Finnian's past self's internal monologue could now be heard.
My face was turning red as I strained to grab the object beside me. The office chair I was seated in creaked slightly as I shifted more and more of my weight onto its left side. This creaking sound, however, was nothing compared to the buzz of hollow motivational phrases and the incessant ring of telephones that currently populated the office. The desperate calls of helpless people were answered by others just as powerless, though far more skilled at pretending otherwise.
Business was relentless as always. More souls were losing their loved ones, too many grieving families, too many reapers, their numbers rising with every passing hour.
"Reapers, huh." the baby thought to himself, in response to the internal monologue "I'm guessing that must be what got me. So I died to a reaper, and then I turned into a demon woman's baby. That sounds... surprisingly accurate, actually."
Finn seemed able to both pause, resume, and turn on and off any given single viewing of his former self on command. Along with that, he possessed the ability to retrieve more in-depth thoughts of his prior self. So in-depth, in fact, it was almost as if every action was being narrated, giving exposition and reasoning behind any given situation.
How convenient…
Picking up the newspaper that sat beside me, I leaned back in my chair as I began to read.
['Global Pest Control Revenues Plummet as Insect Populations Vanish Without a Trace.']
"So this is what counts as news now? If I were a journalist, I'd be praying for a reaper to take me away from this hell hole ASAP."
It's so sad it's almost funny. When the first reaper event happened, it was everywhere in the news. It started off slow, as you would expect: a small-town girl and her fiancé went missing; maybe it was just a mysterious tryst or a classic case of lost lovers. The media treated it like a clickbait hype piece. However, as time went on, the case developed into a nationwide search for the couple, but nothing was found.
This by itself was nothing uncommon; I could turn on any late-night TV "real crime" channel and watch hours of unsolved mysteries like this. But this time, what was unique was that it happened again, and again, and again, and again. And not just to people, but to all living things—animals, insects, fish—life was vanishing from the earth, and no one knew why.
After about half a year of this decrease in the organic population, the leaders of the nations of the world came out with what everyone considered at the time to be a half-baked child's bedtime story: the concept of Reality Eradicators, or RE, what we now call reapers. Entities that could take on any form, kill you, and then leave no corpse.
At first, the idea was met with scepticism, treated as some elaborate ploy by world leaders to distract the populace from real issues like the environment and poverty. But all that scepticism vanished when one of these Reality Eradicators was caught on national TV.
In the background of a mundane news broadcast, a group of schoolchildren were seen crossing the road when, seemingly out of nowhere, a van crashed into them. People could be seen rushing to the scene in a desperate attempt to help whatever might remain of the cohort, but when the onlookers arrived, there was nothing to be found. No blood, no guts, no children, not even the van. Everything was gone.
"Hmmm, interesting…
"So that must be what happened; one of these reapers got me
"Wait, no, if my body disappeared after the reapers took it, then where the hell is my body now? I certainly don't have it, and I'm pretty sure this isn't the baby form of my previous body.
"I guess that must be the reapers' tax; they take your body, and then your soul gets reincarnated into another vessel, or something like that. Well, I honestly can't say I miss that body. In fact, I can definitely say I hated it.
"Good riddance!"
"Mass psychosis," some called it; "god's retribution and second coming," others said. The entire world was in an uproar about the situation.
The message boards, already created for discussions about the disappearances, were flooded with ideas, theories, and speculations. The main query at the core of all these questions was, "Where did all these people go?" and "Would they ever be back?"
Cults of all sorts sprang up from this, each one seeming to offer the true answer to this question. Hell, Heaven, Eden, Purgatory, Tartarus, the Cosmic Collective. If you had enough time on your hands, you could find a cult that could sell you any message you wanted to hear.
Commonly referred to as Reaper Death Cults or RDC, these organizations would milk their "followers" for all that they had; after all, we were in the endgame. Wherever the cult believed you were headed, they were certain that money would be of no use to you there. The leaders, however, were a different story; they needed every coin they could get.
The fervent devotion of cult followers, coupled with the obsessive curiosity of forum dwellers, culminated in a significant discovery regarding the reapers: the reaper mark.
It seemed that whenever someone was killed—or rather, disappeared—the reaper, no matter what form it took, always bore the same marking: eight black arrows protruding from a circle with a black outline and a red interior.
Once again, no one knew exactly what the symbol was supposed to mean. And because no one knew, everyone was able to come up with their own theories.
Of course, the cults took full advantage of this ambiguity. RDC leaders would incorporate the symbol into their teachings, twisting its meaning to suit their agendas. But for all the speculation, there was one chilling consensus: if you saw the reaper mark, your time was already up.
Around the world the drastic decline in population brought about by the reapers plunged the globe into economic turmoil. Hundreds of thousands of businesses faced bankruptcy, ecosystems teetered on the brink of collapse, and mass starvation reached unprecedented levels, driving some communities to cannibalism.
A consensus was brought about from this carnage: Now that organic matter was unreliable, it had to be replaced.
And so came the age of Bio-Machines.
"If all of this stuff was happening as well, then maybe I wasn't taken away by a reaper. Maybe I was just… I don't know, eaten by a magical cannibal witch or something. Now that I think about it, that would explain where my body went.
"So, either reapers or cannibal witches.
"My god, what a beautiful selection of scenarios."
At first, the main aim of these machines was merely to replace the organic matter that was now so unreliable; however, people didn't just want what was the same; they wanted something better. So that is what they created.
Mechanical bees that were able to pollinate twenty times faster than organic ones, machine cows that could produce fifty times more milk, already pastured within their systems, and mech mosquitoes that now only needed to suck tree sap. An entire synthetic ecosystem was created, not a single detail spared. Every organic creature soon had a silicone counterpart, faster, smarter, and more efficient than the original, and that included humans.
The human revolution was slower than for the other creatures; after all, it was humans who were making them. It seemed at first immoral, wrong in a cosmic sense, to try and create a human that was 'better.'
But these worries slowly went away when the Synths came along. They were advanced, synthetic beings made to embody the pinnacle of human capability. The Synths were more than just machines; they had better mental, emotional, and physical abilities than their organic predecessors. As society witnessed the remarkable feats and unprecedented efficiency of these creations, initial trepidation began to fade.
What drew people to Synths most, however, was one thing and one thing only: customization.