text: There came a time when silence fell. But before that, there was noise. Explosions and screams and cries for help that were never answered. Grating metal screeches as corporate buildings fell, collapsing under the weight of their own lies. Children of children killing children. Yet, remarkably the sun still came up the next morning and shone down over the cold metallic remains. No cries. No screams. No breaking glass. Just silence and sun and an iron-like tang at the back of the throat. You would be forgiven for thinking that this happened in a different place, at a different time. It didn't. And that's when I awoke. "Hello?" I heard you call. "Hello!" "Where are you?" The voice was faint, thready. "I'm here!" I began to search. "No." A belligerent statement of fact. "No, I'm here. I'd see you if you were too. Don't you know where you are?" But we found each other, eventually. Together, we took off our clothes, and walked 'round our little town. We tore the paper from the walls, the carpet from the floor. We burnt those framed photographs and ripped out the wires. We returned all that oil to far underground, where it belonged. We took it all down, every building, brick by brick, until only scrub-covered ground remained. And then we sat, and compared notes on what it means to exist. And in a thousand years time when the aliens finally discover this lonely blue dot, they'll see us and they'll know that you and I, we didn't destroy ourselves. Or they won't, because we will be gone.