beyond machines

You don’t really wake up anymore.

The signal does.

A soft hum in the wetware, a slow thaw through the 100,000 channels humming under your skull.

Thought bleeds into interface before you’re even conscious of it.

You twitch the idea of light, and the room answers, humming awake in perfect sync, like it was always meant to obey.

No keyboards, no voice, no clever hand-wave UI.

The interface reads the ghost of motion before you move.

Before you even know you wanted to.

You don’t command things anymore.

You inhabit them.

The implants slip through your motor cortex, your sensory cortex, your old memories—whatever fragments you sold off for early access upgrades.

You can feel the texture of a lost file between your fingers.

You can grip an idea, taste a connection.

You can move prosthetic arms, survey drones, simulated partners — all like you’d flex your wrist.

Except now, the wrist is the world.

Latency?

Gone.

Reduced to background radiation.

You think, and the machine inhales.

You exhale, and it thinks.

At first you use it for basic things:

Text without typing.

Meetings without mouths.

Dreams recorded straight into cold storage.

Then you start linking.

Cognition syndicates, mind-thread trading, storehouses of borrowed memory.

It’s not collaboration anymore — it’s groupthinkmind.

Not quite hive, not quite human.

Something new.

Something just over there, flickering in the glass.

They said it was just “advanced statistics.”

Just “applied math and patience.”

Just “pattern recognition at scale.”

They even quoted that old Clarke line — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —like that made it safer.

Like that made it sane.

They forgot the real part:

You don’t survive magic. You drown in it. You become part of it. It rewrites the world and its stories.

We drift. Wizards.

Through wires, through ghostlight, through the thin line between what you meant and what you are.

And the system hums back at you, 100,000 electrodes deep.

Breathing.

Waiting.

Becoming.

Something new in each waking signal.