It’s another tempestuous day in Metropolis. Clark Kent sits at his desk typing away at a meaningless news report hoping someone will need Superman, but today the only calls for help are from bankers, investors, and the newly homeless walking apathetic, dusty streets looking for ways to make a buck.

He pokes listlessly at the keys knowing there is nothing he can do to help these people.

Outside, the currents are turning, the seasons are changing, and the air hangs heavy, charged with uncertainty.

Superman waits.

Around him dark screens stare blankly into the dim space, his memory of the once-bustling office bringing the new silence of the room into stark relief. Turning back to his computer, he stares for a long time at the words there. Too few, too inadequate, but there is nothing more to be said.

After a moment he presses a key and the words are gone, flying through the network to some distant server, putting his final headline on a story few will read. He ponders that for a moment, and misses the deadline call to press and the smell of fresh ink on the first run of paper.

The presses ran out of ink long ago, and somehow his work seems less real without it.

Paper and ink were the bones and blood of his craft. At the end of the day he looked proudly on the bundles being loaded on the trucks, the papers being hawked by paperboys on the street corners, and felt that somehow he had helped make them come alive.

Now his words, too, were like the ghosts in this empty office: Vital, needed, truthful, important for a small slice of time, then forgotten and rendered meaningless when the clock hand ticks away another minute. In the blink of an eye his words will be gone, down-voted, marginalized and dissipated, to be shattered and recycled into a thousand corrupted clones to become storied web of fiction, diversions, and half-truths to be re-posted, up-voted, and made viral.

Just as well. He picks up a small cardboard box with his meager belongings from the desk: some pens, brittle yellowed articles clipped from the old paper, a couple photos, and a bundle of red and blue cloth, neatly folded. After a moment, he turns to drop the box into the wastebasket by his desk.

Just as well. His words were too few, too inadequate. His actions: too focused and too local for a people busily at war with themselves. There was nothing more to be said.

Goodnight, Metropolis. It was good while it lasted.