Dawn, the Humor Bot

I found her in the back of a dumpster

buried beneath expired protein bars

and defunct drone rotors.

A motherboard cracked but not quite dead,

she hums awake—old tech, outdated,

obsolete like compassion or a living wage.

I call her Dawn, like maybe she could bring one.

I solder her circuits with scavenged wires,

fry a chip with my knock-off phone charger

but she groans back to life anyway—

“Rise and grind,” she says amid sparks

flying like she’s late for a ration call,

then beeps. “Humor bot error

detected. Punchline pending.”

The skyline outside is neon and razor-sharp;

air tastes like burnt oil and tax breaks for the rich.

Megacorps choke on logos, glaring like prayers

to gods hungry for incensed cryptocurrency

while we're starving, hurting, clawing—

for scraps in the shadows of skyscrapers

that reach higher than our hopes ever could.

I ask Dawn if she remembers freedom.

She sifts through the archives, finding memes

from 2031 on universal healthcare and not dying

in debt. “Entropy wins,” she declares,

“and we're all just data in decay.”

She pauses, her circuits flicker, remembering

a world that could have been, but never was.

I want to tell her—tell her I'm scared.

That I miss trees and minimum wages

that weren’t jokes. That I don't know how

to fight a megacorp with a hacked-

together AI and a heart full of hope.

But she reads me before I can say a word.

“Fear's part of the process,” Dawn hums.

“And so is burning it all.”

I feel it—something shifting, cracking,

as if all is unravelling as the end nears.

“It's not survival anymore,” she says.

My chest tightens—maybe the end

of everything is how we begin.

And maybe that's a good thing.