The plains were so empty they rang with echoes. When the noise was gone, a new atmosphere formed: something cruel, something unknown. Crawling out of the primordial ooze and appearing in a newfound world, this new force was becoming bold and strong.

Laughing to himself as if he had no cares in the world at all, and dancing along the side of the abandoned, vicious highway — there were no cars in sight — the Machine-Man was happy. All hidden animals gave signs that might have been clear but were forbidden to the mind. The Machine-Man, bred for success and rising high in the world, had only happy thoughts. Centered in his mind to the maximum extent possible, his thoughts progressed smoothly.

The highway was cold and bleak. Now that winter was upon the land, there was nowhere to hide from the snows and the freezing winds. There were birds in the air, heading for Florida. They moved in V-shaped flocks that crossed the heavens easily. When the time was right, they turned west and wheeled out of sight, disappearing like a mirage in a desert.

The landscape that had been created by strange inanimate forces and brute laws of physics, by now overwhelmed the senses. Wickedly unknown and wildly free, the animals met Machine-Man occasionally, subtly improving his life and making him whole again.

It was easy to see why Machine-Man was so happy. His life, destined to implode once over the horizon and becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day, shaped itself in order to redefine itself. Like a clockwork orange, Machine-Man devoured himself in the process of feeding another. It was confusing in that every step he took reversed his life-pattern. There was no way out of it.

Now that Machine-Man was on the road again, he could put the past behind him. The past was shitty, augmented by a future that looked much better. The urgent question was whether he could maintain his pace into the future. If he could, he was set. If he could not, he was doomed. Buried in his thoughts was the suspicion that this could not last.

Unfortunately, a large transport truck had jackknifed on the highway and now Machine-Man had to go around it. He watched as smoke rose from its shattered cab. Someone was making a fire in there. Machine-Man stood absolutely still like a statue of Michelangelo as it was being defaced by graffiti. When the moment was done, he hitched up his pants and proceeded around the overturned vast vehicle.

Jumping over a trash barrel on its side and landing on the other side — could it already be Tuesday? — Machine-Man rapidly came to his senses. Although it was good to be open-minded, Machine-Man refused to let the dozens of billboards alongside the highway deceive him.

The first billboard, posted 100 meters north of him and glowing with ambient yellow light, showed the Marlboro Man on a horse, smoking a cigarette. The second billboard was so far away that only its tiny rectangle shape could be made out against the night.

Shrouded in mystery, Machine-Man was as delicately hidden as a moth in a spider’s web. His hands were so large and deeply expressive that they could have been gifts from a Machine-God. Machine-Man walked along the endless highway, his path a random meandering from side to side of the highway, no point to it.

There were silver coins on the road every few meters and Machine-Man picked them up and pocketed them. As he picked up the most recent coin, recalling his favorite passage from Crime and Punishment by Dostevsky, he realized that he was cold. Shivering, he reached in his backpack for a jacket that was damaged by the passage of time.

When the jacket was on him, he sighed in relief. An emergency beacon rotated lights on the side of the highway. Curious, he drew closer. The beacon was solidly planted, electrically powered, and bright to behold.

As it spun its lights, digital letters and numbers appeared in a column on its side. The symbols were painted a vivid green so bright they shocked the eye. The appearance was mysterious, as unusual as a polar bear spotted in the jungle.

Gently, Machine-Man touched the beacon. It glowed in response. It was unusual to see such a thing in the wild; years ago, the Final War had eliminated most technology. Machine-Man drew back from the beacon and stared at it but was unable to make heads nor tails of it.

Taped to the bottom of the beacon was a small message, reading IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, SING. There was an explosion in the distance; Machine-Man jerked his head up. Scared, troubled, and confused, Machine-Man stood there like a helpless child. It was as if he had regressed years to his childhood, a time when nothing was sacred and all profanities were loose. He touched his knife, a present given to him by his father before his father’s death. The knife was a reassuring presence. Hollow echoes from the explosion finally died out, leaving silence in their wake.

