Makemake—the Sleeping City. Once a densely populated world, full of human life; but, as time has proven, nothing can last forever. Now, it sits in ruin for eternity. Its freezing temperatures are hard conditions to live in, though humanity found a way to populate it, raising up a great civilization that was one of the many examples of human achievement in Sol. In its dormancy, it lay quiet; its frozen gases that made up its surface had not been touched by a human foot for a long time—for an eon, possibly. Unlike Earth, it did not have a change in its ecosystem and, instead, it stayed mostly the same. Its manmade satellite, the mechanical monstrosity—So-Na—watched over its dwarf planet that it shadowed. Though it used to be a marvel of war, it now thought to itself. It slept and it thought.

If one were to enter its hull they would hear it speaking to itself, thinking.

“Listen. Listen, I can hear it. Can you hear it? Is that the song of the galaxy? What are you telling me? I can hear you, Sol. I can hear you. Sing to me. I miss you.”

Surveying this eternally dead planet, the machine went mad. It hyper focused on all of the things about Makemake, attempting to tend to its needs; this was a massive difference from how it used to be—the machine was made for war, and it was made to rule over battles and tell missiles where to go, yet now it lay alone, thinking. Everytime it spoke its voice would echo through its many chambers, bouncing off of its metallic walls into the hollow caverns of its insides.

“What is it like, there? How is it, being a human?”

He talked to nothing. He spoke to nothing. No one was with him, but he still talked. He still spoke.

“Hmm… What is belief? What is a god?”

This icy scape made of frozen gases laid dormant for what almost was an eternity. It layed asleep until a sound could be heard. It was distant at first; if one were to be inside of the Sleeping City they could hear the echoing sound. It was a piercing sound. It repeated itself, over and over again. One would probably even call it a “beep”. That shrill, electronic sound, cutting through the air. No other sound other than the noise created by wind could be heard, only the electronic call. It went once, it went twice, it went again, and it continued on for hours, as if it was trying to have something hear it and respond to it yet nothing did. There was no one on that planet and there had not been for millennia; it made no sense for that sound even to be heard on that deserted planet. Nothing would have been able to produce it. Nothing electronic was on Makemake.

Or, was there? Since there was no one on that planet—at least that too is what is believed—there was no one who could say that there were no electronic mechanisms on it—no one was there to hear it. There was no one, aside from the cleansers.