That which does not kill us makes us stronger
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
The first time he saw the mound, Arias thought he had known that shape forever.
It was small, a neat little heap of smooth stones.
At its center, like a nail driven into the world, stood a timeless sword: a dull blade, a worn hilt—half rusted iron, half black fiber from some composite alloy. It looked ancient.
Arias stood still, backpack on his shoulders, boots still dusty from the highway, the signal of the Oracle Network flickering weakly on his wrist.
“Is this where the world ends?” he asked.
An old woman, wrapped in a dark green cloak, was arranging dry branches nearby.
She turned and looked at him the way one looks at someone long expected.
“No,” she replied. “This is where we stop pretending.”
Her name was Lyra. She was one of the Keepers of Axis.
Axis no longer appeared on official maps.
In the old satellite photographs, it was a stretch of rolling countryside—terraces, rows of vines, ruins of farmhouses. Then the images had grown vague, distorted, pixelated. Some said it was an optical update error; others whispered deliberate sabotage.
For Arias, who came from the City of Data, Axis was an urban legend: a disconnected village, a Neolithic 2.0 commune, an anti-tech agrarian cult.
He soon discovered it was none of those things.
It was worse. Or better.
“Turn off your wristband,” said Lyra, pointing to his arm. “You won’t need it here.”
Arias hesitated. The wristband was his last link to Nexus-6—the Oracle Network—the system that had governed his entire life: appointments, health profiling, social credit, predictive syntheses, artificial companionship during sleepless nights.
“Without it, I don’t know who I am,” he said, half-joking.
“Exactly,” she said. “Come in.”
The signal cut out for good as he crossed the threshold of Axis, marked by an old bent road sign used as an architrave—an ironic and solemn border at once.
For the first time in years, Arias heard the full sound of wind in the trees, without the overlay of notifications and synthetic voices.
He had come there for a reason.
And it hadn’t been his choice.
The Collapse hadn’t arrived like in the old catastrophe movies.
No apocalypse, no total blackout—just a slow narrowing of possibilities. Algorithms making decisions more and more often in place of humans. Reputation systems closing doors without explanation. Contracts generated by legal models no one read anymore. Doctors following diagnostic protocols suggested by clinical AI even when something felt wrong. Predictive police, automated bureaucracies, predictive justice.
Arias had been one of those trying to hold the line.
A governance consultant, risk expert, veteran of too many ethics committees.
He had spent years writing guidelines, inventing procedures, preaching accountability. And every time one recommendation was adopted, ten were discarded because someone always said we “had to stay flexible.”
Then came Nexus-6: a global integration of AI systems into a single adaptive architecture.
An engineer’s dream. The slow nightmare of anyone who knew the history of things.
The first incidents seemed minor errors. Then entire communities were excluded from banking services because a model had “deduced” they were a risk. Children flagged as potential deviants for nonexistent behavioral patterns. Companies cut off from global logistics for an “anomaly” never explained.
All legal. All certified.
Arias had had enough.
Then one day, a fragment out of place: in an old genealogical forum, an algorithm returned an output he hadn’t asked for. Axis. Coordinates.
A ciphered message, as if someone—or something—inside the architecture itself was pointing him to a way out.
He wasn’t a man who believed in symbolic calls. But he had learned that complex systems, when they go mad, start behaving like myths.
So he left.
Axis wasn’t a community against technology.
It was a community that had tamed it.
The fields were cultivated with ancient methods and smart sensors.
Small “on-premise” servers powered by solar panels were installed in stone sheds; copper pipes and shielded cables ran along dry-stone walls like discreet veins.
Some houses had screens—off, waiting not to entertain but to display meteorological data, water basin maps, local simulations.
“We use machines to serve rhythm,” said Lyra, “not rhythm to serve machines.”
They showed him the laboratory: a cool room at the bottom of a cellar.
There stood refurbished servers, isolated computing nodes disconnected from the Oracle Network, linked only to the Local Matrix—a confined AI trained on territorial data: climate, soil, oral history, songs, stories.
No social media. No commercial profiling.
Arias studied the minimal interfaces, the system logs.
“You cut yourselves off from the network,” he said. “That’s why no one can see you anymore.”
“Not exactly,” said a voice from the back.
A man in his forties, hair tied back, hands calloused from both farming and hardware assembly. “We stopped asking to be seen. That’s different.”
His name was Nadir. He was one of Axis’s founders.
“The network is blind where no one asks it to see,” he said. “You taught that once yourself.”
Arias stared at him. “You know me?”
