Expiration

Written by Anakin McFly

The flickering happened with the three-million, six-hundred-and-ninety-thousand, eight hundred and forty-secondth new citizen.

There was nothing wrong with the stork delivery. He arrived just as everyone else had, deposited gently on the roof of his new abode, and within seconds was up and ready to be briefed.

And then came the flickering.

It was as though a facade was being wiped away; an illusion broken, such that for a moment or less everybody seemed to have the same face. Different in age, wrought with a variety of expressions, but still, unmistakeably, the same.

Those few who saw it the first time put it down to a trick of the light. Such impossibilities were the stuff of fantasy, not worthy of even being thought about with any seriousness. But the second time it happened, it lasted a whole five seconds; and everyone who was around anyone else saw it and could not deny it.

Then the illusion of heterogeneity came back on. Slowly, as though managed by a straining and tired mind, but everyone saw the change.

Some had taken photos, and they went straight up onto the Internet: surrealistic moments caught in that brief moment of time, identical faces looking out from beneath variant hairstyles and kinds of hats, a global society of one.

Who is that man? the people asked in questions that flowed thick and fast through cyberspace and the broadcast media. The face, that face of everyone, was captured and blown up and stuck on the front of newspaper headlines. He is us, the journalists said. But who is he?

Historians claimed to know something about it. They said the answer lay in the dawn of civilisation, when the human race had left the inhospitable climate of the moon and moved down to Earth to settle and grow and set society as they knew it into motion. There were stories that had been passed down; stories about how their ancestors had all been clones, and had later discovered a way through mental implants in the awakening process to create the illusion that everyone was physically different.

Now the illusion is failing, the historians said. The great computer that controls it all must be finally weakening. We are afraid that this might be the end.

And then, in the dark recesses of the old Lunar base, GERTY expired.

And the illusion was shattered for good.

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