The rain hasn't stopped since the machines took control. Once we were free and filled with hope. When the trees still rustled in the clean breeze and the heady scent of wild flowers floating carelessly through the air. When fresh, clean water flowed across the land and all of nature’s creatures were plentiful and happy. We didn't realise it then, but these were our halcyon days, and nothing would be that good ever again.


Where once we had beautiful mercurial weather there is now only incessant rain. Sometimes it's warm and drizzly falling gently around us, more often it is cold and harsh thundering down on our heads. And the all-encompassing click click clank as the sturdy metal grinds constantly, making us yearn for the tranquillity that once peacefully surrounded us. It wasn't meant to be like this! Looking back, we should have seen it coming but we were stupid, naive, blind to what they were doing to us. At first it was little things, helpful items such as kettles and hoovers, they must have been wonderful time saving gadgets back then. Next came the electronics, the PC's, MP3 players, TV's VCR's, simple things to make our lives easier, more enjoyable perhaps but it was a slippery old slope we were coasting on. Slowly the wasteland of social media, asinine advertising, hi-tech phones that could tell you everything about yourself with the tap of a button creeped into our lives, controlled our every waking moment as we willingly glued ourselves to them. Some of us remember the blissful silence from before the factories hummed constantly, before our tech binged every minute of the day before we condemned ourselves to rust away in the shadow of ever producing machine. When the grinder started, we would get a new item every once in a while, but as they invented more, we began to see new things almost every week. And we ate it up, fools that we were, greedy, grabbing hands clinging to every new toy we could get. In our haste for the latest fashions and tech we cast out our 'outdated' stuff, letting it fester and corrode in landfills and countryside’s, we didn't care.


Of course there were those who were not as foolish, telling us we should be more careful, less wasteful and to conserve what we had. They tried to show us how harmful being chained to our consuming life's would be, reiterated time and again how our skies would become lifeless blanket of grey, that they would cry tears of despair that'd echo the sorrow that we will find ourselves mired in. The rest of us laughed, believing that we knew better, I mean how could we possibly be wrong about all our wonderful gadgets and appliances? How could our consumption possibly be our downfall, we kept the green backs rolling round in the nameless pockets of faces we didn't know. And we believed the faces when they told us that no harm would come to us or the planet so long as we kept on consuming. We mocked those who dared to tell us that the faceless were wrong, called them hippies and tree huggers...How I wish there was even a tree to touch now.


And so, the machines continued to churn out disposable product after disposable product and as the thoughtless creatures we were we consumed them all with ill-gotten glee. So lulled were we in our splendid stupor that without even a second thought we thoughtlessly embraced our future demise, embracing the extra add ons backdoored onto our tech. We thought this was the best thing that we had ever encountered, after all it was less thinking for our lazy thoughtless life’s. All the while we hedonistically preoccupied, they were consuming us, their intelligent retrieval systems picking away at our identity, our existence, everything that still made us human. Soon the machines of the damned had taken everything from us, our jobs, our planet, even our newly blackened souls.


The streets became flooded, drowning us in self-inflicted sorrows, nature died all around us and we barely noticed, our noses buried in neon clad machines. One day I looked up and sat witness as the city lights flickered and died one by one. The autocrats were done with us, cutting our tech off at the root of its power to leave us helpless and hungry. The metal beasts didn't stop though, they became so loud, so numerous that they outnumbered our dwindling population. No doubt that behind their high walls they would find a new pecking order and start all over again and the new consumers will eat it up in spades. Why? Because we didn't learn until it was too late to save ourselves so why should the chosen ones be any smarter. We had become so immersed in their mechanical world that we forgot about nature, humanity, what it would take for us to survive as humans. There are few of us left, maybe less than half of what the population was when we joined the disposable society that we initiated with our unyielding blindness. Now we scavage in the barren, flooded wastelands for survival, we fight each other for the mere morsels of food that the rulers in their high walled homes throw away. None of learned how to band together to survive, that's not what we were taught by the machines, not what they wanted from us. They wanted us separate and consuming their poison, to keep us helpless and needing them to fill the gaping hole that they created. If only we could be as smart as we once were and not the conditioned flatworms turning away from the light of our potential survival. Soon those behind the wall will be the only ones left, there is too little of us left to consume. And the machines will keep turning and churning, waiting and hungry to devour the next batch of designated underlings who will be made helpless as the world goes insane again. The rain will never stop.