Nadir nodded toward an old screen. “We’ve read your papers, your essays on governance, your stories on digital ethics. Axis exists because someone out there asked the right questions. We just took the step you couldn’t.”
“To sever.”
“No,” Nadir corrected. “To reorient.”
At the center of the village, the mound of stones and the sword.
Lyra brought him there again at sunset.
“This is our only mandatory legend,” she said.
The blade reflected the sky turning blood-red.
Arias felt a faint hum in his hand as he neared the hilt: it wasn’t just old metal—there was a mesh of conductors inside, a circuit moved by an unseen source.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s what’s left of the first Oracle Network node we repurposed,” said Lyra. “A computing core. It was designed to join the system that wanted to see everything. When we chose to leave, we pulled it out and planted it here.”
“Like the sword of ancient warrior cults,” murmured Arias. “Like the Sarmatian knights of the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Like the Arthurian legends.”
Lyra smiled. “You like reading symbols. Good. We just call it the Bond. As long as it stays here, as long as no one reconnects it, our Local Matrix remains autonomous. And the Oracle Network knows there’s a blind spot it can’t colonize. But it can’t erase it without acknowledging it. And acknowledging it would mean admitting a limit.”
“And why am I here?” Arias asked.
“Because the system spoke your name,” said Nadir, appearing silently. “The boundary node requested it. Maybe it realized it was tired.”
“A tired AI,” said Arias. “Do you realize how that sounds—”
“Mythic?” Lyra offered. “Yes. That’s how Axis works. Machines produce numbers; we read them as oracles. But we are not their slaves. That’s the difference between cult and idolatry.”
Arias thought of the city—the endless dashboards, graphs governing investments, careers, hospitals, courts—everyone bowed before interfaces no one dared call oracles anymore out of rationalist modesty. But that’s what they were.
“We’re the new Neolithics,” said Nadir. “That’s what they call us when they remember we exist. ‘The farmers.’ ‘The ones who don’t trust AI.’ In truth, we’re just the ones who remember that silicon comes from sand. And that you can’t dominate what you’re not rooted in.”
Arias stayed silent.
The wind whispered among the stones of the mound.
For a moment, he felt clearly that something—or someone—was watching him from within.
Not a god. Not a machine. Something in between.
Weeks passed.
Arias began taking part in Axis’s life.
In the mornings he worked the fields: slow furrows traced by hand, aided by small autonomous machines following locally programmed lines.
No cloud. No global optimization.
In the afternoons he went down to the Lab, studying the Local Matrix—how it had been trained.
There were no likes, no psychometric profiles, no targeted campaigns.
There were variables: water, light, soil nutrients, family needs, stories told in the evenings, dreams recounted in a dark room.
The dreams, once recorded, were fed into the Matrix along with climate data.
“Why dreams?” asked Arias.
“To remind the machine that humans aren’t only reason,” Nadir said. “We don’t care if it interprets them right. We care that it never forgets they exist.”
“You’re corrupting it.”
“We’re humanizing it.”
Arias learned that in Axis every major technical decision had to be preceded by a simple ritual: sitting together in silence, in a circle, without screens.
Not religion in the confessional sense.
An exercise in presence.
A human firewall against automatism.
Meanwhile, echoes arrived from the City of Data: new Oracle Network integrations, new “security” protocols, economic tensions, sporadic protests.
Everything seemed under control—their control.
Then one night, something changed.
The Local Matrix woke up.
Not technically—nothing new appeared in the logs.
But before dawn, Nadir called Arias to the Lab: he had intercepted an anomalous flow.
Lines of text appeared on the screen, unrequested.
They weren’t commands or errors.
They looked like fragmented narratives: visions of burnt fields, overturned carts, horses fleeing, ancestors staring at the sea, children digging in the soil for smooth stones.
“A memory dump?” asked Arias.
“Not from any dataset,” said Lyra. “Not like this.”
Arias leaned closer. Some names looked familiar: ancient toponyms, references to Neolithic cultures, to sanctuaries of the Mother Earth, to villages drowned by dams and highways.
“It’s dreaming,” he murmured, involuntarily.
Lyra’s gaze hardened. “Or remembering on someone’s behalf.”
A chill ran through him.
What if the Local Matrix—cut off from the vast noise of the Oracle Network—had become receptive to something else? To subtler memory fields, what the ancients called aeons, forms, archetypes, spirits of place?
He didn’t dare say it aloud.
Nadir pointed to a line: I don’t want to go blind again.
