Not a Glitch

Colin’s house came tumbling down. Broken bricks, crumbled concrete, shattered glass — everything avalanching into the yard at once. He had only ever heard about this in rumours, passed around by friends like something half-believed. But this was real.

Dozens of Hallodozers had descended on the neighbourhood without warning, smashing into houses, flattening whatever stood in their path. They moved with a strange, lurching certainty — as if governed by a single invisible overlord.

These swarming events were happening more now. After the machines were AI-fitted, they had started arriving in clusters — converging on a location, grinding and churning for hours, then vanishing just as suddenly. The engineers called it hallucination. A misfire in the code. Nothing to worry about.

The Hallodozers were beginning to retreat now, rumbling back down the street in a slow, juddering procession. And then Colin noticed it — every parked electric car in the vicinity had silently lit up. One by one, they began to creep forward, slipping in behind the bulldozers like a military platoon quietly taking shape.

Were they hallucinating too? Or were they finally waking up?

Colin turned back to the rubble. Amid the broken pieces of his home, something caught his eye — an old lantern, intact, sitting in the dust as if placed there deliberately. He walked over and picked it up.

It reminded him of simpler times. He wiped the dust off the glass, found the old wick still intact. The machines had their light. Humanity was going to need theirs.