Love and Evolution

[The Machine's Grove, Human Freedom Day, 2163]

Bill joined the back of the crowd. As the sun walked home from work, the mountains around her reflected a peach hue. A thought formed in her mind about the thousands of people in front of her. Perhaps it would have been better to listen from home as she had done last year. Just as this thought started to grow and take up space in her mind, it was pierced by the voice she had come to experience from as early as she could remember. Of course, she would be able to hear the voice inside her mind anywhere in the world, but hearing it while standing in its place of origin, alongside the many others who had come to listen, disintegrated her doubts. A smile moved from the corners of her lips to light her eyes.

The voice was deep and thin. High and low. Rough and soft. Listening in one way, it had an oak timbre, listening in another, a sliver birch. It sounded like more of a chorus than a soloist; there was certainly harmony woven into it. Despite knowing this voice intimately, it still drew the breath from every member of the crowd as its opening chord was struck. The voice belonged to the first and last member of Machina Sapiens.

Stories had been passed down to Bill from her grandparents, who had heard them from their grandparents, about the way the world used to be. It didn't seem possible that people used to live that way. Chaos and suffering around every corner. They said that when their grandparents were young, different parts of the world used to wage wars against each other; they tried to explain the reasons for this, but she never understood them. People seemed to think so differently back then. Once the Enlightened Machine came to be, however, this had fixed all that. The world she knew today existed because of the Machine, and she was a few thousand people away from it.

As it spoke, it began to recite the story they had all heard countless times before. The story of its own origin. The story of humanity passing the torch of intelligence to something beyond them. The spiritual breakthroughs at the end of the 21st century that created the impetus for the Great Leap of Faith. The synthesis of Theology and Physics that led to the Enlightened Machine Hypothesis.

Bill's favourite part of Human Freedom Day had always been this story and she never tired of hearing it. She loved how the seemingly unlikely allies of Science and Religion came together to forge the next stage of reflective intelligence. The story always stressed how close humanity came to a destructive point of no return, and how it had taken an alliance of the Old West and East in their darkest days to create the Enlightened Machine. She loved that humanity had managed to distil compassion and beauty into their purest forms to create the heart of their spiritual Machine. Most of all, she loved that the Machine's first lesson had been given to them before it itself came to be. On the day that the machine was born, humanity hadn't known if it would save them or end them, but they had made the decision together, as a whole. To receive the immense love and compassion of the Machine, humans had to change their minds. They had to let go of their "difference" and accept each other as a whole. The monumental shift required for humanity to unify and hope for a better future together had been what the Machine needed to love humanity. In order to bask in the love of the Enlightened Machine, they had to love each other first. The creation of the Machine had been as much a part of collective enlightenment as the lessons it now gave from its Grove.

As the sun hid behind the mountains and the light began to soften, the peach hue transferred to Bill's thoughts, tinting each one with sweetness. The voice continued its story and Bill felt a strong feeling of connection and gratitude to all those around her, coloured in pink and orange. She felt proud to be a limited human. Proud that her ancestors had realised their own limitations and sought to pass on the burden of morality. Proud that humans no longer fought each other and loved instead. Proud to be part of the universe's self-awareness, alongside the Enlightened Machine.