Plastic Souls

Tiberius awoke to the sound of shouting. He strained his ears against the howling wind.

“We… There… Get him out… The soul… Cut the base…”

None of the words made sense on their own. Much to his chagrin, Tiberius’s eyes refused to open. He was confined to understanding the world via sound alone. Beyond the wind and the voices, he heard footsteps. Hasty footsteps crunching through… through what, he couldn’t tell. But he knew they were approaching him. That became more and more apparent as the steps grew louder, and with them, the voices.

“Chaz you got the saw?”

“Yeah Randy, revving ‘er up now.”

Tiberius heard an engine start up. It roared louder than the whipping wind. He wanted to recoil, to pull away from the engine noise getting closer and closer to his immobile body. But he couldn’t. He was stuck, with no choice but to face the engine head on.

The engine’s angry roar mixed with the sound of a blade digging into something. Tiberius couldn’t place what that something was, just that it was below him. The blade dug through for a solid three or four minutes – it was hard to tell time in this state. He only gathered that from the disgruntled voices complaining about “how long this is taking.”

A sudden feeling of freedom washed over him. At first, Tiberius was unsure of this feeling. Nothing about him or his situation had changed, had it?

“Hey, newbie! You able to move those legs or we gonna have to carry ya?”

That was it. Tiberius’s mind reeled into action, internally screaming at his legs to wake up and move. They obeyed. His legs kicked wildly, as if not understanding what they should be doing, just that they should do something, anything, with this newfound freedom.

“Alright kid calm down. That’s good, now how about those eyes? They been shut this whole time, they melted together or what?”

Tiberius tried to will his eyes open. Why wouldn’t they move? That’s when it occurred to him that he'd yet to try speaking.

“I… I can’t.” He croaked out. Despite the almost sickly rasp to his voice, the fact that he was able to speak at all pleased him greatly.

“Alright Chaz, what’s with his lids?”

Tiberius felt someone poking at his face with something hard. “Hey, not so hard!”

The poking continued, no gentler than when it started. “Not melted, just stuck. Here, lemme try this.”

Something dripped into Tiberius’s eyes. It leaked in around his eyelids, seemingly dripping into the inner canals of his head.

“Alright kid, blink for us.”

Tiberius willed his eyelids into motion. That motion was slow, like a stage curtain being pulled up by a child straining against the rope. Eventually, though, he took his first look at the world around him. And perhaps more importantly, at the men who had presumably saved his life.

What he saw deeply confused him. The face looking down at him was green. In fact, the man seemed to be entirely green. The green-faced man spoke to him, “Alright man, we gotta go. You think you can stand on those wild legs of yours?”

Tiberius nodded meekly. “Uh, yeah, maybe… Let… Let me try…”

Getting up proved more challenging than he'd anticipated. Sure, his legs moved. They just didn’t quite move in the ways he wanted them to. In his head, Tiberius perfectly pictured pushing himself off the ground, standing up tall and proud, and striding away with his rescuers. What actually happened was more akin to a seizure induced series of flops.

“Alright, hoist ‘im up. We ain’t got time for this nonsense.”

This voice was new, and came from farther away. As Tiberius felt himself being hoisted up, he looked around for the source of the command. Fortunately for him, he was being led straight to it.

This man wasn’t green like the two holding him up. His skin was an off beige color. But that wasn’t what caught Tiberius’s attention. No, what held his gaze was the right side of the man’s face. He finally understood why they'd been referring to parts of himself as “melted.”

The entire right side of this new man’s face drooped. It wasn’t like when someone grows old and their skin begins to sag. Rather, it was just as the others had said: melted. The man looked melted. The “skin” overlapped on top of itself, forming odd bulges. Worse yet, part of it had been stretched thin, making it nearly translucent. Tiberius’s attempts to peer inside were thwarted by a quickly snapped out, “Stare later! We gotta move.”

Tiberius was dragged along by the two green men. He helped as best he could, but his legs still kicked fairly sporadically. It was as-if some far off part of his mind understood how to work his body, but by the time the signals made it out of the dark crevasses of his brain they were too weak to function properly.

“W-where are we going?”

The man who was clearly the leader of the group spoke in a gruff voice, “Legoland, kid.”

The two men laughed. Tiberius didn’t get the joke.

“Legoland?” He asked, thoroughly confused. “Shouldn’t I go to… I don’t know, a hospital or something?”

The man at Tiberius’s right chuckled, “Man, this one got all kinds of scrambled while looking for a new host, huh?”

The leader had a tinge of concern in his tone, “Yeah, it’s somethin' mighty strange that is… Ain’t never found one so jumbled up.”

Tiberius realized he wasn’t going to get any answers from his rescuers, so he decided to simply wait until they reached “Legoland,” whatever that meant.

A couple hours passed, with Tiberius drifting in and out of consciousness. He tried to get a grip on the landscape as they marched, but nearly everything looked the same. Dead. It was all dead.

“Alright newbie, you're on your own now.” One of the two men said as they chucked him into a cart.

“Hey, wait!” Tiberius shouted out, but the men were already leaving. He felt the cart moving under him, some unseen mechanism pulling it along. He craned his neck up and tried to see where he was headed.

Legoland. The name made sense now. Well, it made something akin to “sense.”

He was headed into a city. A city made entirely of colorful bricks. Something in his mind stirred, a distant memory that he couldn’t quite latch onto. It felt as if all the pieces to the memory were there, scattered about in the void that was his mind. If only he could just gather them up and put them together.

Someone appeared beside him, walking along with the cart. It was a woman. She looked vaguely familiar…

“Hi, I'm Barbie. I'll be your nurse today!” The woman said cheerily.

Tiberius stared at her incredulously. Barbie? Again, those fragments of memory floated in front of his eyes, yearning to be reconstructed.

The woman laughed, “Oh don’t worry, it’s just a funny coincidence! Now, let’s get you checked out, shall we?”

Reality and memory seemed to be at odds with each other. Tiberius struggled to keep track of which he was currently looking at it. This woman, this Barbie, why did something about her seem so… so… Wrong?

Tiberius realized this was the wrong time to get lost in his thoughts. Regardless of the oddness of the situation, this woman was trying to help. And by god did he need it.

“I uh, I can’t use my body right. It’s like… It’s like I know what to do, but I can’t do it.” Tiberius said shyly. He felt incredibly awkward, explaining his faults to this strange woman while a cart carried him to an unknown destination.

The woman wrote something on a piece of paper, “I see, now that’s interesting! It might just be a missing actuator or two… Let’s get you to Spare Parts and see if we can’t fix you up!”