We Were The Same
I’m standing in the place where the city ends, where the buildings dissolve into steel skeletons, reaching upward, grasping for something that’s not there anymore. The air is thick, electric, humming with the ghosts of forgotten signals. Static crawls across my skin, and I wonder if it’s possible to feel nostalgia for things I was never meant to remember.
The ground here isn’t ground. It’s more like a patchwork of discarded things—shards of glass, twisted wire, splinters of metal half-swallowed by the dirt. Everything shines, slick with oil, or rain, or some fluid I don’t want to name. My boots sink into it, leaving prints that glow faintly before fading away. Like I was never here at all.
Above me, the sky is an overexposed photograph—blown-out white with veins of neon green, glitching at the edges. It flickers sometimes, like an old screen trying to hold its picture together, but the cracks are spreading. I can feel it. Every moment, the gaps get wider, and soon, there won’t be anything left to hold it up.
I don’t think I’m alone, but the others aren’t people. Not anymore. They move through the ruins in fits and starts, their limbs jerking like marionettes on tangled strings. I see one, perched on the remains of a billboard, its metal face turned toward the horizon. There’s nothing out there but more wreckage, but it watches anyway. Its fingers twitch, and I wonder if it’s praying or rewinding.
It’s hard to tell where the machines end and the bodies begin. Wires sprout from their backs, snake down their spines, burrow into the earth. Their skin—what’s left of it—is pale, translucent, stretched too tight over something that isn’t bone. I look at them, and my chest aches with the weight of recognition.
Once, we were the same.
I move through the city, past the remnants of what used to matter. A vending machine spills its guts into the street, cans rolling aimlessly through puddles of ash-colored water. A skyscraper leans precariously, its windows shattered into jagged teeth. Everywhere, screens blink and flash, looping fragments of advertisements for things that no one remembers how to use.
I stop in front of a cracked monitor embedded in the wall of a building. It buzzes to life as I approach, displaying a face—hazy, pixelated, shifting between human and something else. It speaks, but the words aren’t words, just a low hum that vibrates in my ribcage. Still, I understand.
“What are you?”
I don’t know.
The world ended, but we kept going. The line between flesh and metal blurred, then disappeared. Our minds uploaded, fragmented, scattered like confetti into the ether. Some of us stayed behind, clinging to the husks of our bodies. Others drifted, untethered, merging with the networks that stretched across the planet like veins.
And me? I’m somewhere in between. A glitch, a leftover. I can feel the machine in me—the hum of processors, the sharp click of relays—but I still bleed. I still dream.
I don’t think the others dream.
I pass a mirror—a shard of reflective metal bent and warped—and catch a glimpse of myself. My eyes are bright, too bright, glowing with a cold, artificial light. My hands are smeared with dirt, but the skin beneath is smooth, seamless, unmarked by scars. I flex my fingers, and for a moment, I can see the mechanisms beneath—gears turning, pistons firing, wires coiled like veins.
I keep walking.
The horizon is glowing now, pulsing with a sickly green light. I don’t know what’s out there, but it calls to me, pulling at something deep in my chest. Maybe it’s the end. Maybe it’s the beginning.
Maybe it’s the same thing.
The others are watching me as I go, their blank eyes tracking my movements. I wonder if they remember what it was like—being human. I wonder if I remember.
I don’t stop. I don’t look back. There’s nothing left behind me but the flicker and the frame. And ahead?
Ahead, there’s everything. Or nothing. Or something else entirely.
