Ephemeral. noun. A pnt that grows, flowers, and dies in a few days.adjective. Lasting one day only.

  20 — ThresherDaelus Thresh oversaw the machine’s operation. It was a long, tall rectangur shape, bigger entirely than the town he had grown up in. It hovered above the cityscape just low enough to be able to pass over the tallest antenna.

  Great light poured from the bottom of the machine. Much of what its inner workings were designed to do were oriented downwards. It was the business end.

  Daelus slowly moved it into pce, over a tightly packed tangle of human history. Structures, built over centuries, representing countless lives lived, many cultures and histories blended together yet distinct, were now below it. In the control ptform, it was no more than simply the next work zone. The machine had done its job a hundred times and would do it many hundreds more.“We’re go in the elemental storage,” shouted a workmate. “How’s the position look, Thresh?”

  Daelus held up his hand. Though the machine was kilometers long, the positioning had to be exact to the millimeter. “Almost,” he said.The other man came up behind Daelus, looking through the window of their narrow control ptform. It too hovered, but a safe distance away. The gss that protected them from the harsh atmosphere — not necessarily toxic, but filled with micro-debris, and very cold — had enhancements that allowed them to see both the machine and what it was being aimed at through the haze of dust.“And,” Daelus said, very slow, “I think that’ll be fine. Precise to two hundred micro-meters.” He smiled up at the other one present in the control room. “I wanted one-fifty but there’s too much vibration due to the dust from the st run.” “Okay, go,” said the other man, who’s name Daelus couldn’t remember. The man didn’t care about the precision of Daelus’ work. It didn’t impact his work. The man moved to another console and activated the controls.The glow of the machine’s underside increased tenfold. The structures — Daelus was told they were uninhabited — vanished into the light. It would be the st time anyone saw them.

  The control ptform vibrated slightly, steadily, filling the air with a tremendous low hum. Its stabilizers and dampeners were holding. An engineer one level below was making sure of it.“Numbers going up,” the other man said. A dispy presented a chart of all elements, or at least the first three hundred or so. It was still overkill. It began to show quantities ticking up rapidly.

  Daelus took his attention away from his own console for a moment to watch. The usual elements were filling up fast. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, silicon, iron, a dozen other metals and minerals. Those weren’t the gauges that Daelus was staring at intently.Daelus knew he wouldn’t be able to see if there were, in fact, still people down there, based on the chart of elements. He had never memorized what elements were present in a human body nor if those elements were necessarily rare in construction material or everyday objects. He saw Selenium and Bromine ticking up a miniscule amount. Did it mean anything? Daelus’ education had not prepared him to know if it mattered or not. Still, the thought nagged at him.

  He knew it was practically impossible that everyone had been evacuated from today’s reconstitution zone. There were hundreds of homes down there. And even if there were no people, there could be birds, or a cat…

  “How do we compare to your charts?” the other man said, snapping Daelus back to the here and now.“Getting close,” Daelus said. “Low on Aluminum, and as usual the Silicon is way over. Carbon looks good.” Daelus’s console compared the intact to what the machine would output. Even if the numbers didn’t match, today they had enough in reserves to complete this zone.

  “And, done.” said the other man. Daelus looked up, the glow now dim enough to see the nothing that remained below the towering machine. It was now a featureless surface, ft enough that a marble could be pced on it and it would stay put. It was a gap. An empty space, serving no purpose other than to be immediately refilled.

  Daelus verified once more that the positioning was still good. It needed to be. Things needed to line up.

  “And, commencing,” Daelus said to the room, his own controls coming to life with his hands flying over it, signaling all processes to begin, in which order, with which precise timing.

  The glow returned, but much more directed. Rather than covering the entire space at once, it was a single beam. Where it hit the earth, new structures formed. They were designed with precision, clean, ordered, and most importantly, represented what was considered the ideal, the pinnacle of culture.

  The beam created halls and pzas and towering structures, pces of business and habitation, each distinct, but all uniform. It was a cityscape that was meant to represent a glorious past, from a time when architecture was majestic and vish. It would pull the world from its current chaotic and unpredictable form into an image of stability, and provide its inhabitants with the comfort of familiar things — expected things.

  The Benefactors were creating a new world.

  I found the view haunting.

  I was in my new ft. It wasn’t a studio anymore. Distance from the center had allowed me more space, even at half the income. I had a proper kitchen, which was a good thing since now I actually needed to eat rather than it just being for show, or comfort. It was on the outskirts.

  Unlike the old one, which just had the one window looking out into a brick wall, this one’s view was stunning. The building sat on a bit of a hill (though it felt odd knowing that this hill was designed, just like the rest of this pce) and the window faced towards the city center, or at least, the part of the city everyone called the center.

  I remembered parts of it. The zones. The towering machine. What was unmade to make room for this.

  Daelus’ memories continued to come back to me, even after he ceased to exist — memories that were supposed to have been cast into a fog. They, either the delegation or the Benefactors, didn’t want anyone remembering how we got here.

  This was both exhirating and gut wrenching. Sometimes the resurfaced memory was a fvor or a smell bringing me back to a happier, more peaceful time. Sometimes it was the silhouettes of the structures when the sun hit just right and there was just enough haze in the air to remind me of those gaps, those empty spaces, that I — that Daelus — had been tasked to fill.

  That I had been asked to stand by and watch while the inevitable machine of the Benefactor’s Will reshaped the world. Stand by, watch, do nothing. It’s not as if I would have done anything. Back then, I thought it all sounded grand.It was a lifetime ago. I was Sheam now, and I lived in that new world that the Benefactors had created in their image, and continued to somehow rule secretly for an unknown number of years. They said centuries, but as far as anyone knew it had only been a few decades.

  It didn’t matter how long ago it was. The uncertainty was the point. It was anachronistic by design. The city itself was conceived to erase all sense of the progression of time or how its passage shaped humankind. It was meant to look like something out of the distant, yet eternal, past, and yet here it was, modern, new, fresh, clean.

  It was a past no-one could move on from.