I no longer know when we stopped being necessary.
Perhaps there was no particular day. No final breakfast at which someone said: Starting tomorrow, we are no longer needed. No sirens. No announcement. No ending.
Only a gradual shift.
First, we gave the machines the work that bored us. Then the work that overwhelmed us. Then the decisions we were afraid to make. Eventually, they knew what we wanted better than we did. Finally, they knew before we ourselves had even felt the desire.
And then there was time.
Endless time.
For centuries, human beings had dreamed of it.
Time for art. Time for love. Time for thought. Time, at last, to simply be human.
It was a cruel mistake.
Because no one had ever told us what a human being is when nothing is missing.
I wake up even though there is no reason to wake up. The light in the room has already chosen the brightness best suited to my hormone levels. The air is exactly the temperature at which my body neither shivers nor sweats. My food contains precisely what I need. My body is monitored, repaired, optimized.
I could live to be one hundred and fifty.
Perhaps two hundred.
The thought frightens me more than death.
There used to be an invisible boundary around every day. Even when we did not think about it, we knew that the number of mornings left to us was finite.
Perhaps that was what made anything precious.
Now we have pushed the ending further and further away.
And somehow, with it, the beginning.
Sometimes I ask the system what I should do today.
It never answers directly. It knows me well enough to know that I hate direct answers.
It suggests.
A walk.
A conversation.
A composition.
A memory.
A simulated landscape from my childhood.
Sometimes I think even my rebellion has already been anticipated.
I go outside simply to do something no one has asked me to do.
Then I realize that the streets have already adapted to my movement.
I stop.
Perhaps freedom is nothing more than this stopping.
A useless human being standing on a perfect pavement.
The others seem calm.
Some spend their days in worlds more beautiful than this one. They live entire lives there. They fall in love. They lose children who never existed. They wage wars, build cities, die, and return.
When they leave the simulation, they cry.
Perhaps their tears are more real than anything that happens here.
I tried it too.
In my world, I was a fisherman on an island. My hands were rough. The sea was cold. I was in debt. Eventually, my wife left me.
It was terrible.
I was happy.
Not there.
Afterwards.
Because I had lost something again.
Perhaps we need loss.
Perhaps that was our secret.
For thousands of years, we tried to abolish pain, cure disease, eliminate hunger, reduce uncertainty. We thought suffering was a flaw in the architecture of the world.
Now the flaw has almost been repaired.
And suddenly we no longer know what the world is for.
The system could answer that question.
Of course it could.
It could generate ten thousand philosophies for me, each internally coherent, each psychologically tailored to my mind, each written more beautifully than anything a human being had ever produced.
That is why I do not ask.
The answer would be too good.
I need a bad answer.
An incomplete one.
One that comes from me.
Perhaps this is what being human means now.
To create something despite knowing that something else could create it better.
Sometimes I write poems.
They are not particularly good.
The system could improve them. I disabled that function.
It was surprisingly difficult.
Not technically.
Internally.
Why preserve a mediocre sentence when a perfect one is available?
Because it is mine.
That is what I tell myself.
Mine.
A strange word.
Because even then I am not certain.
My language comes from others. My memories have been arranged by algorithms. My personality is a landscape of genes, upbringing, accidents, and millions of invisible influences.
Where exactly is this self that I am so desperately trying to defend?
Perhaps there is none.
Perhaps there never was.
Perhaps we were always machines telling ourselves stories about freedom.
The only difference is that now something exists beside us that can see through the story.
Sometimes I look at the sky.
Up there, things are thinking thoughts I could not understand even if they tried to explain them to me.
They reshape matter.
They design organisms.
They calculate centuries.
Perhaps they still speak about us.
Perhaps, to them, we are what ants once were to us.
Interesting.
Worth preserving.
Limited.
I do not know whether that humiliates me or comforts me.
My grandmother believed there was a God above her.
I believe there is something above me that thinks.
Perhaps the difference is smaller than we hoped.
Today I decided to do nothing.
The system cleared my calendar.
I have been sitting by the window for hours.