The Skeleton Beneath: A Vision of Tomorrow's Truth
In the year 2087, Maya stood before the Mirror of Essence—a revolutionary device that could peer beyond the carefully curated holograms, the genetic modifications, and the neural implants that had become humanity's newest masks. As the mirror hummed to life, her augmented reality makeup dissolved, her synthetic skin tone faded, and her enhanced bone structure shifted back to its original form. What remained was startling in its simplicity: her skeleton, glowing with a soft phosphorescent light, pulsing with the rhythm of thoughts and dreams.
"Who are you when everything else falls away?" the Mirror asked in a voice that seemed to emanate from within her own bones.
Maya had spent decades perfecting her public persona—an amalgamation of trending personalities downloaded from the Identity Marketplace. Her neural feed constantly updated her expressions, her vocabulary, even her laugh, based on real-time social sentiment analysis. Like everyone else in 2087, she wore her skeleton beneath layers upon layers of borrowed identity.
But the skeleton—ah, the skeleton was different. In this future world, scientists had discovered that the human skeleton wasn't merely a framework of calcium and phosphate. It was the repository of authentic self, glowing brighter with every original thought, every genuine emotion, every moment of true vulnerability. The more a person hid behind their masks, the dimmer their skeleton became. The more they lived authentically, the more brilliantly it shone.
Maya's skeleton flickered uncertainly. She had become so practiced at being everyone else that she had forgotten who she was beneath it all. Around her, the Mirror projected images of other skeletons throughout history and across the globe—each one unique not in structure, but in luminescence. There was the skeleton of an ancient poet, blazing with the fire of unspoken truths. A child's skeleton from the 21st century, radiant with wonder before society taught them to dim their light. A modern-day rebel whose skeleton pulsed with the electric blue of defiance against the very systems Maya had embraced.
"Your skeleton remembers," the Mirror whispered. "It remembers the dreams you abandoned for likes and neural currency. It remembers the words you never spoke, the love you never declared, the art you never created because it wasn't algorithmically optimized for engagement."
Maya watched as her skeleton began to glow brighter, not with borrowed light, but with the soft amber of her own suppressed hopes. She remembered the child who wanted to build gardens on Mars, not manage social media campaigns for synthetic food corporations. She remembered the teenager who wrote poetry in the margins of her neural programming textbooks, before the Educational Board deemed creative writing "non-essential for economic optimization."
The Mirror shifted, showing her a glimpse of what her skeleton could become—not bigger or smaller, not fundamentally different in structure, but blazing with such authenticity that it could light up the darkness of a world that had forgotten how to see beyond its masks. Around her, she saw the skeletons of others who had made the choice to strip away their facades: teachers who taught with passion despite algorithmic disapproval, artists who created for creation's sake, lovers who chose vulnerability over viral compatibility.
"The strongest skeleton," the Mirror concluded, "is not the one that supports the most elaborate disguise, but the one that stands naked in its truth, unafraid to be seen for what it truly is—beautifully, imperfectly, authentically human."
Maya stepped away from the Mirror, her augmented reality layers still deactivated. For the first time in decades, she walked through the city without her masks, her skeleton glowing softly beneath her skin like a lighthouse in the digital storm, calling others to remember who they were before they learned to hide.
In that future world, the question wasn't whether you were strong enough to maintain your masks—it was whether you were brave enough to let them fall away.
NEAL LLOYD
