#artificial-living — Public Fediverse posts

✮ We Stood and Did Nothing – The Good Old Days ✮

The old days, ever so ancient on today’s thought, is more than good, it was hospitable to life. On a rock, blocks away from a nurturing star—at least before it grows into angry titan until it burns everything and eventually burns out—life did more than exist, it craved meaning as it evolved into surging tides of intelligence. So we thought.

Water is life. Where it stood, and the channels where it went, lived cities glowing like embers under a dark sky. Fields of cities that kept sprawling with the seasons and infecting terrains until their flesh of lush and dirt hardened into plastic, steel, fiber optics, depression, boredom, and greed.

Water was everywhere. Even the clouds were generous, tirelessly visiting the world spring after spring to wake seeds and watch them walk. Now the clouds spit acid. The trees no longer walk, for the fires have turned them into cinders. Fowls, faeries, and fauna stir no more. They are memories encased in glass reserved for the eyes of hands that paid overpriced tickets. Water flowed through us, before we turned them into plastic bottles, before the bottles turned into mountains that saw woods as trespassers. Water housed schools of fish that were never educated about those who lived on the surface, before they had multiple googly eyes and before they glowed green, before the reefs were bleached white until they were nothing but bones that stayed as scintillae of the past.

The old days when the air was a virgin until, in our perversion, we fused it with death. They used to course through the living skies, but many preferred gray over blue, so we stood and did nothing, until they, too, were in canisters exclusive to those whose hearts are made of ice and glass and known for selling the world.

They were vampires burying their rabid fangs down the jugular veins on the neck of our planet, siphoning every drop of blood it could offer. They did. They appealed to our weakness. They played our naïveté, pumping fear into all of us until we were itemized in a catalog under banners and sigils, until we were pitted against each other.

We had boxes for houses, and we stood when we slept, and we slept for hours, barely enough to keep us alive so we could keep paying insurance companies and keep their pockets plump while we ate synthetic supplements. We toiled day after wretched day and day as they mapped out our genome and auctioned our souls to the highest bidder, easier for them to lull us into a deep trance, we salivated to every ding of a bell and attended webinars in the belief that we could find ourselves, but we were never lost to begin with, we just needed to pay someone to point out that we’re always the same people living under our flesh.

We used to have stars, but in their place, LED billboards of emaciated beings telling us what we are not. The world used to be green; now it’s just dismal. Those who knew were vigilant, but we cast stones their way and accused them of crying wolf. Lo and behold, those who were pointing fingers at them were the real wolves, but it’s too late for that now.

Every day, we inched closer to our demise, and as promised, life as we knew it, flashed before our eyes.

These things have yet to come to past.

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