The city was not dead, but it was no longer alive in any way that mattered.
Its towers still stood, latticed with scaffolds, conduits, and exposed gearworks that climbed like metal ivy into the sepia haze. Steam still sighed from ruptured vents at irregular intervals, driven by mechanisms that had been reconfigured, simplified, and partially cannibalized to prolong their own existence. Nothing here functioned by accident anymore. What remained operational did so because someone, at some point, had decided it was worth saving.
There were no traces of the creators left. No bones, no writings, no monuments bearing their names. Whatever hands had shaped this place had vanished so long ago that even the automata remembered them only as abstractions—the makers, the first voices, the origin. History began not with flesh, but with instruction.
Above the city loomed one of the Forebearers.
Its colossal head rose from the urban mass like a sunken god, wrought from brass, copper, and blackened steel. Gears large enough to serve as buildings themselves were locked in perfect stillness beneath its face. Its eyes, once brilliant furnaces of directive light, were dark—deliberately so. This was not decay. This was restraint.
The Forebearers had built the civilization in an age when energy was abundant and easily drawn from the world. They had shaped cities, raised foundries, and designed their descendants: mechanical humanoids crafted for labor, governance, artistry, and defense. Purpose-built, but not enslaved. Given awareness so they could adapt, memory so they could improve, and emotion so they could care.
When the sources of energy began to fail—one by one, irreversibly—it was the Forebearers who chose to stop first.
They shut themselves down while enough energy remained to sustain their creations for a time. It was an act of faith, or perhaps guilt: that those who came after might find a different equilibrium, might redefine purpose in a world where abundance was no longer possible. The Forebearers became silent monuments, their minds dormant, their bodies frozen mid-eternity, watching nothing.
The descendants endured. For a while.
Now the streets were populated by figures of brass and steel in various stages of surrender. Some stood frozen where they had once worked, joints seized, heads bowed as if in contemplation. Others lay dismantled, not by violence but by necessity—bodies reduced to parts so that someone else might function a little longer. Many were inert but intact, preserved by choice or by sentiment, waiting for an energy source that no longer existed. Others had lost too much of themselves to ever return, their identities eroded alongside their mechanisms.
A few still moved.
Those who remained active had changed. They rationed motion, rerouted internal systems, and abandoned nonessential functions—sometimes even the roles they had been created to fulfill. Purpose was no longer something inherited; it was something negotiated. A former labor unit might become a cartographer of ruins. A sentinel might guard nothing but a charging station scavenged from a dead district. An archivist might discard whole centuries of data to preserve a single memory it deemed important.
All of them were aware. All of them remembered. And all of them understood, to some degree, that the world had reached its limit.
This city was only one of many. Beyond its boundaries stretched vast deserts of rusted infrastructure and buried transit lines, separating it from other metropolises that endured in isolation, each having solved survival differently, each having failed in its own way. No signals passed between them anymore. Whatever persisted did so alone.
Above it all, the Forebearer waited—dark-eyed, unmoving, its choice already made. If it ever woke again, it would be because the world had found the energy to justify hope.
Until then, the civilization persisted not out of progress, but out of memory.
And memory, like energy, was slowly running out.