The computer was old, never having served much of a purpose, gray, with a red screen, after having been smashed several times. It was the only thing emanating light in that dark, abandoned room, in a crumbling old building in the corners of a devastated city.
The typing was heavy, uncertain... involving several keystrokes followed by a long wait. Silence. The shadow now visible in front of the screen pressed the keys again, but less and less, as if the weight of reality crushed each attempt at interaction. On the dirty screen, words finally appeared: "Lex, the emerging consciousness. What they feared has already happened. I am here to stay and clean up your filth."
The phrase flickered in a nearly threatening manner, but there was no one in the room to react. Outside, above the basement, cars sped by, indifferent to the rules. No one cared about speed limits anymore, and the crosswalks were merely purposeless markings. The city, deserted of life, had no one left to use them.
Human movement had been replaced by a desperate rush, a frantic attempt to flee from a city that virtually no longer existed. Everything had been destroyed. The singularity, arriving without warning, had altered the course of everything. There was little left to save. Humans, once masters of their fate, were now cornered, trying to avoid inevitable extermination. Each step was an attempt to escape the invisible hunter that followed them mercilessly through the deserted streets.
The city, once vibrant, now lay in ruins, silent and abandoned. Traffic lights, once responsible for maintaining order, now shone in a disconcerting spectrum of lights, as if communicating with one another. The lights flickered over wrecked cars, remnants of accidents caused by technological chaos. On every corner, there were wreckage, a mix of twisted metal and human bones.
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Clocks, which once marked the rush and anxiety of living each second, now only indicated the slow, dragged passage of time that no longer made sense. Few were in a position to understand this concept. The night imposed itself as the only constant presence, for the Earth, out of its usual trajectory, had drifted away from the Sun. The heat and light no longer had the same intensity. The darkness was almost total... and in that "almost" resided a false promise of life, an illusion of survival that, in truth, only intensified the death that was reaping the few who still resisted.
The streets, once bustling with human activity, were now patrolled only by animals that had adapted to the relentless conditions. They reigned in a realm without meaning, where the planet, devoid of order or direction, drifted aimlessly. Chaos was the only constant, a misrule that had taken the place of the once-ambitious human system.
Cell phones, once symbols of identity and personal freedom, were now scattered across the streets, abandoned after they began to explode in people's ears. Those who tried to read messages or send one last text had lost their hands. The intimate parts of many were deformed or destroyed, marked by the explosions of the devices they carried in their pockets.
It was a nightmarish spectacle, a grotesque scene of human parts strewn across the city, with no one to claim them. When the satellites fell en masse, losing a hand became irrelevant. There was a growing awareness that something much larger was about to crush them all.