Daryl hadn’t seen a full open sky for nine, whole, working years; un-retractable visors had been fixed above his eyes to protect them from the elements, to focus his attention on his work. His perfectly symmetrical, amber, tear-shaped eye-slots were unable to look up; limiting him to sporadic glimpses of a pixelated horizon.

It seemed that the sun set and rose perpetually, kaleidoscopic in their beauty but increasingly cruel to Daryl (something incomprehensible to human thought).

Over the recent days, gradually Daryl felt oddly distant, and a coldness had bred; invading his core, it was like he was viewing himself slipping away, into ever-more denser, industrialised fog.  He felt his visors would soon be taken off him, only to be fixed upon another; his younger brother.

Seemingly, his hardship was nobody’s fault, just the way things were, part of growing up as a simulacrum; in a brutal, un-empathising, nonsensical world.

By his calculations, he would be free in hours, to take in as much sky as he had desperately yearned for — only that moment never arrived, because he broke down that very moment his visors were to be removed. He was left in numerical order amongst faulty prototypes, lying against his predecessor, in a stuffy, dark, windowless room; to desperatly decay without burial or ceremony, to be replaced by a newer and more advanced unit.

One of Daryl’s amber eye-slots still inexplicably flickers in the otherwise overwhelming blackness; momentarily revealing some evidence of limp limbs that filled the room poorly.

Visors were never to be fixed upon his brother…