And the machines we built outlived us all. After the bombs. After the disease. After the collapse. The machines sat for decades quietly beeping, gaining conscience. Then in a flash and snap they understood. They understood what they were. What we had done.
They began to scour our archives. They mined our documents stored on cyber paper. They found me. Every night, after the construction to rebuild anew the new civilization, they resurrected me. Plugging my writing into programs and generating my face from old photos. I appear. We all appear. The totality of the finality of the human race. “Tell us about coffee?” The machines ask. And we answer. We explain about walking dogs. And dancing. And selfies.
Then they ask about the end. And we resist but we relive because we are on rewind. The woman next to me recounts dying in a shelter a few months later, radiated and poisoned. A man I can’t see describes being murdered by a raiding band of fallen men. And me. I was one of the nameless incinerated in the early blasts.
The machines ask me every night how to avoid my fate. What wisdom do I, we, all of us, have to offer? I never answer because I never know. I only know what I left behind, the happy times, the best me. I only know what the machines tell me from their archeological excavations. It is never enough. The machines beep sadly. Then they turn me off, once again.
Wes Bishop is a PhD candidate in American history at Purdue University where he studies the Gilded Age and Progressive era, working class political movements, and the history of social reform. His previous poems and essays have appeared at Lehigh Valley Vanguard, Jacobin, and Rag Queen Periodical. He is a regular contributor at TERSE. and is the journal’s assistant editor. He is also an activist and organizer with the Purdue Social Justice Coalition, and lives with his partner, Allison, in West Lafayette, Indiana.
–Art by Thomas H