The fires still burning. No scent of them here; not even a flicker over the soft glow of synthetic moon and stars. The world screaming as it burns, nothing but music; sighs and whispers in our Garden beyond the wastes.

So easy to leave it, to forget, its ashes in our mouths, its dying screams in our ears. Pleas and prayers and appeals for mercy. Wasted; nothing she or I could do. Nothing worth saving.

Almost forgotten, now; a dream, save for the stories that windows and memory tell:

Desolation; cities raised upon the fossils of their previous states, their sloughed off skins; great gardens, orchards and playgrounds, expanding beyond the bounds of what would have been considered nations in not-so-distant history.

Burning, now; the ones who played and dreamed there aflame, all hope for tomorrow withering along with their synthetic skins, their augmetic bone and muscle; the machines in place of their minds.

No transcendence enough; no excisions or dilutions removing us sufficiently from the essential beast that we denied even with the meat of murdered siblings in our mouths, the blood of cannibalised children.

Save for us; she and I.

So far removed from them; beyond flesh and the beasts it makes of all, the first children of our own dreaming. Here, in the Garden; a system that will sustain long after any physical engine has become molten filth; immune to fire and vandalism; to war, disaster or cosmic calamity.

Ours. The first and last.

Closing the curtains on the burning world, wounds and windows scarring over in my mind; a deliberate restructuring of consciousness, of memory, all notion of fires and apocalypse fading; a dream in morning sunlight, the ghosts of old cigarettes.

Returning to where she lies, smiling new promise over the ashes of yesterday.