Round 3.1 prompt from Multigenre Mashup Flash Fiction Smackdown, September 2023: Write a story of maximum 2000 words that qualified as dystopian and horror. Include the images below and the song "In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans.

Author's content warning: Given the required mashup genres (dystopian and horror), this is not a happy story.

Word count = 1664

Our noble quest for a better world produced instead a desolate dystopia. We played God, and all humanity paid the price. As the scriptures say: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

I was the last free man, and the destiny of humanity now weighed on my shoulders.

A flickering lamp provided dim illumination over a scuffed wooden desk. The batteries collecting solar-derived electricity were not as reliable anymore. As I typed away on the computer keyboard, a white fur-ball settled on my feet and pulled back its ears, looking up with big pink-framed eyes. Thumper was a cute dwarf rabbit and the only one of her litter to survive. My wife, once a biologist, used to raise them. I picked up the little critter and placed it on my lap, stroking soft fur. "At least you're still with me."

I shuddered at my words, since my wife was one of the first taken by the Collective.

The medical nano-bots were a huge success, improving health and extending longevity of everyone. Truly a boon to society. Yet still, the vices of men remained — pride, selfish ambition, petty greed, and destructive wrath. So we thought, why not also improve behavior? Secretly, we programmed the bots to rewire the brain, changing mankind into something more good and noble.

But we didn't anticipate how the nano-bots would network, ultimately creating a hyper-authoritative human hive mind and amplifying the mental changes. Sure, crime and conflict ended, but at a cost of what makes us human — joy, wonder, love, and even free will, all traded for strict communal order.

A small percentage of people, like me, were immune to the mental changes. Defects, the Collective called them, and once discovered, brutally sacrificed for the good of the whole. Individual rights had little meaning.

For twelve years, I sought to undo the changes, working here in a secret underground laboratory outside the city. For a time, I even experimented on people, something I before considered unethical.

But now I have a potential solution that I called the Seed — a kind of computer virus that would reintroduce the concept of self into the Collective matrix, albeit slowly. The difficult part was that I had to introduce it into a central server node at the city center.

A stolen tech-worker uniform, white shirt and trousers, should gain me entry to the server facility. Each worker caste had uniquely colored uniforms. Just before I turned out the lights, my eyes passed a dirty rubber ducky perched on a shelf. Once the unofficial mascot of our project team, it sat at table center for all our status meetings. "You might as well come along," I muttered, then stuffed it in a pocket.

But what to do with Thumper? I may never return, so I released her into the surrounding grassy hills. "Go on, little one," I burbled as a tear traced my cheek. Distant howls twisted my gut with guilt — a little white rabbit would be easy prey for the roving packs of feral dogs.

I set out just past midnight for the long walk, intending to reach the city by dawn. The stars shined brightly on that clear, moonless night. And a meteor fireball streaked across the sky, as if heralding destiny. For some reason, that century-old bleak futuristic song, 'In the Year 2525', passed through my mind.

"In the year 2525, if man is still alive,

If woman can survive..."

It seemed vaguely prophetic now. The technology that we hoped would prosper humanity threatened to doom it — technology that I helped create.

As the sky brightened, I passed countless plain, dreary apartment blocks. Anything artistic or individualistic had been purged as heretical. Ringing bells signaled the start of the workday. Slowly, people streamed out of the blocks heading out as they did every morning, silent, faces expressionless, and blank eyes focused ahead like drones. As I hoped, I disappeared within the growing crowds, and no one paid me heed.

Ahead, an older man with stringy gray hair collapsed to the bricked street, trembling and moaning. Yet the others merely walked around him as if a minor obstacle. I slowed and watched. Soon, two workers in brown uniforms came and unceremoniously tossed him into a rusty wheelbarrow.

I passed a steep-roofed temple where workers kneeled and chanted rote allegiance to the Collective. At the adjacent food hall, other workers ladled out thick brown stew into dull metal bowls that were then consumed at long rows of wooden benches and tables. Nobody spoke or even looked at another.

