Plastic Hearts

By 2092, the world had drowned in its own waste.

Landfills became mountains. Oceans turned into toxic soup. Cities were abandoned as pollution grew stronger than laws. Amid the chaos, one tiny village survived—not because of walls or weapons, but because it refused to waste.

Verde.
A hidden, self-sustaining village deep in the Himalayan foothills, where not a single item was thrown away. Every piece of metal, fabric, glass, or plastic had a purpose. Every soul knew their carbon footprint like their own heartbeat.

It was here that Lina, a quiet inventor with grease-streaked cheeks and a soul wired for curiosity, lived.

Her home was an upcycled marvel: walls made from pressed bottle bricks, wind chimes from broken cutlery, solar leaves stitched into the roof. Every day she walked the trails with a wicker basket, collecting scraps others might have missed—metal rings, old circuit chips, even melted bottle caps.

She wasn’t hoarding junk. She was building a heart.

Not a poetic one. A real, beating, synthetic heart.


---

“Why a heart?” her neighbor, old man Venu, once asked.

She looked up from her desk and whispered, “Because one day, the world will need more than clean air and filtered water. It’ll need to feel again.”

Venu just smiled. He’d seen many dreamers in Verde, but Lina… she was different. She wasn’t just trying to save the planet. She was trying to save something deeper.


---

Then came Arin.

A stranger.

He stumbled into Verde with torn boots, bleeding palms, and eyes wide like he’d just seen color for the first time. He said he came from the Eastern Wastes, a place where people burned trash for warmth and bartered clean water for silence.

He wasn’t supposed to be allowed in.

But something about the way he cradled a broken music player in his hands made Lina pause. It wasn’t functional. Not valuable. Just... meaningful.

She vouched for him.


---

Arin became part of the community slowly—mending nets, replanting trees, learning to sort waste by texture and sound. He asked questions about everything, especially Lina.

“What are you building today?”
“A lung.”
“Tomorrow?”
“A memory.”

They grew close under the canopy of reused tarpaulins, shared soup from cracked bowls, and danced barefoot to wind-powered vinyl records that scratched out forgotten love songs.

One evening, as a thunderstorm rolled in, Lina handed him a gift—a small pendant made from crushed plastic shards.
“It’s made of the things people threw away,” she said. “Like us.”

Arin took it gently. “But you made it beautiful.”


---

Weeks passed. Arin grew stronger. And Lina finally revealed her secret: the synthetic heart.

“It’s powered by solar pulses and recycled graphene,” she explained, “but its rhythm... its rhythm comes from old music files I found in an abandoned server. Songs about heartbreak. About hope.”

She placed the heart in a glass dome. It thumped faintly.

Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

“I want to put it in a machine that can teach people to feel again,” she said. “To remember why the world matters.”

Arin stared at it for a long time, then finally asked, “What if someone steals it?”

She smiled. “Then I’ll build another. And another. Until someone listens.”


---

That night, the storm hit hard. Lightning struck the east windmill. The power grid went dark. The village plunged into silence.

And the heart was gone.


---

Panic spread. For a place that lived in peace and precision, the idea of theft was unthinkable.

All eyes turned to Arin.

He was gone, too.

Lina didn’t say a word. She just stared at the empty dome. Her breath shaky, her fingers numb.


---

Three months later, a drone buzzed into Verde airspace. It dropped a parcel wrapped in repurposed map sheets.

Inside was:

1. The heart—upgraded and still beating.


2. A letter.



> Lina,
You were right. The world doesn’t just need saving. It needs to feel.
I took the heart not to steal it, but to share it.
I found a village buried in smoke. They had forgotten music. Forgotten kindness. I gave them the heart. And it changed everything.
They built their own windmill. Then a garden. Then a school.
Now they dance to your heartbeat.
This new version—it's for you. Keep building.
Love, Arin.



Lina clutched the heart close. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Not because it had returned.

But because it had worked.


---

Years later, the world map began to shift.

Where once there were “waste zones,” there were now “green dots.”
Each one had its own version of the heart.
Each one began with a song.
And at the center of the map, still breathing, still blooming, stood Verde.

Where love had grown not from perfection…
But from what others had thrown away.