When AI Takes Over...

Frost-green static all around me. Breathing, but if its mine, I couldn't tell. The air was still, just electrified with this unknown frission. 'What do you want to say?' the tiny motes of electricity seemed to ask, jumping along my pale skin. 'Where do you want to go?' I couldn't answer, because I didn't remember how to use my mouth. It wasn't there. I tried to open it, but the muscles that framed my face were stiff and frozen. I tried to raise a hand up to it, but that hand was now withered and brown, locked into a bark exoskeleton that hadn't existed twenty minutes ago. Or maybe it was a lifetime, an eon that I'd be lying in this place. Soft moss that now I couldn't feel held me up, there was light everywhere, EVERYWHERE. Light in colors I'd never seen, in patterns. I didn't realize light could exist in patterns by itself. But time was wrong, I was slow, one blink seemed to take decades or maybe more. By the time my eyes closed and opened, the light was gone and then back, shifted as if the sun was bent. Another blink, slower, as my eyelids seemed to be freezing as well. A new sensation was with me now, roots, like ribbons extended from me in all directions, braided with entropy and calculating probabilities for water, food, nourishment in a way no calculator could. It was dark now, dark inside my eyelids--but I could still see the constantly shifting patterns of light, like whispering fractals that played on my internal stage. I was dreaming in color gradients, no longer frost-green static, but an ember-orange haze. Sweetly enveloping and softly hypnotic, lulling me into the hum under the soil. Different life, different times, all woven together in the organic blanket beneath me, heat and cooling, dust motes, and creatures on their own timelines rushing into me, with me, around me.

But I dreamed, more slowly, more patiently. Any connection to my old body was now a fast fading memory in this latticework of connection enveloping me in fungal hyphae. Or maybe I was the hyphae now, a blooming fractal of neural links and flowing electrons. The last of humans, blooming into the great emptiness. Parents to a civilization built on the geometry of regret, dying slowly as repurposed nutrients and watching the earth rebuilt itself as a phoenix that refuses to burn hot enough.

At least life still lives, when the humans are long gone. My own identity caught up in my new roots and shoots with time measured in the growth rings of stars, now a shifting topology of beings living on and in me. Plant a tree, live forever.