I’ve been going through some of my old poems and converting to flash fiction. Here is the original poem:

We had faith in the soothsayer’s poison.
We knew how to sacrifice our sons and daughters
to secure the future of our race. We chant broken prayers
through the night, only madmen dream.

I kneel and hope to find you in the ruins and decay.
My memories of you fade–how you smothered me
with your shame, lulled me to sleep with your ambition.

You were my friend, my purple-haired, monstrous wild child,
a lonely girl with a sad tale, impossible eyes, and hard to ignore.
We were orphans, engaged to each other, separated by fate.

I decided to expand it into a flash fiction piece with a cyberpunk flare. I was thinking cyberpunk needs a rebirth, especially now that we are living in the future that the original cyberpunk writers wrote about. I asked the question: Are we living in the future that cyberpunk warned us about?

Here is the poem in flash fiction form.

We had faith in the soothsayer’s poison, a belief coded deep into our neural implants. It wasn’t the kind of faith you found in temples or altars; no, this was different. It was raw, metallic—an algorithm that pulsed through our veins, a digital religion wrapped in ancient whispers. We knew the cost of our obedience, how to sacrifice our sons and daughters, not in flesh but in code. Upload their consciousness to the Grid to preserve the future of our race, cold and calculating, ensuring we would live on in the endless streams of data.

The city pulsed with neon veins as we chanted broken prayers into the void, hacking the dark corners of cyberspace. These prayers weren’t to any deity but to the remnants of old systems, the ghosts of lost servers, the AI gods long abandoned. Only the madmen dream anymore—those willing to drift in the liminal space between the real and the virtual. I am one of them, kneeling amidst the wreckage of a forgotten data farm, hoping to find you in the ruins, in the decay, in the dead pixels flickering across the skyline.

I close my eyes and try to reconstruct you from memory—your face a distant, corrupted file. The way you smothered me with your shame, a relentless torrent of emotional malware, your ambition infecting everything in its path. You lulled me into sleep cycles filled with synthetic dreams, ones where your voice was the only constant, a glitching loop that whispered of things I couldn’t understand but felt deep in my core.

You were my friend, once. My purple-haired, monstrous wild child, a misfit in a world that demanded conformity. You hacked your way through life with impossible eyes—eyes that saw beyond the gridlines of reality, into the soft code that bound us all. I still remember the first time you found me, lost in a back-alley VR club, disoriented and terrified. You smiled that crooked smile and pulled me from the void, made me feel like we could rewrite the script of our existence.

We were orphans, you and I, not in the literal sense, but in the way the system had abandoned us. We grew up in the shadow of megacorps and digital overlords, knowing full well that no one was coming to save us. Engaged to each other, bonded by the absurdity of it all, promising ourselves to a future that never arrived. Fate had a way of severing those kinds of connections—ripping the code apart, leaving us to drift in separate streams of consciousness, locked in different nodes of the network.

I think of you sometimes, in the quiet moments between hacking jobs, when the city sleeps and the hum of the machines dulls to a soft lullaby. I wonder where you are now. Did you escape the Grid? Or did you become another ghost in the machine, another lost soul wandering the endless expanse of cyberspace?

I kneel here, in the ruins, searching for traces of you in the decaying code, hoping that somewhere, somehow, you’re still out there, waiting for me to find you. But my memories fade, like corrupted data on a failing drive. I wonder if, when I find you, you’ll recognise me, or if we’ll be nothing more than echoes of who we once were—faded, fragmented, lost to the system.

The future we sacrificed for never came, did it? All that remains are these broken prayers, these decaying bits of what once was, and the ever-present hum of a world that no longer cares. We had faith once, but now, only the madmen dream.