A hundred years later, Los Angeles was no longer a city, not even ruins—just a wasteland, a graveyard that had outgrown the memory of the living. The skyline had been erased in fire and atom, leaving behind not towers but grotesque buttes, formations that clawed upward like Monument Valley imitations, though their bones were steel beams, shattered concrete, and melted glass fused together by the war’s fury. They stood like mockeries of nature, monuments to a civilization that had drowned itself in arrogance.
The air was a permanent dusk, a sky dimmed with radioactive haze that had become the new atmosphere. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the creaks of the waste-buttes as the wind gnawed at them, hollow whistles echoing through collapsed subway tunnels and broken sewer lines. No birds, no machines, no voices—only the long, slow exhale of a planet reclaiming what had been stolen.
And yet, in this obscurity, figures wandered. Shapeless, draped in rags blackened with ash, their faces hidden by masks scavenged from centuries-old wreckage. They drifted like wraiths through the skeleton of the city, searching not for survival—for survival had long since lost its meaning—but for memory. Some carried fragments of the old world: a rusted license plate, a melted child’s toy, the warped frame of a photograph no longer bearing an image.
Los Angeles was aware of them. The buttes loomed like eyes, watching. The wasteland itself seemed to mourn, its grotesque formations groaning in the wind as though whispering accusations: This was your dream. This was your promise. Look at what you made of it.
The figures said nothing. They walked in obscurity, into shadows that had no end. The California dream had not just died—it had been entombed, its bones scattered across a wasteland pretending to be mountains.
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