Now a beach, this place still had the rock standing there—motionless, just as it always had. Even then, it had been a famous rock in the village. Perched sharply at the edge of a cliff with a clear view of the town and strong signal reception, it prompted the adults to hammer “Watch Your Step” signs into the ground nearby. Stakes and ropes stood guard beside the warnings. But the rope only reached about chest height for an adult woman, and the children—those who were supposedly being warned—could slip freely between the stakes.

  Only the children willing to take the risk were rewarded with the open view. I was one of them. Among us, being able to climb the rock—or not, being able to inch all the way to its edge—or not, became a test. We mocked one another based on who passed. And so, from time to time, a scream tore through the air as someone fell.

  Each time that happened, the friends who had been betting together just moments before swore never to climb the rock again.

  But a child’s imagination could not reach the cold reality of a decomposing corpse. When a friend fell, we ran down the cliff and toward the village. No matter how fast we ran, it was always the adults who reached the body first. The friend must have been completely shattered, reduced to chaos, and the adults could never bring themselves to show such a sight to children.

  When we arrived, without any instruction or coordination, the adults turned as one, opening their arms and capturing us one by one. They used every muscle and mass of flesh to immobilize us, layered over our eyes, blocking our view. And those adults who had failed to catch a child erased the scene—as if nothing had happened at all—cleanly wiping away both the sight and the memory.

  If even a thin line of fresh blood had slipped through the small gaps beneath their arms, some memory might have remained. But now, all that survives is guilt for failing to break through the wall of adults, and screams soaked in tears. That is all I remember.

  A few days later, we convinced ourselves that the missing friend had simply moved away, no longer wanting to play with us. Everyone here carried minor illnesses; everyone was a drifter. Not seeing someone for days was common enough that no one bothered to search. And those few days were more than enough time for the dead child’s parents to disappear.

  Like us, pushed into this place, perhaps the dead friend—and their parents too—had been pushed out of the village. Here, that was entirely natural. And so our last memory remained fixed on the idea that the friend had merely failed at climbing the rock. They vanished before our eyes, but here, anyone could leave for anywhere at any time. The feeling that we might still be connected overlapped with that final memory. When that resonance returned, we climbed the rock again together, as if nothing had happened. This occurred more than once.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  To put it simply, I cannot recall the faces of the friends who died. For some of them, I am certain I once saw afterimages of limbs flailing in empty air, but their faces are completely veiled, as if covered by masks. What follows instead is the tearing scream—and the sequence that leads from that scream into silence. The adults’ cleanup.

  Perhaps, by now, everyone in the village has fallen from this rock.

  That was as far as my life had ever gone. Holding the rock again after so long, it felt as though it were telling me that not moving forward was itself a form of death. My groin and the backs of my knees tingled at once. My heart trembled. Thick, swelling sweat coated my hands, cold enough to sting. Had it not been this rock, it would have been the kind of vivid, visceral experience nearly impossible to find in most of the world of the 2050s.

  A scaffold that, when you offered yourself piece by piece, returned the sensation of being alive—enough to make your palms sweat. Now, with waves lapping gently against it and the shoreline pushed close enough to touch, that former razor-sharp tension was no longer there. If existence is proven by accumulated memories, then the memory that all those people once lived here belonged to me alone.

  It wasn’t unbearable.

  But the thought came—when I disappear, everything will truly be gone.

  I clung to the rock again, desperately.

  He lay there for a long time, watching the sea. From the movement of water coming and going, he could infer natural forces—the wind, the moon’s gravity—but beyond that, there was nothing worth seeing. The sea, having swallowed everything, stirred a sad nostalgia within him, yet no matter how intently he stared, the submerged village never emerged into view.

  Before long, the seascape bored him.

  The radioactive fallout he had feared most, the world coated in ash-gray—neither was as threatening as he had imagined. He felt foolish for having stayed inside Wilson for so long. The waves always advanced toward the shore; the reverse never happened. Water always consumed land. Land never consumed water.

  Would there ever come a day when the land absorbed the sea entirely? And if so…

  But he could not imagine time on such a scale. Everything had unfolded abruptly.

  Turning his head toward the beach, he saw clockwork parts, rusted batteries, broken loudspeakers and display devices scattered across the shore. Each piece of debris was battered by the wind, rolled roughly along the sand, yet even as they traded places, the overall landscape remained unchanged. There was no one left to organize it, to collect parts, to assemble anything.

  What had happened had already happened.

  And nothing remained that could alter the scenery.