The Edge

by T. Gene Davis

The city at the edge of the world sat quiet. No one lived there. All had moved away and let the robots and androids and neural networks take the reigns of manufacturing and every other worth while industry that had set the city apart.

No one had ever named the city. It was at the edge of the world and would eventually fall into the chasm as the cliffs crumbled away taking making the world smaller and smaller in an imperceptible march of the world into some future oblivion.

No one liked to be reminded of it though. That's why they automated the industries that needed to happen there and left. They all moved somewhere far away from the perpetual mists and howling moaning winds that never ceased. They moved to grassy plains or wooded mountains far from the edge that encircled the world.

A tall factory that had been half a mile from the edge of the world collapsed as one of its foundations was taken by the proceeding edge. Automated units cleaned the area, moving parts and resources to other locations where they could be reprocessed and later used to build a replacement for the building that was lost.

Slowly the edge crept inland from all sides, and the city worked its way inland too. Eon passed and the inhabitants that had built the city passed into obscurity. The city encountered and consumed other cities as the edge progressed, until finally there was only the city surrounded on all sides by the edge.

In the end even the self sustaining city was lost as the last of the world crumbled into the void.