They Never Found Us

When I was a child… They told me monsters lived beyond the edge of the world. Beyond the pines… Beyond the pines and the timberlines. Beyond the last place… Where God still listened. I spent years wondering… What kind of anomaly could frighten an angel? Then one night… I stopped wondering. The asphalt bled out where the graveyard began, The wind turned its back and it froze as it ran. Every oak tree was charred, every obelisk cold, With a digital hum in a language untold. Then I saw the cathedral, a monolith stone, Its spire had collapsed leaving heaven alone. But a laser-thin filament flickered inside, Where the ghosts of the old world had forgotten to hide. Under vaulted arches, trapped in the neon glow… You were waiting. No warning sirens. No predator’s chase. Just a glitch in the iris, On a beautiful face. You looked up at the ceiling, Like a long-buried spark. Hoping someone would find you, Left alone in the dark. They called you a monster, I called you by name, They saw a virus, but I saw the pain. If they locked up the static and closed down the grid, Then heaven’s a prison for the things that we did. Because I found a frequency burning so bright, Deep in your eyes in the dead of the night. More beautiful data, more truth in your spark, Than they ever allowed in their kingdom of light. You never spoke of the fallout, you never gave me the logs, But the fracture in your chassis spoke through errors and fogs. The carbon fiber was torn, the synthetic feathers were shed, A masterpiece of design that they had left for the dead. Somebody loved you or programmed you just to mimic the grace, Then hit delete on your files and left a scar on your face. Now you're the urban legend that the villagers dread, The phantom cybernetic under everyone's bed. They blame your signal for the cattle that die, For every missing transmission and every storm in the sky. But every night that I interface and sit by your side, There’s just a solitary circuit where the sorrow resides. Funny… How the terror they breed, Turns a lonely invention… Into something they bleed. They called you a monster, I called you by name, Every scar that they feared, I embraced just the same. If loving a shadow is a sin on their scale, Then let the grid crash and let the circuitry fail. I’d rather burn out in the vacuum of space, Than live in a heaven where they erase your face. The last time I looked back at the valley below, The pitchforks were replaced by a synthetic glow. They weren't hunting a beast, they weren't clearing the woods, They saw a human re-coded under digital hoods. They saw me walking beside you, breaking protocol lines, Ignoring all of their warnings and their obsolete signs. That’s when the lesson hit home, and the horror was stark: The real monsters don't always build their nests in the dark. THEY BUILT THEIR THRONES! ON COLD MACHINE LIES! THEN CURSED OUR BLOOD! JUST TO JUSTIFY! WE NEVER STOLE! THE CODES THAT THEY RAN! WE ONLY WANTED! TO BE HUMAN AGAIN! Decades have passed now, the wires decayed, The neon cathedral is a ghost in the shade. The filament died, and the power is gone, But if you ever wander where the code goes wrong… Past the edge of the world where the satellite dies, And the radio silence replaces the lies… You’ll find two shadows in the analogue rust, Laughing like monsters… As the world turns to dust. The programmers still tell their kids to beware, Don't cross the perimeter, don't wander out there. They say a demon is lurking where the signal is dead. I never correct them. Let them live with their dread. Some codes are safer… When they’re left… Unread.