Part 1 – Short Story Series – Science Fiction/Futurism
It’s dawn, a new morning. The sun rises across the horizon. Sunlight reflects off the snake of water that cuts through the city, blinding anyone caught in the glare. The river is wider now, swollen from decades of warming seas and much of the city below the barrier line lies submerged. Whole boroughs have vanished beneath the surface. Only rooftops and the tips of towers remain, jutting out like rusted bones.
Dust dances along the higher streets, given life by the breeze that pushes through the tall buildings and the structures that seem immune to the ravages of time. The roads are mostly empty. Quiet. Only those daring to venture out before the heat becomes too much are seen, moving like shadows, swift and silent.
The giant wheel stood still, silhouetted against the bruised morning sky. Its frame was warped with time, leaning slightly over the river like it no longer had the strength to stand straight. The glass pods that hadn’t fallen were shattered, their surfaces splintered into a thousand jagged mirrors. As the sun crept higher, it caught the shards at just the right angle, sending fractured rays across the ruins like scattered starlight.
Each pod rocked in the breeze, slow and uneven, creaking on rusted joints. The wind whistled through the broken casings, twisting through empty benches and snapped wires. It didn’t sound like music. It sounded like breath. Shallow, broken, and far too human. The kind of sound that made you look over your shoulder and quicken your step.
No one had ridden the wheel in years. But it moved still. As if something unseen had never gotten off.
Across the water, the once majestic clock tower had crumbled through years of disrepair, tormented by the savagery of the weather. Cyclones, once rare, now swept through with unnerving regularity. The clock face was cracked, with large pieces missing. Its hands were frozen at five minutes past one, the moment power was cut to the city.
The tower and the palace beside it, once proud symbols of liberal democracy, now stood abandoned, claimed first by vines, then by the quiet directives of the Central Allocation System.
Trees blow in the wind, their leaves brown and infested with a lingering terminal disease. There was a time when just being alive felt like a miracle. Now the odds are so stacked against anything existing.
Somewhere nearby, a metal shutter slams down. The sound echoes through empty alleys like a gunshot. Then silence. The kind of silence that rings in your ears and makes you feel like you’re the last one left.
The stench of decay saturates the air. Anyone reaching the surface, their first reaction is to retch. The putrid smell is too much, even for the hardened survivors. Most souls stay underground, only venturing out when necessity dictates.
The silence breaks slowly.
At first, it’s just a hum, faint, mechanical, like a distant mosquito that shouldn’t exist. Then it grows louder, rising with precision, cutting clean through the stillness of the streets. The city’s quiet bends around it. No birds. No voices. Just the low, deliberate thrum of rotors pushing stale air through shattered spaces.
The sentry drone glides between the towers, sleek and matte black, its casing peppered with old scratches. Scanning as it moves. Its motion is smooth, its presence surgical, not searching with urgency, but with habit. A ghost of an algorithm still looping long after the war ended.
Infrared flickers across its lens. Motion signatures ping and fade. A heat source blooms in the alley ahead. The drone pauses, rotates, and drops lower. Its camera hovers six feet from the ground, locking onto movement.
Faint tracks in the dust. Residual body heat. Barking.
The signal triggers an alert, biological presence detected, but the drone doesn’t fire. It runs the data again. Quadruped. Fast. Malnourished.
Wild dogs. A small pack. Scavenging near the remains of an overturned ration truck.
The drone logs the lifeforms as non-relevant and climbs again, leaving the animals to their own slow extinction.
Far below, the shadows stretch longer.
The drone adjusts course, rising above the rooftops as it resumes its patrol. Below, the city unfolds in slow motion, a wasteland of skeletal towers, collapsed awnings, and open windows that lead nowhere. Vegetation has begun to claw up the sides of some structures, clinging to the cracks like a quiet invasion. A few rooftops had been converted into makeshift gardens once, but they are long dead now, their soil bleached and brittle.
It passes a comms relay, half-toppled and fused at the base. The scanner pauses briefly, sweeping over the exposed circuitry. Useless. Most of the city’s network infrastructure has been stripped or melted during the Distribution Conflicts. What remains no longer pulses with signal, only static.
As the drone nears the edge of Ward 9, the data feed begins to thin. This is unmapped territory, a greylisted zone with no live ID tags, no drone support routes, and no automated supply chains. The system marks it as non-prioritised, but the drone presses on, obeying a patrol loop written years ago by someone who no longer exists.
A fractured structure comes into view, part of a mid-rise apartment block sagging into itself. The external cameras record its dimensions, scanning for active heat sources. A flicker registers near the third floor, faint, possibly human. The drone halts, holding position as it recalibrates.
A deeper sweep follows. It reads the residual carbon output, movement patterns, mass distribution.
Not human. Feline. Possibly two. Their warmth registers briefly, then vanishes under broken roof tiles.
Another false positive.
The drone turns slightly, scanning the building once more. No readable access points. No active biometric keys. No authorised entry logs.
It logs the location as “unsanctioned dwelling, zero threat profile” and resumes its route.
Behind the warped metal door of the third-floor unit, silence holds, but something breathes inside.
The Scarcity Engine has only just begun.
The city breathes in silence. Systems flicker on, long after the world above has stopped watching.
If the story resonates with you, if you hear the echoes in the quiet, you can help keep the signal alive.
Like. Comment. Share.
Or fuel the archive with a coffee.
Every signal strengthens the next transmission.
Stay with us. Part 2 follows soon, until then take a look at some of my other posts.
