You're going to lead us to the bowels of the earth, to found a kingdom that lasts a millennium.
Right?
What kind of animal would have such a thought?
A god?
No.
A delusional ape watching itself die on multiple screens.
It's a fact: no one who could actually drag us from this tissue—this damp lattice of wet paper and dopamine—would be narcissistic enough to believe they could. That's the paradox. Those brave enough to face the genocide of all things human are brave for the wrong reasons. And the right ones—the ones made of marrow and mercy—are disemboweled before they learn to speak. Swallowed whole by the machine, digested by routine.
Morality died in the dark and was buried in the biohazard bin behind a strip mall. The rats held the funeral. The priest was a drone.
We're looking for a pulse in a landfill of branded plastic.
But hush—listen.
In the lull between LED flickers, where the world's roar briefly stutters, there's a faint, unfamiliar tenderness—like a mother's hum trapped in a baby monitor left on in an abandoned apartment—reminding you something precious might still exist.
And yet—
There, in the syrup-thick dream-state, while you float in that purple-black bath where memories distort, a voice speaks. Low. Crooked. Familiar.
"It's you I made to save this world."
With your art. With your words. With your trauma.
You are the perfect sacrament—two parts broken, one part divine. Enough to rise from ash and scream a new gospel into the soot.
But that feeling—like all holy things—is fleeting. It slips through your fingers like melted wax.
Motivation? A lie. You need discipline. But the world has bruised you too much for that. You can't build anything. You're surviving. Hiding under damp cardboard, watching the ceiling warp in the rain. It doesn't even acknowledge you. Its silence is perfect.
Each day: resources scarcer.
Each day: conditions harsher.
And we—
We are locusts under fluorescent tubes, sealed beneath the plexiglass of late capitalism. Eating each other between episodes, dreams, and half-heard cries for help. Gnawing the soft meat of our neighbors' hope. Pressing our compound eyes against the transparent ceiling—watching the giants above us point and laugh, their breath fogging our sky. Just enough oxygen pumped in to keep us frantic. Just enough light to show us what we're eating.
We thought we were chosen. We thought the stars were watching. But the sky never blinked.
This planet is so large, you can't even tell it's round. Us monkeys scurry over it—infinitesimally small—fighting over flesh, like we've done from the start. Like we will until the end.
The majority? Perfectly content in name-brand pajama pants, waiting for the next promised drop of serotonin, believing this—this—is the bread of life.
But this isn't sustenance. This is slop. This isn't art. It's anesthesia—a steady drip for the masses.
And you—you think you can build the kingdom? Forge a new covenant from the rot? You think you'll save us?
Or are you just stuck here? In the box. With the rest of us. Wings torn. Mandibles clicking. Another locust in the swarm.
So at what point do you start chewing the walls? At what point do you leap into the shapeless—a world you've only seen in shadows flickering across your corrugated cell, cast by light leaking through pinholes you use to breathe?
At what point do you give up hope?
Or is hope the point? Is that what makes us human—the persistence of a useless emotion? To hope, to love, to reach for happiness even if it means torching every comfort we ever built?
Maybe that's it. Maybe we're supposed to innovate our way to the stars—on the backs of bodies, on the bones of children, on the wreckage of earth.
The choice is yours.
But if you ever crawl out of the box—if you make it to my drywall kingdom, if I see you skittering beneath the fluorescent light—I will crush you with my shoe. I will wipe the blood. Make the walls glossy again.
And because you're a big insect—larger than a fly, smaller than a lizard—I might feel something. Guilt. A pulse of pity. A flicker of doubt.
Was there an echo of sentience?
But it will pass. Just like the sound a cockroach makes under your heel—wet, then gone. That's all you'll be. A sensation. Then silence.
But maybe this is just how it's always been. Old men clutch their newspapers, point to kids with inked skin and glittered eyes, and cry: "The world is worse than it's ever been."
And maybe the wet underneath my shoe is not just the remnant of sensation before silence—but true horror. The death of sentience itself.
Because every old man has said the same thing. Every generation thinks this is the one—that the messiah will reign, or the cleansing flames will come.
But old men die.
And the world keeps spinning.
And here you are—
Still in the box.
Mandibles clicking against the walls.
Thinking you hear God in the sound of your own chewing.
Still believing—against all evidence, against all reason—that you're the locust who will finally eat through to paradise. That your particular hunger is holy. That your specific gnawing is gospel.
Two parts broken.
One part divine.
Zero parts different from the rest.
The pinholes watch like stars that were never watching. The walls taste like tomorrow, which tastes like yesterday, which tastes like cardboard soaked in the saliva of things that used to dream.
And somewhere, in another box, another locust is having the exact same revelation, writing the exact same manifesto, believing with the exact same fervor that they alone understand the architecture of escape.
This is the real joke—not that we're trapped, but that we each think we're the first to notice the walls.
