I breathed in the silence as I walked. Of course, it was a silence punctuated by whispered conversations and the dull sound of rolling tires on the grey concrete – oxygen cylinders being dragged along by their incapable masters. But that was the only kind of silence I could ever afford.
The trees overhead swished with a vengeance, and the few birds that had manages to elude the authorities let out a war cry.
My eyes adjust quickly to the darkness (What, with 13-hour power outages every day, they have to); it was not really darkness anymore.
Vague figures of people took shape, and I closed my eyes to breathe in the punctured silence again; at least it blocks out this punctured darkness.
More whispers. More swishing, and more bird cries.
The numbered trees overhead and the few hardy birds were the only ones left of a time before…before the work of my kind. They were the only real ones left, and they hated us. These trees and these birds will fight us until they are all gone, just like the other creatures did.
I stood there, in the middle of that unreal world with its unreal silence and unreal darkness; this unreal world of concrete jungles and computer-programmed pets; this unreal world of cancerous people with their parasitic ways, cancerous people who were now being crippled by their own bloodsucking ways.
The sound of my own oxygen cylinder distinguished itself from the other sounds of this silence. I breathed in the silence because I couldn’t breathe in the air.
