The city was theirs. The smoke stacks, the sewer lines, and the power cables, they belonged to them. They powered those things, and in that time, it was rightfully theirs. With their rectangular metal sheets for heads, with their drone voices and their achromatic bodies, they owned everything.

Humans gave them muse, innovation, and they gave us our life, a fair trade, because Machines can't make themselves, can they? They need a spark, an idea. They need ruled and direction to begin, to birth. If you couldn’t think, if your ideas had run dry as bone, you were buried, processed, and made into fossil fuel. Everyone that could escape retreated back to the country and lived in a hut, like ancient days, and prayed they didn't have to visit the city for a long, long time.

With each passing day I grew fearful, fearful that the cities that they were constructing would one day reach my refuge, and I’d have no where to hide, all too obvious in my fleshy form powered by my beating human heart. In the night, I heard sounds from the city. Whistles and dings, sometimes communication, sometimes the moans of the dying reached my ears, and I knew that they were building, building something big. My mind would spin, imagining all sorts of things. My demise, my sister’s demise, all by the hands of the Rusted Ones, the ones that thought without brains and who spoke without mouths.

Then one day, the clanking sounds stopped, and the hissing of steam sounded so close and so near, that I thought it was some sort of giant snake, come to devour. My sister woke, and I placed a hand over her mouth, and told her with a finger pressed to my lips to be still and quiet. Her eyes stared at me, scared and curious, and I thought to myself how young she was, and how unused to sleeping under the stars she had been a few months before.

Minutes passed, and my heart thudded loudly in my ears, and I knew that their the city had reached our front door, and that we could not run.

They took my sister first, holding her little body to their heads, talking back in forth in whistles that crackled with static. They took her because she was so young, and imagination was so fresh in children of her age. I waved my arms and I yelled for them to put her down, tears rolling fast down my cheeks and stinging the cuts that had formed at the corner of my mouth. I looked upwards, trying to see those fathomless eyes that I knew lurked, if only I could see past the shadows.

Metal came down, seemingly from the clouds above me, but I knew it was their version of feet, and they had pinned me to the ground. I tasted mud, the tang of rust that had flecked off from their bodies thick on my tongue. My only sister, though she wouldn’t be dead, she would be mindless, staring like a zombie through milky white eyes onto a world that would hold no color for her anymore. She would be bland, useless, and worse than dead.

Before, I had been frightened. I had run when my mother had told me too, grabbing my little sister’s hand in my own. I hadn’t gone back for her, despite my sister’s cries that we should. I felt guilty, and knew that I should have said something, done anything, at least gone back to know the truth.

This time, I wasn’t frightened. I called up to them and told them that they should take me instead. Though I couldn’t see their eyes, I knew they were studying me. Slowly, my sister was lowered to the ground. The static voices returned, and this time, it wasn’t in a rapid string of ones and zeros, it was in English.

“If you lie, and you do not imagine, you and she will die.”

I nodded once, gathering my courage as they set her down and she scrambled backwards into the safety of our little hut. Around us, people were watching, peering out of their own huts, eyes rounded and breath stilled. When I was gone, I knew those people would take her in, would keep her safe. She was one of our last. Children were rare now.

They were merciful. They crushed my body between their metal hand, holding me close to their rusted heads as they drained my creativity, my imagination, and my muse. My eyes went white, my pupils murky and gaze distant.

Rain had begun to fall, large thick droplets splashing on my face and arms. Before my eyes closed, before I gave into the sleepy abandon that had surrounded me, I looked down at my own arm, and thought I saw little patches of rust begin to form.

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