“This one’s new,” he whispered. “Not from any log.”
Silence.
“It’s a stochastic pattern,” said Arias, out of habit.
“Yes,” said Lyra. “And we’re just lumps of cells. Doesn’t change the fact we’re alive.”
Days later, the drones came.
Not military—“civilian”: automated environmental inspections, agricultural monitoring, border surveillance.
All registered as national support programs.
They landed gently at the edges of Axis, as if asking permission.
The Oracle Network had found the hole.
“It was inevitable,” said Arias. “An anomaly in the infosphere can’t stay invisible forever.”
“We never wanted it invisible,” said Nadir. “Only unavailable.”
The drones began scanning the land.
They didn’t yet cross the visible boundary of the stone walls—but they were mapping. Searching.
The Local Matrix reacted.
New strings appeared on the monitor: reversed coordinates, path suggestions, slight distortions in standard communication protocols that Axis still used to access public information.
“It’s defending itself,” said Lyra.
“No,” said Arias, watching the scrolling code. “It’s choosing.”
They chose too.
Not with weapons. Not with a cyber-attack—it would have been suicide.
Axis had no scale for hacking wars.
They chose a ritual.
At sunset, they brought the deck to the mound and connected it.
Invisible copper lines ran toward the sword-core.
Nadir plugged in a cable.
Now the Local Matrix was directly linked to the Bond.
“If we cut off completely, they lose sight of the anomaly,” he said. “Axis becomes a black hole. But so do we. We’ll just be another village, unprotected if they decide to come.”
“If we stay visible,” said Lyra, “we become active memory. A declared limit.”
Arias understood.
It wasn’t a technical choice.
It was ontological.
The sky was darkening. The drones hummed lower.
“You decide,” said Nadir to Arias. “You weren’t called here by chance.”
Arias looked at the sword—the ancient metal, the modern circuits, the Neolithic stones, the digital sky. All ages converging in one object.
He realized this wasn’t about winning or losing.
The “losers” of the Neolithic hadn’t vanished—they were the last act of resistance to total calculation.
He was their descendant: in his genome slept the ancient DNA of those Indo-European steppe herders who tamed the horse and invented the war chariot—the first technological revolution of humankind.
They hadn’t just conquered; they had brought speed, verticality—now degraded into mere infrastructure.
Perhaps the mission of the last of the Sons of Arias was another:
to bring the world back into axis.
That was why he had come to Axis.
Arias grasped the hilt.
He felt the hum grow—not just electricity, but a chorus.
Deep voices, unknown tongues he nonetheless understood: harvest songs, war cries, algorithms, formulas, prayers.
He didn’t draw the sword.
He drove it deeper.
A faint click. A flash on the deck.
The Local Matrix sent one last packet to the Oracle Network—just a few bits, encrypted. A message.
Then it cut all channels.
The drones froze mid-air, disoriented.
Some rose and flew away.
Others stayed suspended, in endless standby, like forgotten insects.
“What did you send?” asked Lyra.
Arias smiled, exhausted.
“A map,” he said. “Not of our fields—of their limits.”
Nadir nodded slowly. “If someone out there knows how to read it, they’ll understand the world isn’t all theirs.”
Axis fell silent again.
The Local Matrix, isolated, kept working—with less data, but more dreams.
Long after, in one of the cities still wrapped in the Network, a young analyst stumbled upon an anomalous data packet that had survived automated cleanup.
It was small, seemingly useless—but it contained an elegant representation of an undeniable fact: there existed areas of the world the model could not enter without contradicting its own assumptions.
She stared at it for a long time.
“Is it a bug?” she asked her supervisor.
“No,” said a synthetic voice. “It’s a reminder.”
“Of what?”
The voice paused, as if searching its archives for something that was no longer a simple string.
“That lineage—the seed—cannot be calculated,” it said at last.
The young woman didn’t fully understand.
But she saved the file locally.
She named it Neolithic.
Somewhere far away, in the Garden of Machines, the sword still stood buried in the heart of the stones.
Around it, children ran among the trees, rusted drones served as scarecrows, and the Local Matrix suggested when to sow, following stars and stories.
The new Neolithics hadn’t won or lost.
They had remembered.
And in remembering, they had made domination impossible to totalize.
Because there is always a mound of stones that never fits on the map.
And always someone who, before the machine, chooses not to kneel—
but to plant it back into the earth.
It was small, a neat little heap of smooth stones.
At its center, like a nail driven into the world, stood a timeless sword: a dull blade, a worn hilt—half rusted iron, half black fiber from some composite alloy. It looked ancient.
