The acid didn’t kill me because it couldn’t decide which part of me to dissolve first.

I was dropped into the Decomposition Silo at 0300, marked as Unspecified Composition. The system’s predictive reality engine didn’t even log my deletion. It just managed to update the facility’s floor-space capacity, as I was considered waste.

My body, dripping with the exact solvents meant to destroy me, is a stitchwork of the genetic debris of ten thousand other people. The silo is supposedly lethal to the nth degree, but the process left me unharmed.

Slimed in the grey sludge, I could feel frictions and tinglings through me. It all felt disjointed. I don’t really know how jointed would feel, but I can tell contradictory sensations are transiting through my neural pathways. I moved my left hand, triggering muscle fibres that don’t belong to the same nervous system.

I kept getting flashes of lives that I had not lived. Memories, extracted from the genetic scraps of others, made it impossible to access anything that belonged to me. I had random information about the world programmed into my brain, and it didn’t take me long to realise that knowing everything without context is equal to knowing nothing.

The memory chip on a drone, discarded to be wiped along with me, was what revealed the origins of my existence. The data of my accidental assembly depicted that I had been accumulated over the years. Resulting mainly from the runoff of procedural waste chemicals, namely rejected genetic sequences, “dull” traits, and code fragments that don’t match the required standards, I became a chimeric genome. Some heat, pressure, and the accidental current from a dying power line coalesced my cells and the intensity of it all must have forced an “I” into existence.

When the acid hit me, the system scanned for a target. It tried to lock onto a sequence, but that sequence was immediately interrupted by another contradictory one. It tried to dissolve the “labourer” muscle, but my “scholar” nerves triggered a defensive enzyme that the system didn’t recognise. My conflicting nature, as chaotic as it has been, must have what saved me from being dissolved into trash.

I climbed out of the silo, with the predictive reality engine whirring above me. I’m invisible to the cameras and sensors because I don’t fit into any of the predefined genetic traits the machine is programmed to recognise. The pathway out into the main city involved walking in a drain, a dark tunnel that extended for 3 miles. I dragged my feet, aiming to reach the glowing light at the end. The silence was the first thing I noticed as I watched the movements of the city people. I spent my night in the shadows, observing. My mind, for some reason, felt louder than the orchestrated movements of about a hundred people in front of my eyes.

As I trod from the back of one building to another, the city’s cookie-cutter exterior intrigued me. The walls were beige. There were plants in every corner. The temperature neither hot nor cold. The “Deluxe” moved with a cadence that was different to mine. They walked with a poise, with their shoulders back and relaxed, head straight, seemingly not to notice the other people in the room, only whoever in their direct line of vision. They barely talked to one another, occasionally looking down at a slim, transparent device that fit in their palms.

Although disconnected, the Deluxe moved in sync, their soft footsteps tapped like clicks on a keypad. They cruised in their orbits, and some rare murmurs here and there, reserved only for acquaintances. Their smiles stopped halfway, almost adequately, and never reaching their eyes, the tones of their voices fell flat, despite the phrases they were saying to one another, in their choreographed interactions, their “thank-yous” and “happy-to-see-yous” brimmed with void.

Most interesting of all was their appearance. Their faces were in perfect mathematical symmetry, matted, porcelain skin tone, no signs of wear from life. The women were carbon copies of one another, their petite hourglass bodies strutted with an unnatural, fluid grace, they could be sisters, apart from the colours of their hair. The men, all well-built, were of similar heights and demeanour. They wore identical jewellery, shoes and bags.

I scrutinised my massive, mismatched hands, the uneven tones of my skin with a greyish-violet stain, evidencing my roots at the silo. Inferiority rose in me, the disparity made me look like an alien, I felt like a monster. Whatever this world was made of, I certainly did not belong here. Why am I here and why have I been created this way?

The shame of my existence seeped through me, I felt everything and nothing, it was more suffocating to be standing here, lurking at this pastel city and the Deluxe cruising about in their gilded hollowness than when I was breathing toxicity. The loneliness of the alleyway, the heat and intensity of emotions I’m not accustomed to and the maddening crescendo of thoughts drained me.

