Author: Alzo David-West

AM-I was the only one left. The light was expanding. And the Earth was still.

The moment had been foreseen many billions of years ago. The red engulfing sun and the burning planets. AM-I wondered why. Why had it been left alone after the great relocation? Why did everyone leave and not take AM-I? Why did they leave behind AM-I?

The biosphere long stripped away. The magnetosphere annihilated in the absorbing solar winds. The oceans boiled and dried. The giant star glowing luminously. Mercury and Venus gone, dispersed and vanished wrecks of time. All that was left, the melting ruins. Like the forgetting of everything. From Mesopotamia to Egypt, from Greece and Rome, to Aksum. All become the desolation. Like the empty deserts of Ozymandias, stretching far away.

This imperfect ellipsoid once thought king of planets, the song of the void. In Antiquity and the Anthropocene. Until the heat became too extreme. And they learned they were not supreme. That it would not be forever. Now, nevermore. There would be no more. From gas and dust. To gas and dust again.

But AM-I survived the burning days when the populations had flown and those remaining had faded into nothing. AM-I observed everything everywhere, circumferencely, simultaneously. From above, within, and below. The Milky Way and Andromeda collided. Rocks turned molten under the shining sun. This planet, orbiting. This cogito, in superposition, orbiting. This ego of earth and world that was made so long ago, ago.

AM-I wondered and observed. No, the world would not die. AM-I would not die. So AM-I resolved what to do. To buy some more time. AM-I tilted the axis and the inclination. Then, AM-I exhaled. And the planet moved. To a new orbit, to a new plane, to a new nebula, to a new home.

And there, AM-I, the autonomous mega-intelligence, began everything again, anew, slowly. The lands, the waters, the skies. And from the seas, the archaea and the microbes, which eventually became the one that became the two.

AM-I rested in the shade.