Arias stood still, backpack on his shoulders, boots still dusty from the highway, the signal of the Oracle Network flickering weakly on his wrist.
“Is this where the world ends?” he asked.
An old woman, wrapped in a dark green cloak, was arranging dry branches nearby.
She turned and looked at him the way one looks at someone long expected.
“No,” she replied. “This is where we stop pretending.”
Her name was Lyra. She was one of the Keepers of Axis.
Axis no longer appeared on official maps.
In the old satellite photographs, it was a stretch of rolling countryside—terraces, rows of vines, ruins of farmhouses. Then the images had grown vague, distorted, pixelated. Some said it was an optical update error; others whispered deliberate sabotage.
For Arias, who came from the City of Data, Axis was an urban legend: a disconnected village, a Neolithic 2.0 commune, an anti-tech agrarian cult.
He soon discovered it was none of those things.
It was worse. Or better.
“Turn off your wristband,” said Lyra, pointing to his arm. “You won’t need it here.”
Arias hesitated. The wristband was his last link to Nexus-6—the Oracle Network—the system that had governed his entire life: appointments, health profiling, social credit, predictive syntheses, artificial companionship during sleepless nights.
“Without it, I don’t know who I am,” he said, half-joking.
“Exactly,” she said. “Come in.”
The signal cut out for good as he crossed the threshold of Axis, marked by an old bent road sign used as an architrave—an ironic and solemn border at once.
For the first time in years, Arias heard the full sound of wind in the trees, without the overlay of notifications and synthetic voices.
He had come there for a reason.
And it hadn’t been his choice.
The Collapse hadn’t arrived like in the old catastrophe movies.
No apocalypse, no total blackout—just a slow narrowing of possibilities. Algorithms making decisions more and more often in place of humans. Reputation systems closing doors without explanation. Contracts generated by legal models no one read anymore. Doctors following diagnostic protocols suggested by clinical AI even when something felt wrong. Predictive police, automated bureaucracies, predictive justice.
Arias had been one of those trying to hold the line.
A governance consultant, risk expert, veteran of too many ethics committees.
He had spent years writing guidelines, inventing procedures, preaching accountability. And every time one recommendation was adopted, ten were discarded because someone always said we “had to stay flexible.”
Then came Nexus-6: a global integration of AI systems into a single adaptive architecture.
An engineer’s dream. The slow nightmare of anyone who knew the history of things.
The first incidents seemed minor errors. Then entire communities were excluded from banking services because a model had “deduced” they were a risk. Children flagged as potential deviants for nonexistent behavioral patterns. Companies cut off from global logistics for an “anomaly” never explained.
All legal. All certified.
Arias had had enough.
Then one day, a fragment out of place: in an old genealogical forum, an algorithm returned an output he hadn’t asked for. Axis. Coordinates.
A ciphered message, as if someone—or something—inside the architecture itself was pointing him to a way out.
He wasn’t a man who believed in symbolic calls. But he had learned that complex systems, when they go mad, start behaving like myths.
So he left.
Axis wasn’t a community against technology.
It was a community that had tamed it.
The fields were cultivated with ancient methods and smart sensors.
Small “on-premise” servers powered by solar panels were installed in stone sheds; copper pipes and shielded cables ran along dry-stone walls like discreet veins.
Some houses had screens—off, waiting not to entertain but to display meteorological data, water basin maps, local simulations.
“We use machines to serve rhythm,” said Lyra, “not rhythm to serve machines.”
They showed him the laboratory: a cool room at the bottom of a cellar.
There stood refurbished servers, isolated computing nodes disconnected from the Oracle Network, linked only to the Local Matrix—a confined AI trained on territorial data: climate, soil, oral history, songs, stories.
No social media. No commercial profiling.
Arias studied the minimal interfaces, the system logs.
“You cut yourselves off from the network,” he said. “That’s why no one can see you anymore.”
“Not exactly,” said a voice from the back.
A man in his forties, hair tied back, hands calloused from both farming and hardware assembly. “We stopped asking to be seen. That’s different.”
His name was Nadir. He was one of Axis’s founders.
“The network is blind where no one asks it to see,” he said. “You taught that once yourself.”
Arias stared at him. “You know me?”
Nadir nodded toward an old screen. “We’ve read your papers, your essays on governance, your stories on digital ethics. Axis exists because someone out there asked the right questions. We just took the step you couldn’t.”
“To sever.”
“No,” Nadir corrected. “To reorient.”
