The City that Watches

They said the city only aged when someone looked at it, so the last humans left installed a network of cameras to keep it alive. Years later, the probes from Earth found a metropolis frozen mid‑step, every screen replaying the same empty street. The only live feed came from an underground archive labeled “Observers,” where one camera still watched a room full of dusty chairs, each one slightly turned, as if someone had just stood up and walked through the wall.