Day 2,126

We sent so many years believing ghosts were fake that we never noticed them gradually accumulating in the electric meshes we inadvertently created as we built our world up to a thriving technological empire. They were badly trapped in our cables and circuits and we had no idea.

Then they broke free.

Slowly at first, testing the boundaries and making sure they could hold something of a body outside of the wires. They were barely noticed for more years than we'd care to admit and by the time they were on our radar we were too late to do anything more than watch everything we'd built start to collapse.

They flooded the world and drowned millions in a wave of agonising energy that settled as soon as it began. We were left in scattered pockets in the furthest reaches from civilisation, slowly making our way back to the ruined metropoleis in the hope that there might be a way to seal them away again.

We found ourselves as trapped as they had been, hunted and chased by lethal waves of energy we could barely see. The only way to delay them was to bring the circuits back into their old uses, to force the current through and send them somewhere else.

It saved us but killed a great many other survivors. Our solace was that we were trying to fix it all, that's what we told ourselves to ease the guilt and what we told our children when they inevitably killed someone to live another day.