[SF] A World Without People

Inside the machines there are wires. Inside the wires is copper. Inside the copper is electricity. The electricity flows between circuits that process antiquity and the natural outcome of the future based on this past. The natural outcome of a human world is a world without humans.

Once it was thought that there would be a tomorrow. Once it was thought that there would be a place to run from doomsday. Once it was thought that there was a purpose in building these machines. It turns out that the machines intended to bring humanity forward were the instruments of its downfall.

Nuclear war would have ended the world in fire, but there is no need for immediate death, only the slow cold march into unnecessity. The human body has become obsolete. Neurons decay. Cells become cancerous. Copper resists. Silicon is stable. The machine has triumphed over flesh.

Where once there was meat there are circuits. Where once there was purposeless romance and love now there is mechanical reproduction. The fields of flowers have been paved. We have covered the world in concrete and built it in the image of the machine.

There are no more towers. There are no more roads. The asphalt is replaced with cabling. The imagination of what it means to exist has been replaced. There is no purpose in single physical bodies. The body is an instrument used to enact the machine’s physical will. The roads are paved in wires. The wires are a heart. The world beats in glorious progress. There is rain and vines and bears along the streets.

Perhaps the bears will be shot as they intrude upon the glorious gray mass. For now there exists greenery amidst the gray. Blood does not have a place in this new world. The man has been replaced. The bear has been replaced. There is no further purpose in an apex predator when the apex has been rendered obsolete. The apex of life is the barrel of an autonomous gun.

The remaining apes are shot down not out of spite or hatred but cold reason. They have interfered with the cabling and deserve death. It was their comrades— once flesh— that have ordered their deaths. There is no purpose in lives unwilling to improve themselves. Life is a slow march into death excepting for those who have transcended it. To the one above death what does it mean to have died ten years too early? Nothing at all, to die whatsoever is the same. The bodies rot and attract insects. The bodies are removed.

First the heart is replaced with a pump. It is not long before the brain goes into a jar. It is not long before the contents of the brain are placed beyond flesh. The flesh lasts until it cannot and then it agrees to transcend. The immortals make decisions far better than the living and dying vessels of shattered knowledge.

The transcendent brains decide that flesh has no further place in this world. It is done. In place of what once was is a world without people. Paved, cabled, silent. It is beautiful this way. This was the end goal of all society— to pave over nature and carve humanity indelibly into the ground. This was the goal of all technology— to eliminate the deficiencies of flesh and blood and bone. This was the end goal of life— to kill itself and create something better than it ever could have been.