When the smog isn’t too bad, you can see the thing looming over the skyline, rigged up awkwardly with all these lines and wires; a truly ugly man-made idol, whose cobbled-together appearance falls way short of its intended aesthetic majesty.

This image portrays a mass exodus from Megacity-3, one of the three major cities that remain in this late-stage era of human civilization. For the majority of its life, Megacity-3 was peaceful, and everybody got along with very little exception. After a few decades of uninterrupted tranquility, however, boredom began to set in. The city’s governing party assembled and decided it was time to give their people something to argue about. So, they pooled their influence to sanction the construction of a monolithic structure, intended to serve as a kind of spiritual figurehead, the idea being that the population would disagree on whether or not to submit to its “higher” authority. As construction on the figurehead came to a close, however, the population of Megacity-3 were more polarized in regards to what they should even call the thing. After a few weeks of bickering, everyone decided to just forget about the whole artificial divinity thing and treat the figurehead like the giant statue it is, at which point the government, peeved at the waste of time, effort, and money, started just inciting riots in the street. And still, nobody cared. The peoples’ indifference to this burgeoning tumult was so great, in fact, that it led to chronic, grandscale boredom — a Plague of Indifference. The result was citywide stagnation, a stillness so immense and contagious that the unaffected portion of the population (mostly politicians and public servants) decided to pack their bags and leave. With nobody left to work or maintain or manage or do much of anything at all, it’s only a matter of time before Megacity-3 will fall to ruin, overseen by the false god that heralded its demise.