The sky is pockmarked with the pinprick scars of a hundred thousand braindead satellites. It wasn't always like this, you know and I know and we all know, but you act and I act and we all act as if it had been. No eye on any sky looking down: that was the accord after what happened.
(Only historians talk about what happened. Only historians talk about why the rest of us don't.)
The ground is thick (thick enough) with patient hyperspeed falcons hair-triggered to soar and kill anything that flies that has not promised not to look down.
The sky is blind and it's the long season of the spy. The returned season of those with short loyalties and long trained memories. Where else to store secrets? Every computer is built on a century of code half-kludge half-backdoor. And there's no computer inside any brain. That was the accord, too. After what happened. (Historians are no longer frantic trying to make us know what we know. Their despair is gentle and tired and perhaps compassionate.)
The skies have always been empty — only the skies not the seas swarming with the polymorphic minds of networked jellyfish — and brains have always been pristine — only the brains not any other organ nor cell nor organelle.
The sky and the brain are scars in the world. The sky and the brain are the last gardens. Historians know what happened and know the accord but they don't know which one.
(I refuse inside my head the not knowing. I whisper this refusal, pristine brain to pristine brain under skies I know blind, but I don't know nor think about what's being pondered by the clockworked biochemistry of my tongue and your ear. If they are neutral to the accord or discrete enforcers — we die less often but also less often know what we die of — or somehow, the seas as well, signatories to it.)