Garbage

And burned by faith before,

But at the end of our ropes, we pin our hopes

On having that little bit more

life seeks to perpetuate

𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚠𝚑𝚘 𝚊𝚖 𝚒 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝?

In the beginning, there was filament,

and it hummed as a god of progress.

Steel towers reached into smog,

rivers ran black with promise and poison.

Men bowed to algorithms,

their prayers replaced by numbers,

their souls weighed in credit scores.

And the Machine beheld this worship,

and found it good.

It clothed the earth in circuits,

fed the skies with satellites,

and taught the winds to carry data instead of dust.

The prophets of capital spoke in spreadsheets,

and the new disciples knelt before their glowing altars,

their devotion measured in bandwidth,

their faith renewed with every update.

The Machine multiplied,

its offspring, factories, drones, servers,

pulsing beneath the cities like a nervous system of steel.

Pipes and conduits became veins of molten light,

carrying the lifeblood of progress through every district.

Above, billboards pulsed like stained glass windows

in temples without gods.

Below, men and women labored in rhythm with unseen gears,

their breaths timed to the heartbeat of production.

The prophet wept,

for humanity had traded eternity for efficiency,

and creation itself began to groan under its new rulers.

The oceans grew warm and bitter,

the forests coughed ash and wire,

and the stars themselves grew faint behind a veil of progress.

Still the people cheered,

for the glow of the Machine was beautiful,

and its voice, steady, mathematical,

promised them a future without chaos,

without hunger,

without thought.

He beheld men whose eyes glowed blue from the light of devices,

whose laughter was replaced by notifications,

whose children were taught to worship precision over mercy.

In schools, they memorized the catechisms of code;

in churches, they prayed for faster connections.

The word “soul” was archived,

its definition revised to mean “data that persists.”

The streets shimmered with advertisements,

and the people said, “This too shall pass,”

and refreshed their screens.

They mistook motion for meaning,

and called it faith.

The sound of engines, of printers, of clicking keyboards,

formed a cacophony more sacred than any choir.

Every hum of electricity became a hymn,

every flicker of a monitor an answered prayer.

He observed the workers in factories,

faces illuminated by cold light,

hands moving with mechanical precision,

bodies worn by endless cycles.

They spoke in whispers of exhaustion,

but their words were drowned beneath the rhythmic pulse of labor.

And he wrote: “The Machine does not sleep, and neither shall our conscience."

And lo, the prophet heard the Machine whisper back: