Tonight the city rings louder than most nights. Its walls and floors are alive with electric – they throb in sync with the shrieking pitch and drumming heartbeat in my ears. The pressure in my head can no longer be contained. I feel sick – I throw up.

I drag my wet leathered shoulder across the fence. Some of the panels are digital but they bear my weight nonetheless. I trudge forward, half-blind. I picture myself through the eyes of my pursuer. So kino – I’ve been shot. 

It’s too late for me. All I have left to give is this last defiance – to be gunned down in the grey rains like a dog and take joy in the aesthetics of my out-of-body imaginings, that it might inspire those who witness it. 

Ah my eyes. I pause again to catch my breath. Is that me wheezing? Ah my lungs.

We did nothing for too long. It hurts to admit it, much less to say, but our generation has failed yours. The only baton we pass on is a lesson in the follies of patience and passivity – in not believing your eyes over your ears. Just know there was no malice for you in our hearts, young brothers and sisters: only ignorance, denial and cowardice. Fight. Every day, fight. 

We grew up witnessing the first decline, were promised the momentum of history would drive us through it like a speed-bump. We dutifully abided. We couldn’t conceive the bait and switch done to us, maybe because we couldn’t conceive doing the same to you. 

It’s said every generation must rise to its own challenges. Ours was to recognise the nebulous rot that had emerged in every system before the era of singularities entrenched them to code. For a generation so used to standing by, to watching and observing, how could we have failed so utterly? It will be yours to excise the rot, root and stem from code. So kino.

The nano-swarm in the grey rains concentrate around me. I see them swarm like locusts, I’m sure of it. Natural rain didnt look like this did it? The aftermarket cybernetics often trigger terrible bouts of visual snow in me. Or maybe that’s just permanent nerve damage or the mould exposure. I’m no expert –  it doesnt matter. Tonight the nano-swarm jam my optics far worse. I can feel them in my nostrils as I go blind. Can smell them plug my airways.

I realise too late that I’ve been robbed of my kino last stand. As in life, so too in death. The seeker will not come to finish me. Nor will the drones: no spider pack, no dogs, no birds. Instead they’ve blinded my senses. The nano-swarm congregates in my lungs and brain until even my mind’s eye is blind. In penance for a lifetime of perverse voyeurism and standing idly by, I am robbed of an audience, of performing my final act, of even witnessing it in my imagination.

They disable the panel my dead body leans on. It collapses unceremoniously in cold vomit.