You’d see the shimmer first—just a ripple in the sky like heat off asphalt, something not-there trying to be there. Then the air would twist, pixelate, and something colossal would snap into place, fully formed like a god drawn in code. No weight, no soul, just geometry and destruction, its limbs glitching through buildings, through roads, through people. They called them holograms, but that wasn’t it—these things ate. Self-assembling from the junk data of old weapon caches, rogue code pulling from forgotten war servers, ghost factories still manufacturing death in virtual warehouses. They were beautiful, in that sharp, perfect, dreamlike way nightmares sometimes are. You’d blink and the skyline would be missing. You’d blink again and they’d vanish, leaving behind nothing but silence and dust and a low-frequency hum that crawled inside your teeth.