FFM 2021 20: A Lost Dream

Challenge: The main character must pay a huge cost for their powers and they must experience an odd side effect every time they use these powers.

This story was made for this week’s sidequest with far more planning that I’d usually have done.

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“And Circuitson is in the lead!”
“And Circuitson is in the lead!” the gray parrot on the commentator’s shoulder repeated.

You raised your hand to pick up the remote. The instant you started to move, the arm started to voice the weather forecast from the local radio station — as if you even went out anymore. You reached the remote and shut the TV off. Once your arm fell idle, the forecast was cut short. You could taste the bitter anger. It should have been you who was on the TV screen tonight, running towards victory. You had been meant to be there, yet you were lying on your sofa-bed, doing what you could to keep your limbs still.

You had had dreams.

Then your limbs had gone to necrosis from a drug overdose and you, probably still under the drugs’ influence, had opted for cybernetic limbs instead of trying to save the original ones. You survived, but with all those cybernetics (even if each of them did not start playing the local radio station’s broadcast the moment they went into use) you could never take part in a sports game again. There were games for cyborgs, but they did not have that much money in them, not to mention that then you would have to go up against people who had the money for actual sports cybernetics. Yours were probably found from a backstreet and never repaired; they were likely to break a month or two into actual training.

While you had hated the unsympathetic family members for their lack of sympathy at first, now that you had been stuck with these limbs for a year, you agreed with them. You had done this to yourself by taking drugs that were known to cause necrosis at all, let alone when you were in no place to afford proper medical care, much less proper cybernetics.

You had survived the overdose and come out with stronger limbs than any non-cyborg athlete could ever have, but was losing your lifelong dream truly worth the miserable existence that had followed?

You had asked yourself that question every week ever since you shut yourself to your dingy apartment and day after day your answer inched closer to no.