In a large room with a ceiling adorned with pinkish tubes, a weak light penetrates through two half-closed circular orifices, illuminating a corpse floating in a purplish sea.
My job is to turn valves, pull levers, press buttons, move liquids, all this to keep alive the organism to which I was assigned at my birth. Even though I'm small, my job is important, because no one but me knows what to do when even you, albeit rarely, fail in your task.
You secretly take care of making everything work on which I have to operate, countless organs with complex functioning, rigid but flexible concentric yellowish-white tubes that contain within them the basis for keeping the body intact and allowing it to grow, red and blue tubes from which always flows the red liquid that gives vigor to this creature that you and I have always made sure to keep alive...
The same liquid that now wets our legs and hands and that is slowly rising.
Surely you must have noticed it even before me, but you didn't warn me.
How long have you been off? Or are you pretending?
As now, you've always been mute, your silent company has always made me reflect on the reason for our daily actions of controlling valves, filtering bronchioles, arranging tissues...
The order to make things work properly and on time came from the office with black windows above us.
An order from someone you've never seen, what kind of order is that?
This doubt about the origin of our work was at first simple curiosity but then developed like a malignant germ in my mind until it made me develop a certain obsession, you know?
I was born here, you've seen me grow and you know I've always been close to others of my race who have always told me to pay attention to the words of the invisible gods who control us, because if by chance I failed to follow one of their orders, I would end up in the acid mouth that transforms organic matter into energy for the organism we have always taken care of.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, since you've always been in your little corner doing your job diligently like a good servant without a mouth, but I've spent every day of my life analyzing the environment in which we've always worked together. All the pink tubes and white cables hanging from the ceiling that we used to have stuck to our bodies were directly connected to the office with dark windows above our heads.
Isn't it strange to be connected without anyone explaining why to a mysterious structure that gives us orders from morning to night? Maybe not for you, but for me it is. I didn't want to continue being a slave like everyone before me.
Even if you don't answer me because inside you're still bent to their will, I was convinced that that connection was what made us vulnerable to the control of those inside.
So I tried to disconnect the cables, from me, from you, and even from someone else, but I never managed to tear even one, no matter how much I lost myself in yanking them.
Is it me who naturally has a weak body, or was it someone who decided my constitution? Everyone who looks like me is as thin as I am, isn't that strange?
But, you know how every night from the dark windows of the office, different movies came out that were projected on the walls of our room?
I never paid much attention to it since at that time of day I was supposed to be in my common room with everyone else sleeping, but that specific evening, maybe due to your error or insomnia, I was there. So that evening I started watching.
The movie that evening was strange, a handsome young man, probably of the species similar to our organism, or perhaps one of the invisible gods, was violently attacking a small creature with a tube who cried desperately at each blow. The violence continued until nothing but pulp remained of the creature, and I stood staring at that spectacle and reflecting.
I continued to think while observing the obscene image in front of me until, as usual, the movie turned off, and everything became silent.
Then I looked at you.
You were always there in your dark corner with your lights on your face indicating that everything was fine, as always.
Maybe I shouldn't have tried to tear the cables from the outside, but from the inside.
So I tore a rigid tube from a neuron that had broken the day before, and I started hitting you on the muzzle, on the sides, behind, but you weren't crying, you kept making your usual lights, so I hit you even harder, you probably didn't even notice, I imagine.
Then at some point, a hatch opened on your side, so I started pulling out what was inside, cables, boards, organelles, veins, I didn't care, I had to find the cable connection and tear it out, I was doing all this for you too after all, wasn't I? You didn't suffer, did you? Of course not, you're not like me... you disgust me.
On your monitor, there were red warnings that soon filled the room with that threatening color. It would have been my job to resolve them, but not that evening, at that moment, I didn't care about the irregular heartbeat and the regurgitations that were suffocating the organism, so I continued to tear until I found the origin of those connections.
I observed them for a few seconds, and with a remnant of your carcass colored red, perhaps from the lights, perhaps from the internal liquids spurting from your wide veins, I cut them.
The red lights went out along with your usual lights.
At that moment, darkness returned and I finally felt at peace.
But this feeling didn't last long... An enormous earthquake that violently shook our room caused a mass of neurons to fall from the ceiling, breaking through the front wall of the office with dark windows.
The neurons were still awake when I tried to touch them, I understood this from the fact that they burned me with a tremendous shock. But even they didn't last long when I cut off the pink and white cables that united them to the office from which they had fallen, their blue light that distinguished them from other cells went out forever, like yours.
I was about to tear out my cables too, which I had noticed had become considerably loosened since the last time I had yanked them, when I noticed the huge hole left by the neuronal mass that had fallen shortly before. From this came a series of desperate moans and a faint blue light.
So, using the same connections to which I had declared war, I decided to climb up the neurons and the debris.
I wanted to find out who had always controlled me.
But at the third-to-last step before entering the cursed structure that had tormented me until that moment, the cables broke, suddenly one after the other as if from above someone had decided that I shouldn't see what was in there and who has been controlling me all my life.
"Wasted effort! I dismantled everything for nothing!"
I thought these things as I fell into the red puddle that had now drowned the floor. When I hit the ground a few moments after slipping, I could no longer feel my legs. But I could feel everything else, I was still awake.
Yet when I had cut your cables and those of those poor neurons, you turned off immediately.
So I crawled closer to you in that disgusting red liquid.
I was never a slave to those up there. Those colored connections were nothing but a deception to make me think that my life was directly connected to those who had already decided everything for me, even before my birth.
If everyone has turned off except me, it means that the cables were just a lie and that you, damn you, have always pretended not to know how to speak to avoid telling me the truth, "everything for the body!" You had written under your belly that I mangled, but I don't even know this body! I broke everything, but I only wasted time, and you know it well. Why are you staring at me from that black screen? You're saying nothing just to mock me, I bet what's left of my body.
If the organism is dead and we're drowning in its viscera, it's only your fault.
So now, before the blood reaches my mouth to suffocate me one last time, I'll dismantle you, yes, I'll disintegrate you, as you did to me... If only I could move my hands... You don't know what I'd do to you... Stupid... Robot...
Above the corpse, an almost imperceptible creature lands, slips into the cracks from which the light comes, and escapes disappearing into the blinding light of the outside.