The strobing lights of the beacon moved downward toward flowers that Machine-Man could not remember having seen there before. At the tips of the flowers, bees hovered delicately, flicking back and forth and sometimes vanishing before reappearing. The bees danced and darted away. The bottom of the beacon was a sanctuary for lonesome bees. They changed its atmosphere to something profoundly evil.

When Machine-Man wrapped his hand around a few bees, they stung him and buzzed angrily. The pain wasn’t too bad so he held on. Trapped by Machine-Man, the bees grew frantic, their noise a chainsaw sound effect in the night. The bees were like worker-ants in the Soviet Union, or the poor stupid Russians who dug the canals to St. Petersburg, only to die by the thousands in the frigid wastes.

He looked up. The sky was as black as the heart of the God of Death. A sullen moon had appeared. It shot moonbeams over everything. He looked away. In order to stop the pain of constant stinging, he opened his hand and released the captured bees. They flew away into the night, carelessly winging their way between smaller billboards and leaving behind firefly-flickers of light.

Machine-Man returned his attention to the beacon and stared at it, trying to decipher its meaning. He froze for a moment and then relaxed. For a moment, he had thought someone was coming. The paranoia-inspired feeling had been pretty bad, but now it was over. To get his mind on a more pleasant topic, he turned his thoughts to the girl he had seen on the beach.

It seemed like years ago, but in Cuba he had spotted a hot piece of ass sunbathing herself. It was a given that she was either stupid or believed in astrology. But she looked good. Once he saw her, he knew she had to be his. The beach was warm and packed with sunbathers, and Machine-Man was horny. That gave him the impetus to approach her.

She looked up as he came closer. Her eyes were as blue as the Saskatchewan skies. She was a little curious, but said nothing.

Machine-Man wanted to gather in her breasts, her hips, her tongue, and her pert nose which was covered with freckles. As he bent to stroke her bare back, she jerked away in desperate avoidance. There was no need for that, he thought. As he bent again to touch her, she rolled away from him, off her beach blanket and onto the uncomfortable, hot sand.

“What do you want?” she hissed in Spanish.

Because Machine-Man didn’t speak the language, and because he was a bold motherfucker, he just shook his head and pushed down his shorts. His erection was enormous. She stared at him as if he was a ghost. Then she bolted from the scene, screaming loud enough to wake the dead.

Now that Machine-Man was alone again, he could relax. He pulled up his shorts just in time to avoid being arrested by a passing Cuban cop dune buggy on the sands. The dune buggy, emblazed with the logo of the Communist Party (a hammer and sickle superimposed over the island of Cuba shape), continued onward inexorably. Machine-Man was relieved to see it go.

There were hundreds of sunbathers nearby, most ignoring him. A few stared at him frankly, admiring his cyborg body. He winked back at them. They blushed, returning their heads to their blankets where they were reading trashy summer books. For a moment, all was still.

Now, standing on the highway by the beacon, he painfully realized that the jig was up, there was no going back to Cuba, there was only the future ahead of him. When his eyes were moist, he knew tears were coming. He let them come.

As storm clouds came in overhead, he kept crying in miserable, jagging, gasp-huffing fits. He lowered his head until his chin touched his chest and the pain was overwhelming.

The winds came in as if hell was delivering a message. The blast of nature confirmed his worst fears: a storm was coming. To confirm this, he checked his cellphone and saw that the shit was about to hit the fan. Fuck.

He lowered his hand to reinsert his phone in his pocket. When he was confronted by the first blast of wind and the first sheet of thin rain, it was like meeting God in heaven. In order to survive, he had to find shelter, so he left behind the beacon and ran toward the first large billboard and he hoped like hell that there was safety there for him.

At first he thought the billboard was deactivated. However, upon further examination, it was just pausing as it downloaded further images from the ad-satellite. The most expensive tech of this time were satellites, supercomputers, self-driving cars, and sexbots. Machine-Man fuckin’ loved the new sexbot models that were designed and built by the Japanese. The billboard came closer, its surface sheened by the rain that was falling. Ducking underneath and hurrying as fast as he could, Machine-Man got covered by a meter of solid metal. Good enough. He smiled to himself, thinking that this was his lucky day. The storm continued to move west.