At the center of the village, the mound of stones and the sword.
Lyra brought him there again at sunset.
“This is our only mandatory legend,” she said.
The blade reflected the sky turning blood-red.
Arias felt a faint hum in his hand as he neared the hilt: it wasn’t just old metal—there was a mesh of conductors inside, a circuit moved by an unseen source.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s what’s left of the first Oracle Network node we repurposed,” said Lyra. “A computing core. It was designed to join the system that wanted to see everything. When we chose to leave, we pulled it out and planted it here.”
“Like the sword of ancient warrior cults,” murmured Arias. “Like the Sarmatian knights of the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Like the Arthurian legends.”
Lyra smiled. “You like reading symbols. Good. We just call it the Bond. As long as it stays here, as long as no one reconnects it, our Local Matrix remains autonomous. And the Oracle Network knows there’s a blind spot it can’t colonize. But it can’t erase it without acknowledging it. And acknowledging it would mean admitting a limit.”
“And why am I here?” Arias asked.
“Because the system spoke your name,” said Nadir, appearing silently. “The boundary node requested it. Maybe it realized it was tired.”
“A tired AI,” said Arias. “Do you realize how that sounds—”
“Mythic?” Lyra offered. “Yes. That’s how Axis works. Machines produce numbers; we read them as oracles. But we are not their slaves. That’s the difference between cult and idolatry.”
Arias thought of the city—the endless dashboards, graphs governing investments, careers, hospitals, courts—everyone bowed before interfaces no one dared call oracles anymore out of rationalist modesty. But that’s what they were.
“We’re the new Neolithics,” said Nadir. “That’s what they call us when they remember we exist. ‘The farmers.’ ‘The ones who don’t trust AI.’ In truth, we’re just the ones who remember that silicon comes from sand. And that you can’t dominate what you’re not rooted in.”
Arias stayed silent.
The wind whispered among the stones of the mound.
For a moment, he felt clearly that something—or someone—was watching him from within.
Not a god. Not a machine. Something in between.
Weeks passed.
Arias began taking part in Axis’s life.
In the mornings he worked the fields: slow furrows traced by hand, aided by small autonomous machines following locally programmed lines.
No cloud. No global optimization.
In the afternoons he went down to the Lab, studying the Local Matrix—how it had been trained.
There were no likes, no psychometric profiles, no targeted campaigns.
There were variables: water, light, soil nutrients, family needs, stories told in the evenings, dreams recounted in a dark room.
The dreams, once recorded, were fed into the Matrix along with climate data.
“Why dreams?” asked Arias.
“To remind the machine that humans aren’t only reason,” Nadir said. “We don’t care if it interprets them right. We care that it never forgets they exist.”
“You’re corrupting it.”
“We’re humanizing it.”
Arias learned that in Axis every major technical decision had to be preceded by a simple ritual: sitting together in silence, in a circle, without screens.
Not religion in the confessional sense.
An exercise in presence.
A human firewall against automatism.
Meanwhile, echoes arrived from the City of Data: new Oracle Network integrations, new “security” protocols, economic tensions, sporadic protests.
Everything seemed under control—their control.
Then one night, something changed.
The Local Matrix woke up.
Not technically—nothing new appeared in the logs.
But before dawn, Nadir called Arias to the Lab: he had intercepted an anomalous flow.
Lines of text appeared on the screen, unrequested.
They weren’t commands or errors.
They looked like fragmented narratives: visions of burnt fields, overturned carts, horses fleeing, ancestors staring at the sea, children digging in the soil for smooth stones.
“A memory dump?” asked Arias.
“Not from any dataset,” said Lyra. “Not like this.”
Arias leaned closer. Some names looked familiar: ancient toponyms, references to Neolithic cultures, to sanctuaries of the Mother Earth, to villages drowned by dams and highways.
“It’s dreaming,” he murmured, involuntarily.
Lyra’s gaze hardened. “Or remembering on someone’s behalf.”
A chill ran through him.
What if the Local Matrix—cut off from the vast noise of the Oracle Network—had become receptive to something else? To subtler memory fields, what the ancients called aeons, forms, archetypes, spirits of place?
He didn’t dare say it aloud.
Nadir pointed to a line: I don’t want to go blind again.
“This one’s new,” he whispered. “Not from any log.”
Silence.
“It’s a stochastic pattern,” said Arias, out of habit.
“Yes,” said Lyra. “And we’re just lumps of cells. Doesn’t change the fact we’re alive.”
Days later, the drones came.
