Record 16 – The Square Without Footsteps

Times Square opened in front of us like a dream someone forgot to finish. The streets were empty, but the light wasn’t. Bright shapes moved across the giant screens, too sharp for daylight, too quick for tired eyes. Colors slid over the buildings in fast waves, like the city was trying to wake itself up.

There were no taxis lined up at the curb. No buses. No voices bouncing between the towers. Only the steady hum of electricity running through metal like blood through veins. Old posters slapped against empty walls, showing movie faces smiling at crowds that no longer existed. Everything around us looked ready to move, ready to shout – but nothing did.

Repsik stood beside me, staring up. His tail curled around his paws without him noticing. “It looks alive… but it’s dead,” he whispered. And he was right. Times Square felt like a giant heart still beating even though the body was gone.

The parrot landed on a traffic light above us. One claw wrapped tight around the metal; the other shook a little, as if the weight of something old was hanging from it. He didn’t look at the screens. He looked at us. “Listen,” he said.

So we listened.

At first, it sounded like silence. But it wasn’t. Under the silence was something else – the soft churn of machines working without orders, fans spinning, circuits humming, lights flashing with no one to command them. A whole city of devices doing what they were built to do, even though the hands that built them were gone. It felt wrong. It felt sad. It felt endless.

One of the huge screens above us flickered hard – a bright pulse of red – then snapped back to static, then restarted its loop as if nothing had happened. The light washed over the square in a short burst, then vanished. The parrot didn’t blink.

Whatever was happening here, it had begun already.
And the screens were trying to speak.