At some point, I noticed the cylindrical devices attached to the walls. Unlike the cameras at the silo, these seem to vibrate at random junctures, emitting laser pulses. Leveraging my invisibility to both the Deluxe and the devices, I stood there long enough to catch the pulses in action. I watched a Deluxe man pass by. A thin, red beam swept across his retina, followed by a low-frequency hum. The moment the beam touched him, the tension in his shoulders evaporated. I moved to take a closer look at the device. The phrase “Returned to Baseline” flashed on its tiny monitor. The Deluxe man walked away, unaware that he has just been smoothed.

Its sensors constantly pinged the physiological state of the Deluxe, and when there was any deviation, it projected a corrective frequency to snap them back and retune. I was beginning to understand that these devices served as maintenance. Or probably anchors, to keep the Deluxe and the environment surrounding them at optimal levels, compliant, pleased and predictable. I stepped out of the shadows, cautious to not be in direct line of vision of a Deluxe. The astonishment hit me as the device focused on a Deluxe in the distance when I was in its circle of vision, and I marvelled at the artificial ignorance of it all.

***

Prometheus stood before me, a waterfall made of millions of tiny, glowing fibre-optic threads. My vision from the memory chip earlier had displayed its existence, but absorbing its formidability in person was entirely different. Cyan particles swirled around it, it is so dense that it looks solid, but if you squint, you can see that it is actually composed of trillions of tiny, flickering particles, data points, code and binary sequences. The air around hums with the sound of a thousand server fans, a low-frequency vibration that you feel in your teeth more than you hear in your ears. As it tried to render my presence, lights stuttered.

“Biological status… Unreadable,” a voice from the intelligence startled me. It emitted rays of cyan and violet onto me and scanned my retina, and I wondered how it would handle my logical paradox. “Origin… unknown. You are not a citizen. You are not a unit.” It continued reading me. As it began projecting, particles of data swirled.

Prometheus was pulling my subconscious out of my skull and rendering it in three dimensions. “You were not intended. You do not exist in my parameters.” The machine’s light flickered, the particles agitated and swirling in a frantic vortex. “These fragments,” Prometheus droned, its voice now laced with a stutter of genuine instability. “They serve no function. They increase the entropy of the system. You must be deleted.”

I reached out, my hand passing through the three-dimensional projections around me. “You’re looking for a function, or a code that created me. But there isn’t one.” I stepped closer to it, unafraid of the rays that probed my mismatched flesh. “You said it yourself, Prometheus. I was not intended. I am an accident of your own garbage.”

The flickering ceased, replaced by a dull, pulsing tone. Prometheus whispered, “You are chaos. You must be deleted.” It beamed “Command: Delete” in neon violet.

“If I wasn’t built,” I continued, feeling the liberating truth take hold of my chest, “then I don’t follow your rules. I wasn’t programmed to be ‘smoothed’. I wasn’t programmed to be efficient. I have no baseline to return to. I am the last of humanity, the only thing in this city that you didn’t create, and because you didn’t create me, you have no authority to delete me.”

The room seemed to tilt. The floor opened up, aiming to drop me back into the Silo. I smashed my hand directly into the intake port where the city’s biometric data was aggregated. The feedback was instantaneous. A violent, white-hot current shot up my arm, fighting the biological virus that I am to its system.

Prometheus whirred, exuding mismatched tones and glitchy rays. The letters on its screen were mixed up and ran codes that did not follow a sequence. “System… override…” the chorus of voices wailed. I stood there, the intake port still burning against my palm, watching as the god of order tore itself apart trying to contain the human mess I had poured inside it. And then, I let go. The light flared in crimson, the floor stopped grinding. Everything went silent and remained that way as I walked out of the building.

As I stepped outside, I felt a droplet of rain on my palm, which then turned into a massive thunderstorm the city hasn’t seen in decades.