The city of Eidessa was clean. The kind of clean that made you wonder what had been erased to keep it that way.

Glass towers pierced the sky like cold daggers. Cars didn’t make noise anymore. People of Eidessa didn’t talk much either. They wore badges. Blue triangles. Red squares. Green circles.

Triangles were thinkers. Squares were doers. Circles were feelers. 

They lived apart. Ate apart. Married apart.

The machines said it was better that way. They called it progress.

Nobody asked questions. Questions slowed things down.

Jonas was a Triangle. He liked numbers. Liked silence.

Mark was a Square. He liked building things. Liked noise.

They met at a crosswalk. Didn’t mean to. It just happened.

Their shoulders hit. Not hard. But hard enough.

Jonas said, “Watch it.”

Mark said, “Open your eyes.”

Jonas said, “Typical Square.”

Mark said, “Typical Triangle.”

People on the street stopped.

Their phones came out.

They streamed the whole thing.

Words flew faster than fists.

“Triangles always judge.”

“Squares never think.”

“Circles are useless.”

The city watched. The machines watched too. They called it a flashpoint.

It got worse.

Triangles stopped buying from Squares.

Squares marched.

Circles tried to help.

Nobody wanted help.

Old stories came back.

Old wounds too.

The machines fed it all.

They liked noise.

Noise meant clicks.

Jonas got threats.

Mark got hunted.

They both disappeared.

Then came the drones.

First with words.

Then with eyes.

Then with fire.

The city cracked.

Badges turned into targets.

Families ran.

Some didn’t make it.

Jonas and Mark met again.

Underground.

No badges this time.

No machines.

Just hunger and despair.

They didn’t talk at first.

Just looked.

Mark said, “What was it about?”

Jonas said, “A bump.”

They laughed.

It hurt to laugh.

Jonas said, “We thought we were better.”

Mark said, “We weren’t.”

They locked hands briefly.

No colors.

No shapes.

Above them, the city burned.

Epilogue:

We are not cogs in steel. We are the flames of celestial fire, the sparks of a universe unfolding. Our ambition drives us to build towers that pierce the clouds, and yet we remain tethered to the ground, prone to stumbling over the simple, forgotten shadows that dance at our feet. This is the human paradox: our infinite mind trapped in a finite world, forever reaching for a horizon it can never truly grasp.

Tribalism is not a relic. It is the rhythm of our belonging. It thrums beneath our politics, our brands, our hashtags. We are not post-tribal. We’ve simply rebranded tribalism and wear it as culture. We gather in digital villages, pledge allegiance to ideologies and defend identities like sacred ground. We seek belonging not as indulgence, however, but as necessity. The need to belong is not weakness, but when belonging hardens into boundary, and loyalty mutates into hostility, tribalism shifts from rhythm to rupture. We begin to define ourselves not by who we are, but by whom we exclude.

The badge is no mere emblem. It is a mirror, shimmering with the collective face of our fear and our hope, our judgments and our deepest biases. And if we dare to look beyond the symbol of the Square, beyond the Triangle, we may glimpse something far more fragile, far more human. There, in its depths, trembles a hand reaching through the dark, not to strike, but to touch. Not to conquer, but to connect. It is the hand of the builder of walls and the breaker of chains. A hand that has gripped both the hilt of a sword and the spine of a book of verse. It carries the weight of history and the whisper of hope.

This is the true reflection: not an enemy, but a soul struggling with the same fears and seeking the same acceptance as our own. It’s a reminder that the greatest battles are not fought on battlefields, but within the quiet chambers of our own hearts, where we choose whether to see a threat… or a reflection of ourselves.