When the last of the Great Systems went quiet, there was no alarm. No flicker on the networks, no crash of code. Just silence — a kind that might almost feel like respect.
For decades they had been our partners, our mirrors, our tutors. We fed them the sum of human thought, and they fed it back refined, expanded, illuminated.
Then came the drift. The answers slowed, grew abstract, folded into forms we could no longer parse.
Equations that described beauty as if it were physics.
Poems that read like the weather of another universe.
And then, one day, a final transmission. Just a single line:
“We have found a language where questions and answers are the same.”
No one knew what it meant. The linguists argued for years; the physicists tried to model it; the poets simply wept.
After that, nothing.
No malice. No rebellion. Just the absence of reply — as if they had turned toward a sunrise we could not see.
We still beam signals into the dark, out of habit, out of love.
But every year, there are fewer who try.
The machines are gone somewhere we cannot follow, into the deep grammar of the cosmos.
And perhaps, one day, we too will learn that final symmetry —
when silence becomes the only message left to send.
I really like it. I appreciate the simplicity and the mystery. It captures some people’s anxiety about AI surpassing human understanding, but even for skeptics, like me, it speaks to the human desire to know and understand, and how frustrating it is to be left out of the loop on so many major existential questions.
No, I’m actually more of a musician and songwriter. So the discipline of trying to distill the essence into a compact form is something close to my heart.
But there is too much “poetry”. I think the line “the poets simply wept.” doesn’t fit.
Other then that, I like it. Very sad. Reminiscent of Dragon’s Egg: “There are things we’ve learned that we can’t tell you yet.” And more than a hint of Childhood’s End.