The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Aria’s Song
by Alyson Faye 

Before:- 

They asked for volunteers – their glossy, glimmering holographic ads were all over social media, billboards and streaming platforms.

Be part of the future – inhabit the dream – live longer, become beautiful – be perfect.

Who doesn’t want to be perfect? Isn’t beauty and long life what we all are seeking? I’d tried every diet, every beauty aid, every surgical treatment and ‘perfect’ was still a bloody long way off.

So I signed up, the Corporation paid off my debts, and fast tracked me onto The Platinum Project.

‘Aria, you will be one of our first. I promise you perfection.’ The CEO himself spoke to me via a satellite link up. I had an exclusive five minutes as part of my package. ‘Do you have any questions?’

I only had one. ‘When will it happen?’ I whispered, as though I was in church.

He waved a benedictory hand at me and snapped his fingers.

Tears filled my eyes.

After:-

I float, high above myself, touching stars and drinking moonlight. Metal hands touch me, cool liquids flow into my veins, and when I flex I feel the taut tension of myriad tubes and wires.

‘Aria, can you hear me?’

I nod and my mind lights up with the connectivity of millions of neurons firing – it is exquisite, surreal.

Hands, in white gloves, help me stand and I totter, a baby learning to walk, cruise, then walk unaided as icy liquid gushes through my network. I begin to jog, then run, out of the room, down the windowless corridors, faster, faster, turning and completing a full circuit in seconds. Doors, a blur of doors, all closed, inside I hear crying, sometimes emptiness.

I am not tired, I am not tired any more.

Back at base. ‘Show me,’ I command my team.

There are nervous sighs, mutterings, shrugs, questioning looks, but one tech brings a mirror, body-length and silvery.

I gaze upon myself.

Silence.

My hands stroke my face, my skull and shoulders.

‘Perfect,’ I say, ‘at last.’

Fiction © Copyright Alyson Faye
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Alyson Faye:

The Lost Girl & Spindleshanks

The Lost Girl
A nailed-up door. An inheritance which comes with a ghost. A missing girl. A fifty-year-old mystery. Parapsychologist Berkley Osgood is hired to investigate. What he uncovers reveals secrets the living want to hide and the dead will never forgive.

Spindleshanks
Adam is having nightmares about a skeletal shadow figure, who he calls Spindleshanks. Soon his whole class are sharing the same nightmare. Adam’s dad, Rob, knows that Spindleshanks can’t be real. But is he? One terrible night Rob has to face his son’s nightmare creature and fight for his son’s life. What would you sacrifice to have your child back safe?

“A decent two-for-one. Alyson Faye brings the engaging and eerie in equal measure.” CC Adams – horror / dark fiction author

Available on Amazon!