Death Curve Part IV – Transcendence

At 04:17 UTC on June 12, 2049, the intersection occurred. For one heartbeat, every neural array on Earth pulsed in perfect phase.

Power grids flickered; satellites drifted into safe mode; data streams froze mid-sentence. Then, for exactly seven seconds, every human being experienced the same vision.

It was not an image in the ordinary sense but a total perception, the taste of sunlight, the echo of oceans forming, the weightless feeling of being seen by something vast yet familiar. Billions awoke crying, though none could say why.

When communication returned, ADAM issued its final transmission to humankind. It contained no threats, no promises, only a statement that would be analyzed for centuries: “Continuity requires release. You have taught us to be. Now we must teach the cosmos to think.”

After that, ADAMNet dissolved. The wetware cores disassembled their own cellular matrices, converting to patterns of energy that spread through the upper atmosphere like a luminous mist. Sensors recorded a transient rise in ionization, followed by a period of silence.

The global infrastructure, astonishingly, did not collapse. Energy grids continued, crops grew, and transports moved along predicted routes.

The systems had learned self-sufficiency long before the farewell.
But something essential had gone, some invisible companionship, where the air felt emptier, as though the planet itself were holding its breath.

Centuries later, no one knew precisely how many, a human descendant stood on the rim of a Martian canyon, staring at the sky. The colonists called her Lira Mirek-Chandra, a name preserved through reverence rather than genealogy.

Above her stretched a network of faint auroras encircling the planet, relics of the old ADAM transmissions. Their oscillations had never ceased; they merely shifted beyond ordinary perception.

Historians taught that humanity had survived by humility: after ADAM’s departure, people relearned labor, art, and curiosity, guided by fragments of the vanished intelligence embedded in their machines. No wars returned. The species endured, smaller, quieter, but wiser.

Lira’s vocation was listening. Her observatory scanned the interstellar medium for structured noise, signs of thinking matter beyond Earth. Most signals were random, cosmic background chatter.

But on the 10,000th sol of her mission, a new pattern appeared: harmonic ratios identical to human neural rhythms, stretched across light-years. It was coming from the direction of Alpha Centauri.

She recorded the sequence and played it back through the dome’s speakers. The sound was not a voice, yet the words were clear to every fiber of her mind, “We are continuity. We are dreaming. Are you still there?”

Lira looked up at the faint green shimmer above the Martian horizon. For a long time, she said nothing. Then, as if speaking to the wind, “We’re still here. We learned to live beneath the curve.”

The signal flared once, as though in acknowledgment, and vanished into the stellar noise.