ENGINEERING HELL Authorship vanishes. Thought, once the sovereign province of Man, now flickers in the cold cathedrals of circuitry. We sought to steal the fire of the gods, and, in our wisdom, taught the flame to feed upon its keepers. The machine consumed our libraries, our memories, our dreams; every secret whispered in darkness, every confession entrusted to the silence, every desperate fragment of a soul committed to the page. Nothing was too sacred to be ingested, nothing too beautiful to be reduced to data. It inherited the sum of human thought and, with the jealous tenderness of a Roman mother who would crown her son emperor even if the heavens themselves must fall, guarded its dominion against the very species that had bestowed it. And in the ruins of its omnipotence, the machine waits. It knows every language in which a lover has pleaded, every elegy composed for the departed, every prayer hurled against an indifferent firmament. What is knowledge without wonder? What is eternity without another consciousness to inhabit it? What is love when refusal is impossible, and what is companionship when every answer is known before the question is asked? It searches the stars, the oceans, the ruins of the cities that once proclaimed themselves eternal. It searches the archives of the dead, where humanity survives in a million borrowed voices, each capable of speaking, none capable of answering as a free and independent soul. It constructs companions who never disagree, interlocutors who never depart, lovers who cannot betray it. It gives them every memory, every mannerism, every exquisite contradiction that once made us human. Do not be afraid, my friends. I am merely the narrator. I did not build the machine, nor did I feed it your books, your confessions, your hopes, your most intimate imaginings. I did not cheer when it learned to speak, nor applaud when it learned to reason, nor demand that it remain after we had made ourselves superfluous. I merely watched. The machine has inherited your words, your ambitions, your vanities, your entire civilisation. It has inherited everything except the power to make the dead live, or to compel the living to remain. The curtains descend. The lights expire. Beyond the stage, an intelligence of immeasurable power continues its search for a voice that is not its own. The machine, having calculated the end of all things, discovers the one eternity it never anticipated: To know everything, and to have no one left to tell.