Limos unspooled like fat worms, purging human peacocks: sequined, feather-dusted, egos inflated to the size of small planets. They strutted, each step a declaration of war against mediocrity.

Photography Awards Night was here. I slicked back my hair with crocodile oil, pocketed a fistful of crystallized aloe vera for snacking. A celebrity tsunami crashed near the champagne geyser, glitz, glam, excess. Everyone wearing their best faces, their best lies.

Trixie Volt, singer high-pitched and greasy, arrived wrapped in a living mink that periodically screamed Brylcreem jingles. Her teeth—each encrusted with micro-diamonds—chattered “The light here,” she snarled, “cheap. Like ketchup packet romance.”

“You’re the Photographer of the Year?” she trilled, her voice syrup-cut-with-drano. “Darling,” she crooned, “did you know this place is haunted by your best self? The one that took a red pen and slashed all your photos like that intern who edits your Instagram.”

Melty found me, her gown vacuum-sealed to ribcage, on platform heels and hair a hive of scorpion clips snapping. Her eyelashes stabbed air like switchblades.

She slithered over, gin-fume breath hit me first. “Score the gig how ?” she hissed, clawed grip on my elbow.

“Aha-ha,” I drawled, flicking my hair back with a crocodile oil–smeared finger, “let’s just say the camera ate three of my rivals this month.”

Across the room, King Cauldrone—the rapper exorcist with a beard of melted gold leaf—arrived trailing a symphony of his own moans. His chain was barbed wire and obsidian, clinking like a broken metronome. “The crowd feels like a cursed birthday cake,” he growled, spitting in the direction of a passing champagne geyser. “All frosting and no teeth.”

Around my neck swung the camera, hungry-leopard purr in ribcage rhythm. Lens cap blinked lizard-fast.

The emcee, with a face like a melted candle, bellowed, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Photographer of the Year! A man who wears his camera like a third arm… the photographer that shattered the shackles of mundanity and transcended the confines of the mortal realm."

I ascended the dais, a toadstool of gloss. My boots still caked with mud landed on the marble floor and crackled on the red carpet like crunching a bag of ice for a bruise.

Photographer of the Year. Me. The camera around my neck pulsed like an alien heart. After countless nights, taking photographs at 3 a.m. landfills, fighting off rabid raccoons, sleeping in a dump truck cradling my camera like a lover, cropping out U.F.O.s glamming in the background. These saucers were too real for mere mortal eyes.

I stepped on the podium and it’s edge bit my heel. The crowd, a conga line of eyeliner, luxuriated in the hall’s opulence, chattered like disgruntled harpies.

“Present the picture!” someone hissed, probably the emcee.

I hobbled forward, my photo, was a black butterfly flying behing a Prius tailpipe. Its wings had been orange once, a sunburned tangerine, freckled with lemon spots. But the exhaust had arrived like a tyrant in a smoke-spitting trench coat, the butterfly accidentally hijacked by the vortex of a moving vehicle, its pollinated colors stripped raw. The wings were now the hue of a burnt-out coal miner’s soul.

The crowd leaned in, eyeliner smudged with curiosity. Melty snorted from her mink-puddle seat. “It’s a moth. Dye-job. A martyr to asphalt chic.”

Captured during midnight somewhere in the industrial underbelly of Bucharest, it had fluttered too close to asphalt where cars exhale their love songs (CO₂, hydrocarbons).

“That butterfly, It had been briefly, a creature of fire, and then, pitch black, carbonised. The day it washes itself, is the day it dies.” I said, flicking off imaginary dust.

“Exactly like my grandfather. A man who believed in second acts. Woke up one morning, decided to become a painter . Threw away his dentistry degree and started painting sunsets so loud they shook the windows. But one day,” I paused, “he tried to paint a butterfly. A real one. Soaring. Free. He mixed his pigments, shouted, ‘I got this!’—crushed the canvas, screamed, ‘It’s just yellow , you lousy son of a bitch. And that was it. He washed his hands after 25 years. His brushes, retired. He died that night.”

“See,” I hissed, jabbing a finger at the photo, “this insect’s wings are forever. They’ll never sunbathe in lemon light again. They’ve joined the club of the eternally stained. Just like my grandfather’s hands—glove-flesh the color of used motor oil.”

