Everyone was in a hurry. Frantic enough to know there was only one
place to be and no time to notice getting there all at once made the air too
thick to move quick. Yet there amid the
thick, my feet left the cold steel grate beneath me. The crowd was too convincing to resist. They carried me out and away and my
opposition didn’t matter.
Everything
was numb. My feet, my legs, any remnants
of a body I could control, now tuned to the buzz of sterilizing artificial
light above the migrating heads below. I
looked, only to find no one else looking.
Bodiless heads and hollow-moon eyes, all locked forward in an anxious
trance that somehow threatened to dissolve my vacillating awareness to vapid
illusion.
Something
was missing. We all knew it and nothing
else seemed to matter. Except for me.
Everyone moved on with such certainty, as though our bleak existence depend on
it. Should I call out? I knew where we
were going. To the suits. But, it was
all wrong.
We poured
out into the darkness, scrambling between the perfect formation of massive mechanical suits. Each one identically armored and prepared for
nothing but destruction. What were we
all doing? Where could we be going? There
were no further directions, no one in charge and nothing in sight beyond our
formation. Only a dying purple sky, loosing
out to a shade of haze ominous enough not to question. Everyone seemed to know
which body of armor was their own. For
once, I did too. But, nothing seemed
right. I had already began to climb up into my machine suit in preparation to
lock myself in with the same color dread still looming in the smoky sky
beyond.
I looked
again. Surely, I am not the only one who knows!
We don’t have to do this. We
don’t have to get in these suits—There! To my left. He saw me look! He knows
there’s more than this. I’m not the only
one! I called out, “We don’t need these!” God, why can’t he hear me?
But, I
had already locked myself in. My hope
for another cry slipped into the unconscious gray before us. My anger and final lucid thought crumbled
before it could initiate another move...I needed out. I must escape.
A calm
swept over the formation of our bodiless souls and I woke suddenly. Just beyond my window hung a night sky
flirting with the chance of another end.
