When All Else Fails

Rusted skies dripping with rain, was the only blessing in this world gone gray. It was the year 2058. Desolated deserts gathered dust and trees poisoned by carbon monoxide fought resiliently to stay afloat amongst the pile of garbage of a world long decayed. Though nature was trying to reclaim its territory it was easy to see how even the strongest weed had fallen to decay. Machines, it was AI (Artificial Intelligence). Everyone had warned us about it, but no one had listened. It had taken measures into its own hands and had decided that it was going to make its nest here on earth. Many had fled to other planets, and had tried to settle there, but whether they had made it was something unknown. Desecrated remains of the civilization that had once thrived were now artifacts of a long and bygone era.

A lone petite female figure stood inside a fortified building, wearing a long-tattered coat and red fingerless gloves with black jeans, red tattered shirt, and old black military boots, her brown chocolate hair flowing freely in the contaminated, dust particles of air, coming in through a shattered window before her. Like everyone else, she protected herself from it with a gas mask. She took out a small device from her dusted coat pockets, it was a small radio with green neon lights, an updated version of a “walkie talkie” from the old world. This one though was hacked to prevent the drones from zoning in on conversations from the groups of survivors that were trying to, as lamely as they could resist the machines dominating them.

“It seems the drones are asleep still” Maria heard, as the voice from the walkie talkie reported to her. Maria was the leader of a group of resistance in the north. To her dismay, she had been living in Finland before the crash of the grid, and before all hell broke loose. So, she was now stuck in a wasteland of what had once been Paradise, the Fatherland.

Her brother kept in contact with her he was leading his own group in the lone star state overseas, keeping her father and mother safe along with surviving family members and friends. As for her, there was nothing but the will to fight and her group of rebels. Yet she remained stern, nothing could break her focus, the need to survive was pushing her to keep going, even if there were days filled with nothing but the menacing and eerie zoom and buzz of the AI patrols that would guard the city as soon as they awoke.

They had no master, well, they did but it was not a sentient one they were, the Anima and Animus, prototypes of the new format of humans in this new age, wanting to consume and upload all of the consciousness into their main computer files and create planes of existence in accordance with their wishes, and then the towers of Jung sifting through the memories and history of those they would capture to create the perfect society, one that would be subdued into subservience and have no free will.

For indeed there were those cities with the ones that had been captured or had succumbed, and they were naught more than empty shells, obeying, and worshipping their leaders without question. Abandoning their morals, cultures, religions, ways of life, music, art, history, literature, and all those things that made them human to be safe, and be cataloged as “Demu” in the system as opposed to “Ren” which separated those demure in demeanor from those against the system.

If they could only take them apart, take them down, it had been their plan for years now, but the menacing machines were placed in esoteric planes of existence above the rainbow towers that they could not reach lest they get zapped and fried by the “bees” and “moths”. Enormous drones that could fly and shoot laser zapping guns that would drain a body of all vital fluids with one touch of their spark.

Then there was the fear of getting caught by the “regulators” whom would take and force you to be “Demu” or die at the hands of the incinerators and acid pools, your body would later be used for its proteins to keep their artificial farms and necessities running in the Opal City, for nothing outside the Opal City could live, or thrive, the Evermire were the wastelands, the only places where rebels could survive if barely. There was also a legend of Acropolis Zion the place said to have the strongest army of rebels and supplies leading a movement to take down the machines and regain the planet.

Thanks if you are here!