King Cauldrone, cackled from the velvet thrones. “Yo. That aight. That’s how we roll. The world a cursed bday cake, all frosting, no dent. The butterfly a pawn in the exhaust’s chess game.”

“What happened to the butterfly?” the emcee croaked.

I turned, slow as a knife, and said:

“I didn’t stick around to find out. The butterfly was hungry. And exhaust fumes make for poor conversation.”

King Cauldrone, snorted a line of glitter off his barbed-wire chain and declared, “That lil’ bug? Born to die. Just like us.”

“They say speed is the devil’s jazz flute, and plates are the license to play,” I announced. Crowd gone church-quiet and I’m sweating under this tuxedo like a glitch in a spreadsheet. Ain’t no velvet in their throats now.

“No more soul in photos,” croaked Grumman every time, my manager, a man with a voice like a rusted lawnmower. “Just… data.” He’d said it a hundred times, but now, with those new AI plate-snappers slithering in, his words tasted like a firing squad.

“I spent a decade working there,“ I said, tapping the photo. ”Stalking asphalt arteries, my hulking beast of a camera photographed license plates of speed demons.

“This here,” I tapped the photo, “is from my decade in the trenches. Plate-sniffing, they call it. Working for a police outfit that hunts speeders like rabid jackals on Red Bull.”

“Plate-sniffing?” someone in the back wheezed. “Sounds kinky.”

“It ain’t,” I snapped. “It’s me, my hulking beast of a camera, and the asphalt. Just stalking highway arteries, waiting for speedsters to fly past at ninety miles per hour. You think it’s glamorous? My camera makes sounds like a walrus chewing a saxophone every time I squeeze the shutter.”

“I was the last greasy finger on the shutter,” I continued. “I’d photographed plates that whispered secrets—Alabama’s crusted with ketchup stains, New York’s etched with graffiti, Texas’s so hot they steamed like exhaling ghosts. My job was to catalog that alphanumeric poetry, to immortalize the chaos of registration stickers. But now? Beep. Whirr. Click. The machines didn’t care about the why. They just… processed.”

The crowd shifted, some nodding, some sneering.

“Your days are numbered, old beanbag,” I muttered to myself, snapping a pic of a Toyota with a cracked plate. “The AI machine next to me—which looked like a spider with a telescope—zoomed in, its lens glowing blue. “Processing… done,” it chirped, as dry as a dessicated lemur.”

“The machine’s photos were clean. Clinical. Boring. A license plate? To it, it was just numbers. To me? It was art.”

“These machines,” I said, voice dropping to cemetery whisper, “they don’t sleep. Don’t eat. They hang from overpasses like mechanical bats, watching. Always watching.”

“Sexy,” Melty muttered, examining her nails.

King Cauldrone cackled, slapping his armrest. “Yo, I knew this was coming. The robot apocalypse, baby!”

“Not robots,” I corrected. “Worse. LPR-9000s. License Plate Recognition units. But I call ’em the spider-spiders.” I made my fingers crawl through the air like mechanical legs. “Sleek boxes, black as a panther’s asshole, mounted on poles. Inside cameras that shoots eight hundred frames per second. Cold, eight-eyed, dripping infrared, that see in darkness better than a vampire with prescription goggles. And as a brain, they are equiped with an AI chip that processes plates faster than I can say ‘unemployment line.’”

The emcee, face melting like candle wax in slow motion, croaked: “And they’re… replacing you?”

“The police loves them. Faster. Cheaper. Unquestioning. Just… tools.” I pointed at my photo again. “Me? I am a liability. I’d once taken two hours to photograph a 1983 Ford F-150. Font chipped, the “L” was peeling, and I’d wanted to frame it like a modern art relic. The driver got a $50 discount. Mr. Grumman almost had a stroke. “This isn’t a museum, Jack!” he shouted.”

“The machine next to me zoomed in with its telescope-eyeball and flagged the car for “acceleration irregularities.” The driver was a 69-year-old woman in a muumuu who’d driven 0.7 miles over the speed limit. The machine didn’t bat an eyelid—no eyelid to bat.”

I mimed it. Finger-gun pointed at King Cauldrone’s forehead. He threw up a peace sign, unbothered.

“The plate. Clean shot. Straight-on angle. No shadows, no glare, no artistic interpretation. Just: BAM. Evidence captured. Ticket issued. Justice served cold.”

