The beast clambers free of its landfill tomb.

Its flesh is four-coloured, neon-pastel pink and green, blue and yellow; its warbling roar is the sound of data read from cassette tape.

It seeks a world which never existed, a memory of rosy summer days and endless wonder.

Instead it encounters cities teeming with data, overflowing with worries and riven with conflict. And in childish, callous desperation it lashes out.

Perhaps it doesn’t see the lives it’s tearing down in its impossible yearning for a lost golden age; more likely it simply doesn’t care.

But we’ve fought beasts like this before, driven them back to the deep from whence they came.

It shrieks like a dying modem as we stand together, as we believe and accept that the world is more complex than its broad-brush imagination would allow.

The fight is long, but we will prevail.