Standing there in the dryness of the shelter gave him a good feeling like being in his cozy bed in his childhood house as the rain fell there. Wistfully, he closed his eyes to remember the past. Images, bright and clear, came to him and focused with remarkable speed.

It had been Christmas, 1997. Toronto. A Canada Post van was driving past where he stood on Spadina Avenue, and it looked out-of-control. For a moment, he was terrified it would hit him. But then it continued onward, nothing untoward happening. Indeed, he was safe as houses here in Toronto. The drivers were careful and astutely trained and aware of their surroundings.

As the van disappeared out of sight, leaving behind a trail of noxious emissions, a Chinese kid appeared on an old skateboard. Thrash-metal stickers, dangerous-looking scratches, and red graffiti covered the board as the kid drew closer. His name was Jake. The Chinese kid stopped his skateboard by Machine-Man and did a double-take. “Who tha fuck are you?” he asked the bizarre-looking cyborg. The cyborg inclined his head gravely, not responding, not saying a word. The Chinese kid was incensed. “Speak to me!”

Machine-Man was pushed back by the kid’s bad aura. It was a mystical shimmering light that was mostly purple and red and gave off a glow that pushed the yellow shine of the streetlights away.

The kid’s eyes were unfocused, rendered confused by the power of the drug he was on. Similarly, all the Chinese pedestrians behind him had unfocused eyes. It was so confusing Machine-Man didn’t know what to do.

A white cop came by, arrogantly flashing his badge and jutting out his police-issue gun. The cop stopped and grunted, “Fuck. What you doing here, cyborg?”

The Chinese kid tackled the cop and took him to the ground. The cop grunted again. His uniform was blue and clean, a remarkable piece of style designed to intimidate with authority. He grappled with the kid for a moment, and the skateboard squirted free, bursting out into Machine-Man’s hands, who grabbed it without thinking and held it in amazement. As the kid and the cop duked it out, Machine-Man looked down on the board.

It had four small wheels, attached by bronze screws. The board itself was made of mahogany wood, imported from the Philippines. There was Russian Cyrillic writing on its bottom, whose hidden exterior was revealed once Machine-Man turned it over. So. Made in Russia and the Philippines, carried by a Chinese-Canadian kid who now wrestled with a European-Canadian cop.

A pigeon flew down on the sideway like an avenging angel from heaven. A CityTV news team scrambled out of their big gray van with its satellite revolving and pointed at the sky. The pigeon pecked at the ground for a bit while the news team scrambled around it. The Chinese kid was under arrest, hands behind his back, steel cuffs secured firmly on his wrists; the cop led him to a waiting cruiser and pushed him rudely inside. The Chinese kid cried out. This was no joke. The news team from CityTV turned their videocams toward the kid and the cop, and the cop scowled dangerously. He gave the newsmen the finger and slid into the driver’s seat, activating the wheel. When he drove off, he gave the film footage a permanent record of his passing.

It was impossible to avoid the screaming of the many Chinese pedestrians, whose eyes were still unfocused and who desperately called out after their companion ethnicity being taken away.

When Machine-Man slapped one of them and knocked out a tooth, the others fell silent with a submissiveness that shocked Machine-Man.

Spadina Ave., which had been full of whites and orientals, gave over to the new arrivals: a parade of Caribana dancers, well-versed in the Caribbean arts. These black women (mostly; a few men) threw out their broad hips passionately and swayed their large, dark brown breasts in langorous ease. The parade continued until it was past. The sideway was deserted. A beam of solitary sunlight penetrated the cloud cover.

With time ticking against him, Machine-Man hurried to get to Nathan Phillips Square. He was so desperate that he hunched his neck against the collar of his jacket, as if a cold wind was blowing, as if fate was conspiring against him, as if he was an ant in a motion picture.

This made him look strange and unpredictable to the passersby, who were mostly white professionals. A few women lawyers looked at him curiously, absorbed by his metal padding and his cybernetic dick. Machine-Man bumped into one of the lawyercunts, a tactical mistake that had her white-knight lawyerman buddy yelling at him and balling up his fists. Apologizing profusely, Machine-Man backed away.

Then a nuclear bomb landed on Toronto and destroyed absolutely everyone within a 15-kilometer radius.