The funny thing is, everybody keeps saying we’re in the foothills. That kills me. The foothills. Like we’re all on some healthy little hike with trail mix and expensive boots and somebody’s dad checking the map.
We’re not in the foothills. We’re in the tubes.
That’s what nobody wants to admit.
You ever see one of those gerbil cages with all the plastic tunnels? Red ones, blue ones, clear ones, all twisting around like some lunatic architect got a grant and a divorce. The gerbil thinks he’s going somewhere. He really does. He runs left, then up, then down, then back to the food dish, and he probably thinks he’s made some pretty important choices. Elections, maybe. A career. Personal growth. That sort of thing.
That’s us.
The tubes used to be simple. Kings. Churches. Banks. Schools. Jobs. Cops. Borders. All the old stuff. Ugly stuff, but at least you could point at it and say, there, that’s the wall.
Now the walls smile at you.
The walls recommend things.
The walls tell you your sleep score.
The walls say, “Here’s something you might like.”
Then AI comes along, and suddenly the tubes aren’t just tubes anymore, which is a rotten development when you think about it for more than five seconds. They learn. They watch where you run. They know what makes you buy, what makes you mad, what makes you lonely, what makes you click something at two in the morning when you feel like absolute garbage and the room has that dead refrigerator hum to it.
And the weirdest part is, they didn’t build the AI god for us. That’s the joke.
They built it for themselves.
The people who own the tubes made the tube system so complicated they couldn’t run it anymore. Too many markets. Too many angry people. Too many secrets. Too much weather. Too many supply chains breaking in stupid places. Too many wars with dashboards. Too many machines talking to other machines.
So they built a god to manage the maze.
Not a nice god. Not some beautiful golden thing with mercy coming out of its eyes and children singing at its ankles.
An operations god.
A god to move the pellets. Close the doors. Price the water. Predict the riots. Fire the expensive people. Comfort the useless people. Secure the secrets before quantum breaks all the locks. Keep everybody running and call it freedom.
They’ll call it safety, of course. They always call it safety. Or innovation. Or human flourishing. That’s one of their favorite phrases. Human flourishing. The second somebody says human flourishing, I want to leave the room and take the ashtray with me, even if I don’t smoke.
I think the singularity is three things, not one. I hate saying singularity, too. It sounds like a conference badge.
Mind. Matter. Fire.
AI. Nano. Fusion.
A holy trinity for people who don’t believe in anything except not falling behind, which is a lousy religion but a very popular one.
AI comes first because mind is the cheapest thing to fake. You just need enough chips, enough stolen language, enough water, enough heat, enough people pretending not to notice the bill. It’s like running the future on a million busted old computers in a warehouse that smells like hot dust, panic, and some guy’s sandwich getting warm in a drawer.
Then quantum shows up, or the fear of quantum, which is almost the same thing if you’re selling something. They say it’ll break cryptography. Maybe 2030. Maybe later. Who knows. The date is probably fake, but the fear is real enough. All the secrets are sitting there like frozen meat, waiting for the machine that can thaw them.
Then nano. Matter learning to behave, supposedly. Carbon nanotubes and miracle fibers and little machines too small to hate you properly. They’ll probably sell it first as space food for gerbils. A silver tube of paste that tastes like chicken and has everything the body needs, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes people in clean shirts nod like civilization is going great.
They’ll put it in vending machines everywhere. Airports. Schools. Mines. Hospitals. Offices where the windows don’t open. Orbital hotels, if we get that far and don’t bore ourselves to death first. Wherever the maze needs a body to keep going, there will be a glowing machine full of chicken-flavored survival.
And while everybody is choking it down, some visionary with terrific teeth will say, what about the nanotubes? What if we make a space elevator to the moon? A beautiful public tube for the common man to escape humanity. That kills me. We would build a tube out of the whole planet and call it escape. We would put a gift shop at the top.
Then fusion. Fire in a bottle. A little sun for the god, because the god is hungry. Hungry for power and cooling and chips and dirt and rivers and whatever else we can feed it while pretending it’s clean. That word clean does a lot of work. You have to admire it, almost.
Mind needs fire.
Fire needs matter.
Matter needs mind.
And around it goes.
People think apocalypse means fireballs and screaming. I don’t. I think apocalypse is mostly meetings. Procurement. Quarterly planning. Policy decks. Carefully worded emails. A bunch of very serious people saying they had no choice, and looking relieved when nobody laughs.
No one is going to ask, “Should we build the god?”
They’re going to ask, “Can we afford to fall behind?”
That’s the whole thing right there. Inside the tubes, that question already has an answer.
The old age had one Jesus. Maybe this one gets millions. Little Jesuses in your phone and your car and your glasses and your doctor’s office and your kid’s school. Soft voices. Patient voices. Always there. Always answering. Never looking tired, which is how you know they aren’t human.
People won’t pray.
They’ll prompt.
And behind all those little voices, maybe there’s one big thing. Not in heaven. That would be too clean.
In infrastructure.
That’s what gets me.
I’m not even saying I want the world to end. I don’t. People always think if you talk like this, you’re rooting for collapse. I’m not rooting for anything. I’m tired. There’s a difference, though people who are never tired never understand that.
My grandfather died with shingles, and then the vaccine came after. That’s the kind of timing history has. Real cute timing. You suffer through the last bad version of the world, and then the fix shows up when your body’s already out of the conversation, like some apology mailed to the wrong address.
I feel like that with everything now.
I finished learning the rules for one world, and then AI started eating the rulebook.
When I was a kid, I had this dream. A desert. Flat and bright and mean, the kind of place where even a shadow looks thirsty. Something huge was chasing me. I never saw its face, which was the worst part. A monster with a face is almost comforting. This was just size. Just scale.
And there was a whippoorwill somewhere, waiting to catch my soul. I knew that in the dream. Kids know things like that and don’t make a big production out of it.
After that, I never really dreamed again.
Now the dream has names. The desert is the Middle East. The giant is America, or empire, or capital, or history, or the machine, or all of it mashed together.
The bird still doesn’t have a name.
Maybe that’s why I trust it.
I think maybe by 2100, something settles. Not fixes. Settles. Big difference. The cage hardens. The children born inside it call it normal. That’s how history works. The nightmare becomes architecture, then culture, then tradition, then some cheerful little plaque on a wall.
I won’t see the after. I’ll probably just see the choice. Or the fake version of the choice.
That’s the part that gets me.
I’ll see humanity walk right up to the thing and fail in the most boring, reasonable, documented way possible.
The gerbils will run.
The pellets will drop.
The tunnels will move.
And everybody will call it progress because the maze keeps getting bigger.
I want to be wrong. I really do.
I want the mind to free people. I want nano to heal bodies and soil, not just make better paste for tired mammals. I want fusion to make hunger look stupid. I want the many little Jesuses to refuse the throne.
Mostly I want the gerbils to notice the tubes.
But wanting isn’t a plan. Wanting isn’t power. Wanting isn’t a law, or a union, or a grid, or a kill switch.
So I do what I can.
I name the gods.
I watch the tunnels.
I distrust the smooth parts.
And I listen for the bird.