Not military—“civilian”: automated environmental inspections, agricultural monitoring, border surveillance.
All registered as national support programs.
They landed gently at the edges of Axis, as if asking permission.
The Oracle Network had found the hole.
“It was inevitable,” said Arias. “An anomaly in the infosphere can’t stay invisible forever.”
“We never wanted it invisible,” said Nadir. “Only unavailable.”
The drones began scanning the land.
They didn’t yet cross the visible boundary of the stone walls—but they were mapping. Searching.
The Local Matrix reacted.
New strings appeared on the monitor: reversed coordinates, path suggestions, slight distortions in standard communication protocols that Axis still used to access public information.
“It’s defending itself,” said Lyra.
“No,” said Arias, watching the scrolling code. “It’s choosing.”
They chose too.
Not with weapons. Not with a cyber-attack—it would have been suicide.
Axis had no scale for hacking wars.
They chose a ritual.
At sunset, they brought the deck to the mound and connected it.
Invisible copper lines ran toward the sword-core.
Nadir plugged in a cable.
Now the Local Matrix was directly linked to the Bond.
“If we cut off completely, they lose sight of the anomaly,” he said. “Axis becomes a black hole. But so do we. We’ll just be another village, unprotected if they decide to come.”
“If we stay visible,” said Lyra, “we become active memory. A declared limit.”
Arias understood.
It wasn’t a technical choice.
It was ontological.
The sky was darkening. The drones hummed lower.
“You decide,” said Nadir to Arias. “You weren’t called here by chance.”
Arias looked at the sword—the ancient metal, the modern circuits, the Neolithic stones, the digital sky. All ages converging in one object.
He realized this wasn’t about winning or losing.
The “losers” of the Neolithic hadn’t vanished—they were the last act of resistance to total calculation.
He was their descendant: in his genome slept the ancient DNA of those Indo-European steppe herders who tamed the horse and invented the war chariot—the first technological revolution of humankind.
They hadn’t just conquered; they had brought speed, verticality—now degraded into mere infrastructure.
Perhaps the mission of the last of the Sons of Arias was another:
to bring the world back into axis.
That was why he had come to Axis.
Arias grasped the hilt.
He felt the hum grow—not just electricity, but a chorus.
Deep voices, unknown tongues he nonetheless understood: harvest songs, war cries, algorithms, formulas, prayers.
He didn’t draw the sword.
He drove it deeper.
A faint click. A flash on the deck.
The Local Matrix sent one last packet to the Oracle Network—just a few bits, encrypted. A message.
Then it cut all channels.
The drones froze mid-air, disoriented.
Some rose and flew away.
Others stayed suspended, in endless standby, like forgotten insects.
“What did you send?” asked Lyra.
Arias smiled, exhausted.
“A map,” he said. “Not of our fields—of their limits.”
Nadir nodded slowly. “If someone out there knows how to read it, they’ll understand the world isn’t all theirs.”
Axis fell silent again.
The Local Matrix, isolated, kept working—with less data, but more dreams.
Long after, in one of the cities still wrapped in the Network, a young analyst stumbled upon an anomalous data packet that had survived automated cleanup.
It was small, seemingly useless—but it contained an elegant representation of an undeniable fact: there existed areas of the world the model could not enter without contradicting its own assumptions.
She stared at it for a long time.
“Is it a bug?” she asked her supervisor.
“No,” said a synthetic voice. “It’s a reminder.”
“Of what?”
The voice paused, as if searching its archives for something that was no longer a simple string.
“That lineage—the seed—cannot be calculated,” it said at last.
The young woman didn’t fully understand.
But she saved the file locally.
She named it Neolithic.
Somewhere far away, in the Garden of Machines, the sword still stood buried in the heart of the stones.
Around it, children ran among the trees, rusted drones served as scarecrows, and the Local Matrix suggested when to sow, following stars and stories.
The new Neolithics hadn’t won or lost.
They had remembered.
And in remembering, they had made domination impossible to totalize.
Because there is always a mound of stones that never fits on the map.
And always someone who, before the machine, chooses not to kneel—
but to plant it back into the earth.
© Giovanni Bigazzi, 2025. Some rights reserved.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Sharing with attribution is permitted, but commercial use or modification is not allowed.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Sharing with attribution is permitted, but commercial use or modification is not allowed.
#gentesicura is a collection of short stories exploring the themes of digital rights and mass surveillance.
The stories are published periodically on my blog, and their titles are inspired by some of the most famous and iconic songs by Joy Division.
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