archaeologist

Everything is disconnected: no more communication, no more interaction, no more fellowship. Only a sea of blank faces now, all closed, unhappy mouths, averted eyes, and busy ears. A maze of cold, dead towers, monuments to greed, power, and corruption. The grey, cracked concrete of the sidewalks, growing greyer and more cracked with each passing second. Even the sun has been unplugged, the sky now little more than the empty, white screen of a disused light table.

Suddenly, my eyes meet the mirrored lenses of a guard near the entrance of a bank, and I flinch as I see him tense up, his one hand squeezing tighter on the truncheon, his other hand flexing impatiently at his side.

“What’s gone on here?” I ask, striding up to him. “What’s happened to everyone?”

“Move along, sir,” the guard cautions.

“But the people, they’re—”

“Just move along.”

He barely moves, but something in his body language suggests that he’s serious. A certain rigidity. A certain flatness. What is it? The curling and uncurling of his leather-clad fingers. The shiny black of that terrible club. My own distorted reflection in the mirrored lenses of his eyewear. All designed to awe, to intimidate, to threaten.

A cold chill breaches the feeble security of my upturned collar as I turn to walk away, the wind bringing with it a torrent of trash; tattered newspapers, battered coffee cups, ragged advertisements, and the like. Snatching up a soiled page of print, I’m immediately assaulted by headlines of war and upheavals, murders and rapes, discontentment and general tumult, before the wind steals the page from me, ripping it from my trembling hand.

Kick it up three ccs.

The Dark Ages: that’s what we’ll call this. No age of enlightenment, here. Perpetually overcast skies, polluted air, and a near dead population. Killing their bodies with fake foods. Killing their minds with fake knowledge. Killing their souls with—

He’s stable. Heart rate is stable.

Lose myself in the crowd, that’s what I’ll do. Completely lose myself, alone in that lifeless crowd. Would anyone notice if I just disappeared? Would anyone care if I vanished right before their eyes? It’s starting now. Already I can feel it, that familiar sensation. A numbness of the core, a slight tinge behind the eyes, pressure building—

Signs of internal tissue damage?

None.

Good. Brain activity?

Normal.

Great. Okay to unplug him. Wheel him to PC when ready.

A million points of light exploding around me, before me, and I’m ripped from there with such a light touch, almost peeled away. Stretched. Mind and body. My soul waits for me back home. Waits and surely wonders. Coronas growing ever larger, overpowering my ocular—

Mind shutting down.

Resist it. See if you can resist it.

Entangled, now, in that thin, silvery strand. Follow it. Tug at it. Toy with them a little.

Ha ha.

Toy with them.

Oops, faster now than—

Fading fast. So fast I—

Tell them—

Oh god—