I awoke to a dead world.

My eyes opened to the ruined husks of London and Paris, to the submerged carcass of Manhattan,

to the burnt desert that the once lush Amazon rainforest had become.

The Pacific Ocean was a black expanse, crisscrossed by the bright scars of molten lava.

The newly barren grounds of Southeast Asia were covered in crystallized rock.

It was a world without birds or grass or oxygen.

A world of deafening silence.

Then I remembered the attack, the invasion, the cataclysm that had killed the world, the

straight edge starships bombing our cities, boiling our seas, vanquishing our atmosphere.

I knew immediately that I was alone, more alone than any single human had ever been before.

Yet I felt compelled to look for survivors.

I held onto a vague notion of hope, to the childish idea that, impossible as it was,

somehow everything would be okay.

I scattered my fleet of drones off into the desolation.

I searched through empty office buildings covered in radioactive dust.

I combed flooded subway networks and train stations and had my machines fly in formation

over endless expanses of scorched earth.

I scanned the inside of tunnels, barns and museums.

I was methodical and desperate at once.

By the end of the first month, my fear of solitude had been validated.

This global de facto graveyard was a monochromatic rainbow of skeletons.

Stacked in trenches, abandoned on sidewalks scattered over fields and huddled together

...