Glass and steel blades slice through choking smog above a forest of metallic trees, every trunk lifeless and stripped of leaves. Branches of wire sheathed in rubber bark twist and interconnect; their xylem pumps not water but live current to a network of sense-blunting coruscating screens. Lured in by dreams of greener grass, subdued animals with the wildness bred out of them let the seductive glow envelop them until their minds atrophy. Nobody bothers looking up: the blue sky is forever obscured by an amorphous, hovering grayness sourced from distant industrial fires. They gather inside atop flat concrete slabs that suffocate the desperate roots below yearning to reclaim the soil. Everything else is flat too: walls, colors, expressions, affect.

Their anonymous faces hungrily slurp up B-grade microwavable dinners made of eviscerated cattle. Beneath their feet is a black river of excreta – thick sludge flushed away to anywhere-but-here. Omnipresent machines chug and sputter, belching noxious smoke that swirls and mixes with the alien clouds exhaled by the factories. But this is not the only pollution; they wake up to caustic buzzing and are ceaselessly assailed by all manner of unnatural screeching, clicking, and beeping until a device that simulates the forgotten sounds of insects lulls them to sleep again.

Empty days cycle ad nauseum, each one a facsimile of the one before it, until the arbitrary segments they call time blend together indecipherably like ink repeatedly Xeroxed (even their words are corporate property). They filter bitter stimulants through paper to keep them awake and slug another liquid to knock them back out, each cup tossed aside to become drifting refuse in a toxic ocean with more plastic than fish. What enchants them? Stories of other lives richer than theirs. What gives them hope? The illusion that things are always getting better. They speed toward this mirage like heat waves on the highway, ignorant of the impending crash. They make tiny copies of themselves and send them forth into a barren future with absolute faith that it will be different for their children.