it started one night
when the moon sulked behind the clouds,
and the air buzzed with the sound of something unnatural.
not birds, not planes.
just cold, unfeeling machines
drifting against the wind’s will,
junkyard ghosts looking for a fight.
no one knew where they came from,
but the bastards were ours.
man’s great pride and inevitable mistake:
to build what he doesn’t understand,
to send it soaring into the sky
and call it progress.
then came the orbs.
smooth as polished emeralds
gleaming like they’d been forged
in some black star’s furnace.
no rivets, no seams, no blinking lights—
just quiet, humming judgment
from an enormous void we thought was empty.
our junkyard ghosts looked fragile,
wings bent, rotors spinning like drunk spiders.
they moved in straight lines, predictable,
while the orbs curved through the sky
moving like whispers of a language
older than time itself.
and when they clashed,
it wasn’t a war,
it was a slaughter.
men in suits argued on screens,
pointing fingers at each other
while their creations were crushed like ants.
“defense budgets,” they said.
“countermeasures.”
as if the sky gave a damn
about our bureaucratic bullshit.
and all the while,
down below,
we drank ourselves blind
under the flickering glow of bar signs.
some prayed to gods
they didn’t believe in.
others wrote poetry no one would read.
but most just stared at the sky,
watching our junkyard ghosts looking for a fight
and losing.
they fell one by one,
burning bright as they tumbled.
our man-made birds and blades,
our drones and flying dreams—
reduced to ash
against the cold, calculated cruelty
of their orbiting gods.
but here’s the rub:
the orbs didn’t care about us.
we weren’t the target,
just collateral damage.
they were here for our toys,
our arrogance,
our need to scrape at the stars
like desperate whores.
one by one, the orbs descended.
more silent than death,
merciless, cosmic executioners—
the kind who don’t bother with last words,
just the unrelenting swing
of the reapers scythe.
and when the last of our machines fell,
the sky went dark.
we should’ve learned then,
but we didn’t.
we kept building,
sending new junkyard ghosts
into a sky that didn’t want them,
still looking for a fight we couldn’t win.
and somewhere,
in the cold reaches of hell and beyond,
the orbs are still watching,
waiting,
ready to remind us
that we’re nothing more
than ants on the edge of the abyss.
so pour another drink.
raise your glass to the ghosts,
to the machines we built
and the arrogance that made us think
we could conquer the stars.