The App: App-ocalypse (1)

Night 45 - Seeing the top of the world

I'm on top of the world. Sort of.

I'm looking at the stars on the rooftop of a New-York's building and it's beautiful. We arrived yesterday during the night in New-York and we stopped a few miles after we entered into the city.

We hadn't expected what we were seeing so we had to stop sooner than we thought. Streets and road were empty. Totally empty. There is not a corpse anywhere. There is nothing. Emptiness and silence. That's what is beautiful right now, the silence of the night, the shades and shadows of every other buildings around me, the moon and the stars reflecting on windows everywhere. Everything is silence, everything is empty and it is so poetic. It reminds me of the night we saved Anna, when everything was covered by ashes.

That beautiful landscape I'm looking at is also the cause of all my despair. I'm crying because it's wonderful and because I feel... fucked up. We have no idea where to look for Michael. New-York is so big. What are we supposed to do? How can we find them here? And are they even there? What were we thinking?

We stopped yesterday and got out of our cars. We hugged each other in the middle of the street. Even Will and Anton hugged. Even Anna and I. It was so unreal. We were relieved. We felt good to know the streets were empty. We don't know where are the corpses and I think we don't really want to know. It's great to know we can walk wherever we want in New York without seeing horrific scene at every corner. Corpses in Austin were starting to decompose. They were being eaten by animals. Here all is clean. Desperately clean.

We decided to all get into the bus and we abandoned our cars on the road. We travelled through the Big Apple and I have to say it's a wonderful city even now. Everything is so big. Everything is so calm. It's like walking into a ghost town where everything is bigger. I felt drowned by its emptiness and its gigantic proportions.

Xia drove us to Times Square. We stopped and get out of the bus again because we couldn't believe what we were seeing. I don't have any word to express how weird and magical and wonderful and exceptional and majestic and terrifying and threatening it felt to be on an empty quiet Times Square. All screens were staring at us, off. Somehow it never really hit me before but this is the moment I definitely stopped hoping.

The world had ended. We lost everything. We were a bunch of fools trying to get their children back in the biggest city of the country - of the world, maybe. We were a bunch of fools wearing protective suits in the middle of Times Square. We were walking on white ashes from a nuclear explosion, miles and miles away from the explosion. We were standing in the middle of an empty Times Square in which they were only invisible radiations. We were staring at black screens that used to claim how powerful and rich our country was.

I had said it before I guess but I was lying to myself. I still had hope. Hope to see my parents again, hope to see Cassandra again, damn even hope to see and face Mark. I had hope to find Michael in New-York. Hope to find another group like us in here. Hope that somehow the world will find a way to work out this App-ocalypse and nuclear explosion. Hope that someday everything would be normal again, even though I never stopped saying there was no normal anymore since the nuclear bomb. Now, I'm not saying it. I'm knowing it.

To say it and to know it are two very different things and I only understand that now that I'm looking at New-York. I felt it for the first time on Times Square. I had thought I felt it before, but I was so wrong. I couldn't breathe while I was looking at those black screens. Everything around us was dead. We were somehow the last ones standing on Earth. What are we supposed to do now?

We had a plan to fulfill though and the night was upon us. We drove to a building, the highest we could see from where we were - which is not an easy one to distinct since they are all so big and since the darkness was falling upon us. We stopped and entered into it.

There were so many stairs. We stopped in the fifteenth floor and decided to sleep there. We couldn't go higher on the same night. Our legs were just as useless as Times Square's screens. We slept in the middle of a conference room with a view on New York and Central Park. We were in the middle of an open space with so many desks. We could picture workers. We could picture the life that must have been happening here. The hubbub. The commotion. The life.

All of that is gone. We spent our day today to get on that roof and my god it was hard. We felt legless this morning. We didn't even speak to each other. We ate on different floors, on desks of workers who have disappeared into thin air.

Tonight, we arrived right in time to see the sun disappearing into the horizon. We saw the night falling upon New-York and it was the most beautiful thing we ever saw. I'm still staring at it. We are all sitting on the roof, in silence, contemplating at what we're seeing. We're on top of the world. Literally.

We don't know what we're going to do next and we're all unable to speak.

I guessed it hits every one of us right now. There is no way to go back to what we were. I mean... It's impossible.

The worst thing to admit is that it's a really beautiful moment. We're eleven strangers looking at the world and we all know the world is doomed. How could we fix this?