"Money" (2022)

𝚖𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚢;

Rom rolled the coin between his fingers, a bemused smirk travelling across his face. It was an ancient thing, a relic from a bygone era, a fossil emblazoned with royalty and worth equal in their insignificance.

Clinking and clacking the extraneous currency along his steel knuckles, Rom shook his head. His ancestors buried their paper inside their mattresses, possessed pockets full of jangling change, entrusted their hard earned money to the banks and institutions. The latter, run by greedy pigs in ill-fitting business suits, would be their downfall.

The world hadn't dealt in anything as paltry as money since the late 2000's. Even history books told of desperate millennials and ill-informed boomers clinging hopelessly to cryptocurrency, a brief boom that gave way to a catastrophic fall, the final, mewling death rattle of modern wealth. With notes and coins left behind to gather dust beneath crumbing architecture and dinosaur bones, the world moved on to something far, 𝙛𝙖𝙧 more 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘱𝘪𝘥.

𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞. 𝐏𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲. Your worth defined by your follower count, your head count or your bed count. It was a fools game, a constant, crushing chase to the top, to a lofty height one could never reach, lost somewhere between the upper engagement echelon and the subscriber superhighway.

"Idiots," The word buzzed from Rom's electric tongue. His body enhanced by science, evolutionary ersatz by way of mechanical meddling, each curve of his human flesh lay interrupted with LED glow and chrome inlays. Each procedure more extreme than the last, Rom razed and remade; functionality, desirability, lethality - he built himself in their image, the droves of onlookers begging for bigger, better, bolder. It was irrefutable; for every shred of his humanity tossed in a teeming biohazard bin, his follower count 𝙨𝙬𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙙.

Taking a final look at the coin in his palm, Rom smiled and stepped, unceremoniously, from the edge of the building.

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Originally written and shared as part of Verbuary 2022: https://tinyurl.com/48mpd34j