The Wasteland
The future belongs to the Mad and the Grieving
The Interceptor screams across the salt flats. Max’s hands are welded to the wheel. Out of the white—just for a heartbeat—a face. A child’s face. Screaming. Blood at the mouth. The car swerves. The vision vanishes. He’s just a man, gripping leather, trying to breathe.
Your phone vibrates on the nightstand. A gentle hum. You glance at the lock screen. “One year ago today.”
A photo. A room. Late afternoon light slanting across two coffee cups. A book on the nightstand you don’t remember opening. Neither of them asked to remember.
Max is not a survivor. He’s a haunted organism. Trauma doesn’t stay in the past—it runs live, short-circuiting the present. A flash of a child he couldn’t save. A name whispered in the dark. These aren’t memories he pulls. They pull him. We call ours notifications.
The first time it hit me, I wasn’t ready. I was holding my phone like any other morning. The room was quiet. For a second, I couldn’t breathe.
The Photos app surfaces a highlight reel. Facebook shows a memory. The calendar you forgot to purge alerts: “Due Date.” The hospital portal still works. Your login credentials still valid. A gateway to a ghost I can’t touch.
I never deleted the portal login. Deleting it felt too final. Like signing something I wasn’t ready to sign. I told myself I wouldn’t open it again. But I did. Max lives in a wasteland because the world ended. We live in one because nothing does.
A portal remembers days no one else does. Appointments that never happened. Dates that exist only on a screen. Words typed once, never spoken, never sent, frozen in a server.
There are no funerals. No black clothes. No witness. Only motion. Only survival. Only the unprocessed dead riding along in your nervous system. Some memories, some data, some impossible to tell apart.
Max floors it. Tires scream. The engine screams. A child he couldn’t save flashes across the salt flat. Blood at the mouth. The past rips into the present. He cannot outrun it.
We scroll. Refresh. Switch apps. At 2 a.m., the screen fills a room too large. The archive is faster than we are. Every notification. Every “On This Day.” The wasteland is finite. The server farm is forever.
Every notification. A comment left under a photo: “You shouldn’t be moving on yet.” A text from someone who thinks they know your pain. Every expectation of how you should feel, who you should be. It does not matter.
Max’s world collapses into a scream. Ours continues. The world keeps functioning while yours has ended. Ghosts, absences, fragments—data and memory fused. You carry it. Witness it. Name it. Let it burn or let it settle. It is yours.
Max turns the war rig around. Anchors himself in the present. Fights for the living. We have a choice too. About the data.
Delete the photos? Archive the portal? Leave the calendar alert? Let the algorithm decide?
There is no “right” answer. Only the recognition: this is a choice no human has ever had to make. How to let things end in a world designed for infinite persistence.
Max lives in a wasteland because the world ended. We live in one because nothing does. In the desert, things decay. In the cloud, they wait.