The city woke before the sun did, as it always did—buzzing with restless engines, screens lighting up bedroom walls, and people already running late for lives they didn't want.
Mara stepped off the bus into the cold morning haze. Her coffee was lukewarm, her earbuds tangled, and her eyes hollow from another night spent staring at a glowing rectangle, scrolling through other people's curated joy. She told herself she was keeping up with the world, but the truth was simpler—she couldn't sleep. Not anymore. Not with everything collapsing in slow motion.
The streets were filled with faces that didn't look up. Eyes glued to phones, earbuds plugged in like veins. Everyone pretending to be somewhere else, anywhere else. A man bumped into her and didn't even apologize—just kept walking, face illuminated by a screen. She didn't blame him. They were all ghosts now, walking through the ruins of meaning.
Billboards blinked above the traffic, selling dreams no one could afford. "You deserve better." "Escape today." "Own your tomorrow." Mara stared at one for a moment—an ad for a luxury condo. Starting price: more than she'd make in a lifetime. She laughed quietly. A bitter, tired laugh. It echoed in her chest like a warning.
She worked at a call center on the twelfth floor of a building with mirrored glass. From the outside, it looked sleek, efficient—modern. Inside, it smelled like burnt coffee and recycled air. Rows of desks under fluorescent lights, each one occupied by a voice pretending to care.
"Thank you for calling," she'd say, a hundred times a day, reading from a script. "How can I assist you today?"
No one ever asked how she was doing. Not that it mattered. She was replaceable—another cog in the polite machinery of decay. Everyone there knew it. No one said it.
At lunch, she sat by the window, watching the sky choke on gray clouds. Somewhere beyond the horizon, another wildfire was burning. The news called it "unprecedented." But nothing was unprecedented anymore. Every disaster had a name, a hashtag, and a brief moment in the algorithm before disappearing into the next crisis.
She thought about her mother, who used to talk about the future with warmth, like it was a promise. "You'll have a good life, Mara," she'd said once. "The world is changing, and it's going to be better." That was before the rent tripled, before the heat waves, before her mother's heart gave out waiting in a hospital line that never ended.
Now, "the future" just meant more of the same—more work, more bills, more noise.
But lately, something inside Mara was stirring. A quiet voice beneath the static.
It asked questions she couldn't ignore anymore:
What are we doing?
Why are we living like this?
And how long before it all breaks?
She walked home that evening through streets lit by the glow of advertisements and the hum of drones overhead. People hurried past her, eyes down, faces blank. And for the first time, she noticed how empty they all looked—how empty she felt.
The city wasn't alive. It was feeding.
Feeding on time. On energy. On hope.
And Mara could feel herself thinning out, day by day, like a ghost fading into the noise.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a thought formed—dangerous, fragile, but real:
Maybe the only way to survive in a dying world is to stop pretending it's alive.