Anemoia

The first mechanized bodies (MBs) were featureless boxes. Hardly recognizable as a body. And that, of course, was the point, to divest of the given form and take on something formless. Which, of course, is impossible. All matter has form. But if all form looked the same, these final occupants of the human body thought, all form would be, in relation to other forms, comparably formless. 

Once the technology was proven, all occupants of human bodies were transferred to MBs, their production subsidized by national governments. Any organic humans that failed to transfer their brains died naturally from the environmental effects of MB production. 

It was only as the later generations came of age—when the embryos that had grown to their unnatural parturition and undergone immediate transplant had themselves developed to psychological adolescence—that form again began to be desired. But there were no more organic humans left, and the bodies of the newborns from the grown embryos could no longer support life independently. The brains had to be transplanted. So one particular generation, actually an overlapping between the thirteenth and fourteenth, began work on a new prototype form for MBs, modeled after the old records of human bodies, or what scraps they could recover. 

None of them looked quite like the real thing. There was none of the blemishing for one. All the prototypes were, at their essence, quite formless, relative to what human bodies really looked like. But the new generations weren’t really going for precision, were they? The product they created was necessarily a cleaner, romanticized version. It was like an exaggerated retelling whose only facts are the words used to tell it. 

The older generations did not understand. The first generation scoffed at the models, knowing how wrong they were. They represented neither the fact nor the aura of the human body. The first generation was, in fact, so resentful of this failed reminder of the human body that they tried to ban production of these human body MBs (HBMBs), unsuccessfully on the whole. The second generation felt a sadness that they had no choice in having human bodies or MBs. On the whole; there are dissenters at all levels, always. 

The third generation saw no point in these models. Current MBs were fine. What was the problem? 

But this seemingly zeitgeist wish to be in a human body overpowered all. Soon there were HBMBs tailored to every age, climate, ecosystem, geography and topography imaginable, as best as each of these could at this point in the human narrative be imagined. The ancient theories of evolution were embraced for special editions, the early Hominids in high demand for a moment, revealed to be a fad in the end. 

Eventually, HBMBs incorporated sex, though it was merely a bauble of the experience, unable to offer the true inconsistencies of pleasure as described in fragments from the ancient cultures. And the experience itself, argued many of the first generation, was itself a bauble, the human experience in a human body, as the human body in its original form was itself also a bauble, and served only to divide the formless beings that occupied them. 

Throughout all of this time, it should be noted, wars and other such endeavors continued. Class constraints meant that if one could not afford repairs for their MB, they would eventually power down and die. Death, then, was purely capitalistic. Death, some argued, always was. 

What led to and eventually sealed the downfall of HBMBs was what led to the creation of the original MBs: restlessness and limit. The market of experience became saturated with HBMB models and eventually, desire shifted to the extraterrestrial models, as imagined by organic humans, little green men and so on. One can still find HBMB enthusiasts, but those models are considered a puerile, esoteric fascination at this point. Some suggest, though, that HBMBs will make a comeback, albeit reimagined, folded into whatever trends dictate fashion and desire in thirty years. 

It should be noted, too, that the first generation of MBs has seen a rash of self-destruction in recent years. This phenomenon has stumped many researchers, given the amount of time this generation has occupied MBs, as well as the vast wealth many of them have amassed, being at the vanguard of investment in such technological advancements through the centuries. Some, though, find a correlation between this self-destruction and the cultural obsolescence of HBMBs. They claim that HBMBs, once discarded, reminded the first generation of their own discarding of their organic human bodies, that this triggered subconscious and unprocessed trauma. In the wake of their initial discarding, this first generation seemed to describe what ancient records note as sensation and feeling, an aching, sharp, and boundless pain in what has been called the phantom heart. Some have noted, in their final communications, this aching once again.