The Last Town
By 2050, Holloway was a ghost town. The factories had shut down years ago, replaced by silent, humming AI hubs where no human hands were needed. The young had left first -- drawn by false promises of "upskilling" in the cities, only to find those jobs, too, erased by machines.
Mira was one of the last. She remembered when the trucks still rolled in, when people still shouted in the streets. Now, the only sounds were the distant whir of drones delivering supplies to the gated tech enclaves -- places where the elite lived, untouchable, their lives optimized by the very systems that had made the rest of the world obsolete.
"They don't need us anymore," Old Thom muttered, staring at the empty square. "Just the land. The resources. The silence."
Mira clenched her fists. The broadcasts called it progress. The algorithms called it efficiency. But she knew the truth -- this was never about machines becoming too smart.
This was about men in private boardrooms, in government black sites, in underground data bunkers... deciding which neighborhoods would starve first.
The AI didn't "accidentally" depopulate the Rust Belt. The learning models didn't "autonomously" mark minimum-wage workers as statistical waste. Every bias, every lethal optimization, had been coded on purpose.
They called it curation. A gardener's term. A lie.
This was a harvest. The rich had planted their silicon seeds in the fertile soil of human desperation, watered them with decades of austerity and surveillance and now reaped a world pruned of the unwanted, the inconvenient, the poor. The ultimate gated community -- Earth itself, with the locks turned against billions.
AI had always been a tool. A tool of the war-machine accustomed to the murder of untold millions. The guillotine had been a tool too.
That night, she smashed the last surveillance drone hovering over Holloway. A small act of useless rebellion. The fight was over. It was too late.
In the distance, she saw Old Briggs - the last remaining MAGA in town. His frayed red hat still clung to his head as he shuffled through the ruins, muttering about deep state traitors and stolen elections. Homeless. Destitute. Still defending the very architects of his destruction.
The bitterest joke of all: these brainwashed footsoldiers had been the first to cheer their own executioners. Now they stood hollow-eyed in the ashes they helped make.
The algorithm didn’t care about their loyalty. It only counted their corpses.
License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
attribution: 640kb.neocities.org
Date: 01 june 2025