I was tearing up early on, and it got better! Very powerful!

Now THAT was a nice twist. ;-)

Here’s my first attempt, I hope it’s adequate.

“Hey Nerd! I bet you’re helpless to spoke without using the first letter!” The Jock spoke.

“You thought you just did something there, didn’t you?” Replied the nerd.

“Well, sorry to bust your bubble, but numerous sentences could be constructed without employing the first letter of the English lexicon.”

“So to comprehend this discussion we been working on it’s entirely possible to hold a conference of couples like us.” The Nerd finish his spiel.

“No need to be condescending my dude” reply the jock requesting.

“It’s just form the Direction which is foolish in your person.” The nerd spoke smugly.

“Fuck you nerd.”

======================

Edit: okay I’ve fixed it. 👍

Congratz to all the winners! Well done!

This is incredibly well done. Instantly pulled me in and someone started cutting onions by the time I reached the end. Bravo!

damn. you’ve got me tearing up over here.

Good job.

What the fuck? I looked at my wrist, and sure enough, there were braided cables beneath the skin where veins should have been. Without thinking, I sliced the rest of my forearm open. The entire thing was made of wires and cabling wrapped over a metal frame. I felt extreme pain in my forearm from the cut, but why? There was no blood. There was no muscle. There was just... circuitry.

"Mom, dad, what is this?" I demanded. The other guests at the party had all recoiled when they had seen what was going on. I had certainly bled before. Hadn't I? My parents had insisted that I not play any sports, but that was just for my safety. I never played outside much. Now that I thought about it, I'd never had so much as a fucking nosebleed. What was I?

"Son, calm down," my dad calmly said. "Everyone, please leave. We need to have a conversation with our son. Alone."

Everyone filed out hurriedly from the room. My dad went to the window by the front door and waited until everyone had gotten in their car and left. He meandered back into the kitchen and sighed with a furrowed brow. My mom had moved toward me and was stroking my hair with a few tears falling down her face.

"We didn't want you to figure it out this way, sweetheart," she said. "We were going to tell you tomorrow on your eighteenth birthday."

"Tell me what?" I asked. I wanted to put distance between us. I wanted to go to the hospital for the searing pain in my arm. But what would they do? Send me to fucking Best Buy to talk to the Geek Squad? In shock, I just rested my head on her shoulder and sat there.

"Well, son," my dad started from across the table. "When you were born, your body was... broken. You weren't born prematurely, but your body hadn't grown to the point it needed to. Your arms weren't fully formed, your legs hadn't grown beyond the knees, and your heart was missing a valve. For all intents and purposes, you should have been dead. And yet, there you were. Our miracle child. But you didn't have long. The doctors gave you hours before you died. We were heartbroken. We didn't know what to do.

"But then someone came in," he continued. "Someone in a suit with a clipboard. He told us he could save you. All we had to do was sign the papers and agree to some monitoring throughout your life. We were desperate. We didn't ask any questions. We just signed the papers."

"And? What happened to me?" I demanded. "What did they do to me?"

"They transferred your brain to a cybernetic body. It was made from some metal that grew organically and nanobots that would handle the wiring that replaced your nervous system. You essentially became the world's first cyborg."

On this revelation, I finally pushed away from my mother. That wasn't possible. I had skin. I had hair. I felt pain. I was a person. I was a human. Wasn't I? The pain in my forearm was starting to fade. I looked down, and it was stitching itself up as if it had never been there. There wasn't even a scar. Holy shit.

"I'm not even a fucking person!?" I cried. "But I have a girlfriend. I love Maisie. I fucked Maisie. I'm a person. I have to be."

"You are a person, sweetheart," my mom urged. "You have everything that makes a person. You have feelings, emotions, a consciousness. You're as much a person as anyone else. I've studied it extensively. You are as much a person as I am."

"I'm just not fucking human," I said as I made the realization myself. I was a robot. I was just a simulated body. Everything about me was fake. My muscles. My fat. My bones. My dick. Holy shit. I needed to sit down. The world felt woozy. Fuck. Everything always felt so real. How was that simulated? Or did it feel real? What was real? How did I know what it was supposed to feel like?

"Son, we did what we had to. You were going to die," my dad said. I wasn't mad that they did it. I was mad that they hid it.

"You could have told me! You could have told me the truth about why you didn't want me to play sports. Or why you didn't want me dating. Or why I wasn't allowed to ride a fucking bike when I was a kid."

"It was part of the agreement. We couldn't tell you until you were eighteen. The government wasn't sure how your body would react to your brain overloading like that. It seems to be handling it fine, for what it's worth."

"Don't do that. Don't make this out like it's a good thing. You've lied to me my entire life. Everything about me is fake. I'm manufactured. Like a McDonald's toy. Fuck you guys. Fuck both of you for doing this to me. You should have fucking told me."

