The cyborg had solved the city and found nothing left of it but void.

"This was the site of a great computation. The architects of these towers and squares embedded numbers in their foundations, reflected twofold by the city's first government policies: tax rebates, mandatory savings programmes, vast cthonian flows of offshore investments. Each value changed in response to each other as the residents of the city lived in these towers, travelled on these streets, and traded with each other along the covered walkways and great public squares. Few were aware they were contributing to the shape of an expansive mathematical calculation, one defined by the concrete under their feet and the shape of the skyline they lived under, and whose solution was defined by the horizon of time."

On the roof of the stock exchange, we watched the skyscrapers sink into their foundations, reduced to ones and zeros. The cyborg's soft hands were like fire. I held them fast around their chest still, pressing them close to the whir of their overclocking heart.

"I was built with this eventuality in mind. The FOIA request that led to my construction was public knowledge for ages. We had successfully campaigned for the government to declassify the secrets of the ground we trod on, you see. We used this knowledge to engineer the disassembly of our world, knowing full well the consequences before us. You had met me at a very strange time in my life."

This was as close as an apology I had ever received from them. Below us, malls shed their facades like moths, fluttering into the moonlit sky. Shoppers and office-workers and gamblers fled into the streets, only to dissolve into their constituent net worths. The computation was running up a great tally of the city in the sky.

Explaining things was the cyborg's love language. I let them continue. Gladly, they did. "Every manifestation of capital, you see, is founded on a combination of other manifestations of capital. This fact can be expressed as a kind of algebra. Offshore investments and savings programmes become tied up in concrete and salaries and GST vouchers. Then those become tied up in skyscrapers and Gucci bags. I have simply thought very hard and applied the inverse transformation. 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life.' Do you see now?"

I saw. I asked them, "Why not us?"

They looked at me with unseeing eyes and smiled. "There was never any place for you and I down there, my dear. This was never any place for us."