This was the existence of humanity now: sleep, pray, eat, work, and repeat until you die, usually prematurely. Equality was achieved by reducing everyone to dismal proletariat — socialism at its very worst. The Collective central planning was inherently slow and inefficient, enough so that they did not adjust agricultural practices to changing weather patterns, resulting in extensive crop and livestock losses. How had they managed to feed themselves?

As I continued toward the city center, a jumble of smells assaulted my nose. There was a sickening pungent stench of rot mixed with slightly metallic sweetness, and a smoky smell of cooking meat. I followed the odors to a long flat-roofed building with multiple smoking chimneys. But preceding me was the squeaky wheelbarrow containing the collapsed old man pushed by two workers.

As I peered inside a wide opening, I froze as acidic bile burbled up into my throat. Now I knew how the Collective addressed food shortages, and it horrified me.

With no sign of emotion, the workers stripped the old man, wrapped dark chains around his feet, and attached him to a moving overhead rack, leaving him hanging upside down with arms wavering below. A blood-splattered worker further down the line raised a knife and slashed across the man's throat, gaping it open. A last gurgling breath erupted as the man's lifeblood drained out in pulsing rivulets to a trough below. Preceding the man on the butcher line was a small girl, maybe only a few years old. Also hung upside down, the last drops of her blood dripped from a lifeless face.

Further within the building, giant black cauldrons boiled over smoky wood fires.

This was the fate of the dead, the infirm, and the defective — to feed the masses. To a Collective with no regard for the individual, it was a logical solution to food shortages.

No longer being able to endure the sights and smells, I dashed around the building to a shadowy alley and puked out my stomach contents beside a trash bin. Now my mission was more important than ever.

I continued toward city center, blanking my face while walking as upright as possible despite the queasy dizziness, lest I was identified as infirm. A glass and limestone block multi-story building, a remnant of a previous age, was my aim.

Two black-clothed guards with dark visored helmets carrying long batons stood at attention at the glass-door entrance. Likely, they examined all who entered by linking with internal nano-bots. Since the bots within me never achieved function, they would have arrested me on the spot as a Defect.

So, I simply entered through an unguarded back door. The Collective, so obsessed with communal behavior, never considered that an independent thinker might just take an alternate path.

My footfalls echoed off the hard walls as I climbed clean, worn stone steps down to the basement. A few workers clad in similar white uniforms passed me along the way, but they made no eye contact, nor even noticed my presence, so intent were they on their assigned tasks.

A row of old computer terminals, partitioned in cubicals, sat in the back of a room dimly illuminated by small rectangular windows located high on the basement walls. Even though the Collective networked through the nano-bots, they still needed a central server to program broad changes to themselves. And that was their weakness.

Choosing the far terminal, I sat down and switched it on. When the monitor flicked to life, I entered an administrator passcode that the Collective had not bothered to change. Inserting a small memory stick into a port, I initiated the virus. The malware was a small executable file that altered an equally small snippet of the nano-bot control code. To get around the built-in intrusion protections, the virus worked glacially slow, perhaps taking decades to spread across the Earth. If it worked, it would undo a portion of the Collective's corruption, reintroducing the concept of self in humanity. An egocentric seed.

With a grin, I took out the rubber ducky and placed it on a shelf high above the computer terminal. Hopefully, it will supervise the Collective's undoing.

Now to get out. I retraced my steps, emerging into bright mid-morning sun. Rounding the building, I came face-to-face with a woman I once knew well — my wife, or so she was before the Collective took her. She wore a plain green uniform and her once luxuriously thick blonde hair was cut short to a rough buzz.

"Clarise..." I blurted out as I sucked in a breath.

For the briefest moment, she paused, and emotion flashed through widened, deep-blue eyes. Was her true self still there, but locked away? Was there truly hope?

The expression faded as quickly as it had risen, and her face returned blankly dispassionate. "You are defective," she said in monotone.

My heart dropped into an abyss. Revealed, I turned to escape, but found myself surrounded by a crowd wearing many uniform colors. Their vacant eyes bored into me.

"Defect," they chanted, over and over.

Converging, countless hands snatched and grabbed, immobilizing me despite my struggles. My heart raced and panic flooded through my whole being as they dragged me along the street.

I knew where they were taking me.

My misguided efforts helped create this dystopia. That my body would now feed it was a fitting punishment. 

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