The cracked highway stretched endlessly into the horizon, flanked by the skeletal remains of forgotten billboards, their faded neon flickering weakly in the twilight. Rusting cars sat abandoned along the roadside, their windshields shattered, their interiors reclaimed by dust and time. Towering in the distance, the broken husks of war machines lay half-buried in the earth, great mechanical giants, their circuitry long dead, their towering frames now home to creeping vines and flocks of crows.

Entire towns lay still and silent, their windows dark, their streets littered with debris that whispered of lives suddenly abandoned, inside people still lingered, life was there but it was... Different. Humans hooked up to machines, rotting away behind screens; and the ones that werent, barely got by.

Along the outskirts, the Exclusion Zone loomed — a no-man’s-land where towering, deactivated drones stood like statues, their hollow eyes staring at nothing. This wasteland was Keats home now.