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In this world of the future, currently in the year 2079. The world has gone completely sci-fi or ‘cyberpunk’. It had everything. Conversations via mind, most games turned into virtual reality games, Android, robots, humans, and cyber-humans alike. Basically any science fiction/cyberpunk junkies dream. It’s like if you took the show “Cyberpunk: edge runners” with the super advanced technology of ‘Black Panther’, fused them, then put everything on max.
There were humans, cyber-humans(who had robot parts but still had flesh), and cyberpunks(who had barely, if none, of their actual human features, remaining.
Anyone could do anything and everything. No limits, no bounds, and no judgment, at least on the surface. It wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows, nothing was, but all of the advanced stuff people could get and the lack of limits made everything seem like the most perfect thing to someone on the outside looking in, to be free.
For example; there was this thing in the show “Cyberpunk” called a “Cyberpsycho”, they were basically someone who put way too many cyber modifications into their body making them crave more and more updates and upgrades. It can cause someone to go on autopilot and hallucinate something of their past. It could cause them to either kill themselves or the people around them without even knowing. There are meds that you have to take to help with that but there is a chance that the meds stop working or the patient loses motivation to take them, insinuating that they’re fine.
That happened to one of my parents 3 years ago. My father ended up leaving to follow the “thrill” and “addiction” that was cyber modifications and knew that he wouldn’t be able to help care for a family of 5 kids. My mother broke when he left and decided to modify her body so that she didn’t need as much sleep or food to watch over all of us. She got one too many, and it made her condition worse. She had to take meds but because she had to watch so many kids and make sure they were safe that she would forget to take them. The hallucinations came soon after.
We all found our own ways of bringing her back from her hallucinations before she did anything to hurt herself or the things around her but as time went on, they slowly stopped working.
One day she completely lost it. The sound of my mother yelling and screaming at our imaginary father, the sounds of glass shattering and someone walking on them, the sounds of her crying while laughing at her own pain repeatedly asking over and over again to our father who wasn’t even there why he left was horrifying to hear, my two older brothers and I were up guarding our 2 younger sisters, who were asleep, door. I wanted to cry, scream, or shake in fear of what was going to happen to us or my mother.
Then the yelling stopped, we could still hear the sound of our mother sniffling so we knew she was still there. I told my brothers that I was gonna go check on her since I’m the calmest one in the family. They tried to stop me but I was already out the door. I heard some sort of strange clicking sound that sounded familiar to something in a video game but I couldn’t remember what it was until I got to her. What I walked into wasn’t what I would have expected to see ever, especially from my mother.
The image of her turning to me made me shiver. She wasn’t looking at me but at my father in me. I wasn’t even there. My father was there in my place. At least to her.
She said something that for the life of me I can’t remember no matter how many times I try connecting my memory to a computer to see it again, it’s always like my ability to hear turned off for that specific moment then my vision. Next thing I know my mother was on the floor, the gun she had previously on the ground next to her, just a few inches away from the hand that held it, that used to hold me with such care that the thought of never feeling it again made my eyes water.
My two brothers ran into the living room, I’m guessing they heard the gunshot and thought that I was the one laying on the floor, lifeless. When they got there they saw me and were relieved, but only for a second before they turned to what I was looking at, no, staring at and it was like the life they had vanished in an instant along with my own.
My brothers then looked at me, then each other, then back at me before hugging me trying to stop me from looking but I couldn’t. Even with my eyes covered by one of my brother's hands the image of her lifeless body on the floor was still there, it was being buried in my memory to haunt me for the rest of my days. I couldn’t go into the living room without seeing her body there when it wasn’t. I had taken my mother's place, I was the one that was having hallucinations this time.