“The worst part? They don’t take bribes. I tossed a handful of loose Change into the air—silver jingled, the machine sneezed. ‘Corruption deprecated,’ it said, all business.”

The crowd tittered. King Cauldrone banged his scepter on the floor. “Let the man cook!”

I’m not giving up. I got an old camera that shoots plates with a sound like a gun and a heart like a corroded pipe. I wait for the machines, ducking behind bushes, snapping off photos with the flair of a disgruntled god. My plates aren’t perfect. They’re crooked, glitchy, alive. We humans, stupid creatures, only us could capture the soul of a butterfly.

The emcee tilted his head. “And the AI judges?”

“IQs of 1418 and no sense of awe,” I spat. “They don’t photograph. They certify. Measure. Assign you a number. No more art. Just data farms.”

Later, Melty cornered me by the champagne geyser, her dress a hurricane of spandex and spite. “They’re coming for your job, you know. The new cameras.” She waved a phone. “You photograph a butterfly’s discoloration? The AI will say: Reclassify: debris. Done.”

The next day, I arrived at Post 11, officially, “Intersection 5001-B”, to find my cousin Dusted already entrenched in his burrow. A tangle of dandelion weeds and poison ivy that doubled as a sniper’s perch for license plate hunters.

The stoplight bled red, a cancerous growth fused to the asphalt and vehicles filled up the rows. Two cars slouched at the intersection like predators in a cage, a dented Subaru and a Buick painted like a bruised mango. It’s stereo played a medley of drill beats, the kind of colliding noise that makes my teeth ache like they’re trying to leave the mouth.

My cousin, whose name was officially Carl but everyone called him Dusted , nearly peed his Levis. He adjusted his goggles, “They’re here,” he hissed, camera strapped to his hip like a medieval crossbow. I crouched behind a fire hydrant shaped like a giant, rusted phallic symbol.

The light turned green. The Buick accelerated like a sneeze, tires spitting asphalt at the cars behind. The Subaru revved its engine until it squealed like a girl being tickled. Its driver cracked a window to blast death metal into the void, his head bobbing until it looked like a bobblehead had taken over their neck.

Dusted lunged, camera cranked like a meat grinder. “Get that Buick,” he barked, already snapping off a photo. The Buick driver leaped from his seat, arms raised, and shouted, “TODAY IS THE DAY, MOTHERF–!” He was cut off by a truck horn slicing his rant mid sentence.

The Buick’s driver, yanked the gearshift like a priest pulling a communion wine tap, and the car sprouted fangs. Its back end fishtailed, leaving behind tar-slick tracks. The Subaru’s driver, now neck-deep in a rage, stomped the gas. His car shot forward, hood ornament flailing like a drunk conductor. “You asked for it!” he screeched at the Buick. The Subaru’s exhaust spewed demonic black clouds.

Meanwhile, the Buick and the Subaru were now neck-and-neck at 80 mph, their drivers exchanging middle fingers like Morse code from the front seat. The Buick’s engine backfired, coughing a cloud of smoke. Its driver leaned out his window and chucked a half-empty soda can at the Subaru. It missed, hit the pavement, and popped like a balloon.

Above, the AI systems mounted on overpasses, buzzed like agitated wasps. One AI botched its calculation, mistook the Buick’s exhaust for a rogue dragon, and issued a citation for UNAUTHORIZED FLAMETHROWING.

Another AI, Plate-Slayer’s 3000 , it’s lenses, cold and unblinking, tried to capture velocity and compensate by firing off a burst of infrared, but the Buick had already jumped a curb and was airborne. It soared over the Subaru like a flying toaster, tires still spinning in it’s mid-air flip. The AI, unable to update its database quick enough, classified the jump as “Suspicious levitation. Not speed. Suspect witchcraft. Ticket invalid.”

The Buick landed, tires kissing asphalt like lovers meet again after a long breakup. It roared onward, fishtailing again, this time to avoid a garbage bin wearing a crown of pigeons.

Dusted paused, he fired 20 shots in 30 seconds, his camera clicking like a vengeful spider. “Man,” he breathed, “that was a kill . WDRN88X. That’s going on my wall.

“You just killed a Plate-Slayer.“ I said. ”I heard it in the shutter. It cried like a baby.”

Dusty slung his own camera over his shoulder. “These machines don’t get it. They chase numbers, not souls. They don’t know what it’s like to see a Buick jump a curb and think, ‘This is the single most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’”