Hummingbird 4512

The dome seals away the stars; the world of mortals swallows the night. Mars in the future is a vast industrial machine that runs endlessly beneath lights that never go out. Oxygen has a price. Emotions are regulated. Death is processed like any other task. A person’s existence amounts to nothing more than an employee number and data that can be erased at any time. Longsi, a worker at an oxygen refinery, watches a coworker die in an accident. The loss of a life is casually reduced to a subcontractor’s compensation payout, and the cracks in the humanity he had numbed for years suddenly split wide open. In this rotting apocalypse, where everyone lives like a machine and machines are learning to act human, a faint ember of humanity quietly burns to life beneath the silent steel dome.