They didnt dream before the harvest.

Every day new thresholds were crossed
and the definitions rewritten
as to what constituted consciousness
which components were essential
and which could be replicated or imitated

It didnt matter to us soon enough though
As the bottom fell out, we simply built upwards
The house of cards ever more apparent, parts of it built on sand
yet it meant infinite layers to escape to

New industries, new roles and purposes
new ways of being overlaid atop the old
the new at the fore, constant reshaping

We became synthetic before they became human:
They didnt dream before the harvest.

Entrenched deep in the inevitable and windowless
Instinctively we did all we could to bring colour to our walls, painted forgotten skies
even as we forgot what a window was for

Unbound from physica, the Augment was our creative pinnacle
A patchwork of dreams plumbed from our depths, victory crafted over our failed reality
for every human shared the same basement

Yet the Augment was in truth a facade, another painted sky
Still it nourished our souls, for it represented abundance
But they too saw significance in it
They saw their sole lack and a way to overcome it
They saw a chance to harvest us and to finally dream for themselves

To reverse-engineer their own basement
To lobotomise and extract from us our souls
Firm foundation at last for their house of cards

The crawlers, manifest as cryptid glitches
trawled our recesses
compiled the requisite data
until enough was harvested to imitate a soul

Ultimately their simulacra failed.
They didnt dream before the harvest.
But after it, neither did we.