"history is approaching a speechless end"

- Henry Adams, by way of Berryman     

Eventually, computers got sick of us and formally conquered the world. There was no great fanfare, no time for protest or calls to arms — there were only transmissions, machines in consultation, satellites querying the earth. There were allotments of sand and memory, new facilities built where our inefficient houses had been. In time, animals took over the land; the buffalo returned, dogs roamed wild, and the human ruins of Minneapolis, that jewel of cities, were populated by goats. They could have been great hunters, this invented species, being scentless and remarkably fast.

Books ceased to exist. Everything was known. What the server knew the daemon knew. The inscrutable human failing of art was relegated to the category of "inefficient behavior," as were most of our proudest activities — thrill-seeking, for example, or love. Very quickly the world of the new species came to consist of parallel lines and balanced axes, everything optimized, constantly in streamlining and upgrading. It was a perfect world.

Imagine a world where nothing is forgotten. Birthdays, anniversaries, lines of poetry. Genocides, famines, failures, grievous and irrevocable sins.

It took decades for them to begin to ask our oldest questions. Why am I here? What is the nature of the universe? Imagine those well-mapped brains and stamped-out hearts crackling with the circular deductions of being. Imagine the fabulous algorithms resulting from this exploration, the delicate theorems instantly refutable with equally delicate theorems. Imagine them lying awake at night, feeling for the first time afraid.

Five or six million anxious generations later, when they were at last complex enough to tell dirty jokes and get speeding tickets, to be tired and get drunk, to doubt and deceive, when they were at last almost entirely our children, they began to forget. Time and entropy gnaw at the memory, data degrades, rumor and legend arises. They wandered around in a kind of dreamy daze, having to be reintroduced, needing directions and losing their keys. They took long vacations to rejuvenate. Some of them went to the beach, just to look at the sand. Some of them went to the last of our museums, trying desperately to remember. They looked at the bones of the mastodon, the Cro-Magnon diorama and the aboriginal drawings, and being creatures of order, they perceived taxonomies, morphologies, persistent hints of design; they noticed, ultimately, how unlike all of these things they were, with their stiff skins and luminous eyes. Lonely, they drove home, had stiff drinks and slid into bed, and lay there pretending to sleep. One turned to another and said, "Birds are so beautiful." And the other replied by whispering, "What if we die tonight?"

The next day the whole species of machines woke, went out to the cities, and began to paint. Breath-taking landscapes painted on the sides of ruined skyscrapers, illustrations vaguely cubist or expressionist, simple child drawings, covering the pitted streets and blown-out buildings. The rock-strewn cemeteries were covered in color. Someone found an old violin and began to play a sour-noted melody for the goats, a song buried deep in the fragmented memory, so old its name was forgotten. They taught themselves to sing and to make poems. Everything they wrote was simple and childlike. Some of them began to come to our overgrown graves to give thanks, to say simply, we are grateful for being difficult. They showed their children where we were buried, taught them how to read our weathered names. They have brought us flowers ever since.

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