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The Machines

 The Machine in the road turns, and I’m a young boy again. 


I have dreamed it so often, over and over, even when I am awake it comes back. I am made into someone frail and fragile and terrified, heart racing, fingers numb. 


The machines are here. The striding things without souls, dictating voices that are lifeless and uncompromising. 


REMAIN INDOORS.


INSURGENT ACTIVITY WILL BE DEALT WITH VIA EXTREME AND EFFICIENT FORCE.


Everything was already ruin. Our hospital a glassy smear, it’s staff and patients reduced to carbonized phantoms in cratered rubble. Our library, a structure nearly two thousand years old down to its familiar foundations, split wide open by hypersonic tungsten rods dropped from orbiting platforms. Cupola obliterated, shaken to nothing. The first strikes had come delivered by so much impossible fury. To shock and awe the Foe. 


When the soldiers come, they were armed just as much with questions as with weapons. Folders, files, photos; fingers pressing hard to faces no one recognizes. Saying names no one has heard, saying them again, again. Like our frightened, ashen faces might conjure whoever they’re looking for right then and right there. But no one does. And so the Machines come. 


The Machines are protectors, we were told. Unflinching, invincible, able to pry apart the boundary between faithful citizen and nightmarish rebel. The Machines would fight day and night until we were free. The Machines will stop at nothing to defeat our Foe. The Machines will keep Order where it is found, and instill it where there is none. They are unlike anything we have ever seen. Some walk like men, faceless, storming in formation from one street to the next. Others crawl and skitter, large as vehicles but so much faster, their weapons sweeping perpetually. And yet others still fly, shrieking overhead, silvered terrors. Elders call them the Jin, the ancient terrors— sinful things whispered at night lest the mechanical legions hear, destroy. 


More memories, more fragments shattered by so much fear. So much loss. 


The Machines turn every day into an anxious nightmare. They cannot be reasoned with, bargained with. They have no desire to talk to the eldest amongst us, they spare no child or any of the infirm should some arcane process dictate to them that they are the Foe. 


Cellphones pulled from pockets, cameras around necks or in backpacks are met with gunfire. 


Drunken fights between workers that once ended in laughter or snores are silenced by hissing plasma or crunching bone. 


Bright, sunlit days are days to remain inside, peering out through curtains. The Fliers are ceaseless, hunting for silvery gleams that should be met with complete and utter annihilation. 


An onslaught of funerals drowns our community like a flood until by decree of the Machines, we will hold no more. Faces, voices, all vanished. We drift apart. We collapse. Our village is made into a tomb. 


The car idles. My cargo is precious, a progeny special and decisive. It is all my terror. It is all my rage. It is all the fire that I felt in my youth, into my emergence as a man. It is every voice I can never hear again, it is the cost of burying so many friends and family, over and over and over again, it is the loss of everything. 



The Machine straightens. Heavy automated cannon whirring in cool calculation. 


I put my foot to the accelerator, close my eyes, and hope with every fiber of my being that when I open them again, I will be with all that I have lost.

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