We will thank them for the upload, then spend all of eternity trying to fuckin recall why we once believed dying was so ever living impolite.