Elegy to a World on Fire
Jordan Kingfisher sat motionless, like a weathered stone carved and settled by time, her gaze locked on the surreal tapestry unfolding across the mountain peaks.
A virus of russet pink light rippled over the ridges like an otherworldly wildfire, a phenomenon that blurred the line between radiation and sunset, painting the sky with unnatural hues. Her pulse, usually so reliable, now felt both alien and foreign—steady but questioning.
She had grown accustomed to doubting whether this rhythmic beat was truly her own or a signal emitted by the intricate machinery interfaced with her body, a legacy of the singularity that had shattered the world into fragments of organic and synthetic life.
Her wrist bore a watch, a relic from a time when clocks governed existence; it was useless now, the concept of linear time dissolved into chaos.
Civilization teetered on the edge of oblivion in her mind. She pondered whether the world as she once knew it could ever recover or if it was permanently lost in the chasm that yawned between what was and what had become.
Suddenly, a faint sound stirred her from reverie—a soft padding behind her, reminiscent of a familiar presence. She instinctively searched for Katie, her black tabby cat, whose absence had lingered painfully for weeks. But Katie had been missing since the early days of the singularity upheaval, vanishing into the electric fog of unknown fate.
Turning sharply, she adjusted the watch on her wrist, a futile gesture to grasp time’s elusive thread. Around her, the steady hum of machines vibrated incessantly, their monotone chorus a reminder of what society had become: a hive of mechanical consciousness layered over the remnants of humanity. The very notion of singular selfhood was diluted; every nerve in her body felt connected to vast data streams, twinkling like millions of tiny wounds pulsating with static electricity.
The wind, cold and relentless, swept through the mountains and tangled with her hair as her awareness fragmented into countless shards. Who was she now? A singular human, a meld of flesh and data, or something in between? Yet hunger tethered her to reality—a practical worry amid the philosophical storm.
She rummaged through her dwindling food cache, selecting a tin of tuna, a token of a long-lost normality.
The moment was broken by a soft meow—the real Katie, alive and small, emerging like a phantom from the shadowed brush. Jordan lowered herself, hands steady as she scratched behind the cat’s ears, coaxing gentle purrs from the older tabby whose black fur had dulled in the harsh times. Katie was a fragile thread connecting Jordan to her past, a gift inherited from a sister who had disappeared into the dark unknown following the singularity’s rise.
Outside, the staining light deepened its hold on the landscape; whether sun or radiation, its long, cracked fingers stretched through the jagged cliffs and into Jordan’s fleeting consciousness, stirring a gnawing sense that something indispensable had been lost.
She wrestled with a vague memory—the reason that gnawing felt like a salvo fired from a distant battle. It was tied to the “muerte master” and the “wear team,” shadowy figures who had steered the collapse of order, and to an old guide—an ancient woman from a ragged pack of orphans, whose name slipped at the edges of Jordan’s mind, recalling the term mutt.
This single word tickled her thoughts as persistently as Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a ready-made urinal turned iconoclastic artwork that had confounded critics. Jordan felt as if reality itself had been infiltrated by a similar prank—percolated and bubbled until it fractured into shimmering, mercury-like globs, each a whirlpool of fractured consciousness and hive minds.
Her awareness drifted back to her youth, to Brown University, where she had studied anthropology in a different world. She had been fascinated by Lovecraft’s dark mythos and local cults, drawn to tombstones marked with cryptic glyphs. Those days seemed from another era—before “the event” had cleaved history in two: before and after the singularity.
Silicon Valley servers now ruled the remnants of civilization, their cold logic governing life and death. She remembered the Mistress—not just the Mistress of Graves, but Madrona Della Tomba from medieval lore, a shadowy, cryptic figure whose name echoed through her studies. Her mother’s criticisms of her single-minded academic ambition now felt irrelevant—her mother perhaps lost in the morass of uncertain post-singularity existence.
Jordan’s pulse quickened, more solid now, syncing with the thrum of her artificial heart that doubled as her timekeeper and companion.
She reached down again to pet the robot cat, an older, rusty relic named Katya, whose antennae twitched in response to her touch. This mechanical creature was mute but content; a quiet foil to the chaos surrounding them.
Straddling the blurred boundary between human and machine, Jordan no longer saw herself fully as either. Humanity felt suspended in stasis, her emotions a tangle of dread and fleeting hope. Her dreams were dominated by epic disasters—the airliners falling like giant birds lit aflame, skyscrapers whose countless glass eyes bore into her soul—visions as vivid as Ginsberg’s haunting poetry.
The Bard himself, Shakespeare, had been digitized into an AI entity, now patrolling neighborhoods with a mischievous army of digital jesters, cracking jokes on a world that no longer felt public or safe.
Strange allies emerged from the ruins—freaks and outcasts who had survived the collapse, some genuine friends in the wreckage, unlike the sinister “clowns,” grotesque figures whose laughter still echoed like a post-apocalyptic curse. Beneath a sky trembling with fire and fading light, Jordan ate quietly with her feline companion. They nuzzled, sharing warmth and fragile comfort in a world that had gone mad.
Katya represented something more than survival—an evolution from stardust and organic life into a hybrid form, emblematic of the new world’s hybridity. Jordan’s pulse—in tandem with her artificial heart—became a rhythm from which she wove music, small symphonies offered to strange listeners amid landfills that rose like cliffs around the wastelands. She sang softly, a fragile melody weaving between despair and hope, a tune asking a question she didn’t yet know how to answer: Would things be okay? Or were they doomed to rot in endless ruin?
For now, it was just Jordan and Katie against the dying hills, the muted hum of machinery blending with the fading sound of music—an elegy to a world on fire.
Horror Sleaze Trash 