"Regardless of what you think of this decision, you are my son, and you will not talk to me like that."

"Or what? You've already taken everything that makes me human. Are you going to kill me? Fucking take a magnet to my heart or something?"

"We would never hurt you, sweetheart," my mom said as tears streamed down her face. "I'm sorry. We didn't have a choice."

"I'm going out." I grabbed the keys off the countertop and headed toward the door. "When I get back, we'll talk more. But I need to go cool off. This is fucking bullshit."

​

--------------------

Let me know what you think, good or bad. Any feedback is appreciated. <3

Just adding to the "Thank You!" pile. This was an utterly unexpected positive impact on my day.

No, there are five rounds and the rules are all explicitly laid out. Each group in each round gets a different genre, character, and subject. The other groups I’ve seen were all normal in terms of subjects for a story?

Thank you for trying for me though!! I feel like I’m in a Seinfeld episode lol

pretty much the UK rn no? 😂

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Not an expert at all, so I would wait to see if others confirm. I would interpret it as giving you a new subject weekly. Like it will be a multi-part contest and every week will be a new subject.

fucking. chills.

amazing.

In the instant you saw the wiry metal and cable spilling from where you cut yourself a sudden thud resounded from somewhere outside the room you were in and before you could ponder over where that sound could have come from the entire house comes crashing down onto you leaving you little room to breathe and little time to think and comprehend what was happening to you before you completely blacked out and could think no more.

Outside this pile of rubble that once belonged to you two men in suits stood and told the group of people they were surrounded by that there was no need to worry for it turned out the child the family had adopted was only a minor low-leveled cyborg that for some reason never got registered in any official records and that the family could rest-assured for the threat had been safely exterminated and could no longer pose any danger to the family.

Relieved from having their worries put to rest the family set about fishing through the rubble for their belongings and cursed their dirty-blooded non-human adopted child for having to cause their house to be ripped from them along with their lives in the house they had lived in for as long as they remembered and their dignity for having to associate with a dirty disgusting thing like the monster they had unknowing taken in as their own without even knowing it.

Yeah that is true. What you imagine is almost always scarier than the actual thing.

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Above and called, as well

It would have been simple, you know?

If not for one, tiny detail.

We answered two questions at the same time, when they figured it out.

Is reincarnation real? Yes, irrefutable.

Are we alone in this universe? No, we are not.

There's a lot of things out there. Lot of species. And apparently there's no real rules about what you come back as. You might be a human today but that doesn't mean you'll be a human after that ends. That's where the complication lies. Sometimes you come back as something else. More often than not, you come back as something else.

Well, you know the morality arguments and philosophical debates that come up once you have those two answers? We aren't alone and we keep coming back for round after round of life, just in a different suit.

"Farrell." My vid screen comes to life, a crystal clear picture of my boss. Or rather, my handler. I'm my own boss.

"Well howdy there, boss." I say, feet up on my console. I still call her boss, even though it's not real accurate. Just felt right.

"Yeah, right. Contract for you. Details incoming."

I lift my feet off and my boots thud against the heavy metal floor of my ship. It's small, it's cozy, and it's floating in space right now because I have nothing to do and no interest in changing that. The contract flashes across my screen and my eyes open wide.

"Nope." I say, shaking my head and leaning back. "No way. Not a chance. Never."

"No one else wants it." She says. "It's double your usual rate."

"Yeah, for five times the risk. Let the feds take this one, let them send a cruiser or something, or a special ops team." I say, shaking my head again. "This one ain't for me, boss."

"Five times your usual rate." She says, after a pause. "I'll break even, you'll make a year's worth for one contract."

I take a deep breath and close my eyes.

I lean over the screen again and look at the contract.

Mass murderer. Extremely violent. One hundred and thirty seven life sentences, forty two death sentences. Of which less than half have been carried out. Now the Federation wants to continue their streak and they've put out the call.

"And on Terminal Station, too. Of course." I mutter.

"That's why I'm offering so much. Farrell, you might well be the only guy on my payroll that can pull this off.

I look at the picture. I sigh.

This time the bastard came back as a Brox. Because sometimes you come back as a cicada and get stomped just through a freak accident, and sometimes you come back as a four armed member of one of the most violent races in existence. And here he is, running a gang of arm's dealers out of Terminal Station.

I sigh again.

"I get it, Farrell, you can quit with the sighing." She says. "Finish putting up your fake fight about taking the contract and say what I need you to say."

"I'll do it." I say, standing and walking to my locker. I plant my hand on the pad and it slides open to reveal my suit. And the badge.

"You were always going to take it." She says, from the screen. "You can't help yourself."

"Probably." I say, removing my tarnished badge from the locker and rubbing my thumb over it. Then I grin, looking at the arsenal there.

"Who doesn't like a challenge?"

It’s nice to see opponents that aren’t enemies.

Could actually def make a good mini anime series out of this.