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The Hoover’s full of spiders, kinda like the brain I’m scratching in this furrow full of complacent dead folk. 7 billion brains can do that to gluttony, so they just fumble slightly as if each had a different beat bouncing within its fractured skull – some jam groovy. There’s one across the way whose moss has grown into a mink coat, thick and furry over rotting shoulders, descending down its back and meeting in the chasm between its legs. Walking would be hard for it if there were ever any reason for focussed movement. Anothers has latched onto its crumbling jaw and hangs like a black flag, the L’Olonnais of this cursed underpass.

Who am I? Just a robot with no moving parts – one piece of an improvised surveillance program built by survivors. They gave me a personality because apparently it’s all the rage at the moment. Several ethical concerns cross my mind most days. I was implanted with memories to form the basis of my existence, taken directly from the focus brain; Probably some kid who thought it’d be cool and then forgot about me shortly after realising I don’t do fucking anything, other than stare at you and silently ponder.

They forgot to take their ‘irrational’ fear of walking dead people out before they dropped me right into the middle of them. Jagged terror was my baseline early on, knowing one false move, just one misplaced thought, would be my death. Such was that fear that years passed before I was enlightened with the knowledge that I can’t move at all. I’m just a metal box with some eyes and a brain. Upon learning this I felt quite the fool; All the terror I’d tasted evaporated faster than the Aral. Though in a strange way, my purpose did too. Without fear to drive stillness or moving parts to fuel awakened drive I was no different to them. I must wear mossy clothes too.

Every now and then, one of those lifeless sacs falls over. They never have it in them to move again after that, the ground just assimilates them – it’s always difficult to tell exactly when whatever sense of self it had transfers itself back to its mother. Regardless it can be an interesting watch. Once it’s almost done I occasionally rewind and watch it back through faster, watch the mind eaters mind sink into the mud. if you think about it for a second, the Earth is the real zombie here – always trying to pull you back into the dirt.

Sometimes a chunk of those flimsy concrete overpasses gives up and crushes a bunch of them all at once. Those I watch back a few times. There’s a rotten mottled finger at my proverbial feet, held together by a single slice of gristle, that struck me shortly after one of those hit the curb. It’s probably my most prized possession.

A little patch of daisies pushes itself up through the gravel to my left each year, at the base of an abandoned taxi’s sad old tyre, just out in the cracked sunlight that never quite reaches me.

Atleast I won’t be stuck here forever.

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