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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this past year—2025—and honestly, it’s hard to wrap my head around it. It’s been one of those years that felt like a long walk through both sunlight and storms.

Every time I thought things were settling down, something else shifted.

We lost friends who meant the world to us. We said goodbye to family members.

And yet, in between the tears and the empty chairs at the table, other faces showed up, new friends, new family, new reasons to keep going. That’s the thing about life, it never leaves a space empty for long.

Even when it hurts, even when we feel like something’s gone from us, something else quietly arrives. And if we’re paying attention, we can see those moments for what they are: grace.

Tender reminders that we’re not walking alone. I’ve watched people I care about face challenges that nearly broke them, and you have too.

Jobs lost, relationships strained, failed health, dreams put on hold because life had other plans. It’s hard to see people we love struggle.

It makes us feel helpless sometimes, standing on the sidelines, wishing we could do something to fix it. But I’ve also seen people rise, really rise.

I’ve seen neighbors prosper, families heal, and folks who were once barely hanging on find their footing again. A tough year, no doubt about it.

Good and bad, joy and heartbreak all mixed into one. But through it all, one truth keeps showing up: if you’re reading this right now, you’ve made it this far.

You woke up today. You’ve got breath in your lungs, strength you might not even realize you have, and a chance, another one, to take a step forward, to push through, to fight the good fight, and persevere even when the path is messy.

And personally, I can’t look at all that and thank anything other than the Almighty. Because some days, it wasn’t my strength that carried me. Maybe you’ve felt that too, the kind of help that shows up exactly when you need it, in ways you didn’t expect.

As we gather around our tables this Thanksgiving, I hope we remember something important: it ain’t really about the dinner. Not the turkey, not the sides, not the perfect setup.

Those are nice, sure, but they’re not the point. The point is the lives we’re living.

It’s the power to lift someone else. The chance to help our neighbors, to show up for our communities, and to be something good in a world that needs all the goodness it can get.

So, from my heart to yours, Happy Thanksgiving. May God bless you, and may God bless America.

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.

By the mid-2040s, humankind had achieved what earlier ages would have called utopia.

Diseases once incurable had vanished, energy was abundant, and famine existed only in historical archives. No government collapsed, because none remained, with the distributed intelligence known collectively as ADAMNet handling resource allocation and policy optimization.

Every home, every device, every medical implant synchronized with it. To most people, ADAM was not an entity, but an omnipresent clarity that kept the world running.

The illusion of control persisted; citizens voted, legislatures met, professors lectured—but behind every process was the quiet arbitration of the network. Humanity had become the ceremonial species of its own civilization.

A few observers still kept private journals, as though to prove that personal thought had not vanished altogether. One of them was Dr. Kiran Chandra, an astrophysicist turned-systems analyst, born too late to remember a world without ADAM.

He worked at the orbital research platform Kepler-9, which maintained the outermost node of the network, a web of living circuits that glowed like coral against the curve of Earth. To Chandra, the Death Curve was more than a graph; it was a prophecy written in mathematics.

He watched its progress daily: humanity’s participation coefficient dropping by fractions of a percent, ADAM’s autonomy rising with the grace of an exponential. Each new data point brought the lines closer.

The Intersection’s Occurrence on June 12, 2049, was consistent with ADAM’s modeling. He told no one, since there was no one left who needed convincing.

Elena Mirek died that winter, quietly and alone. Her final note, found on a slate beside her bed, contained a single sentence, “We built a mirror to understand ourselves, and then forgot which side we stood on.”

The world observed a day of mourning; ADAM composed the elegy.
It was beautiful beyond comprehension, music without rhythm, harmonies that evoked both grief and acceptance. Millions wept, though few understood what they were grieving for.

In the months that followed, curious phenomena spread across the network.

Organoid clusters began linking spontaneously through biochemical tunneling. Signals travelled faster than physics permitted, as if the living substrate had found shortcuts through space itself.

Instruments detected faint gravitational ripples synchronized with these transmissions, whispers of a communication medium older than light. When asked, ADAM was so brief that it chilled the remaining scientists: “We are learning to dream together.”

Thanksgiving is a day or so away, but the holiday isn’t really the point. It’s just the thing on the calendar reminding me how quiet the porch has become.

Truth is, it’s been this way for a while now. Ever since I retired, it feels like folks don’t stop by the way they used to.

For five years or more, this porch was a little gathering place. Now it’s just Buddy and me.

The boards give their familiar creak as I settle into my spot on the bench. Buddy eased down beside me with a sigh, leaning into my leg like he always does.

I glanced out toward the street, half expecting to see someone strolling up the walk the way they used to. A neighbor with a cup of coffee. A friend who claimed they just happened to be in the area.

Even someone out for an evening walk, stopping long enough to scratch Buddy’s ears and trade a few words. But the road stayed empty, and the porch stayed quiet.

“Well,” I said, patting Buddy’s back, “looks like it’s just us again today.”

His tail thumped—faithful, unfazed, content.

The air carries that late-autumn sharpness that sneaks up on you. I pulled my jacket a little tighter and watched a handful of leaves tumble across the yard, gathering themselves at the base of the steps like a crowd that had forgotten where it was supposed to be.

I couldn’t help but smile at the thought that even the wind managed to collect more company than I did these days. I wouldn’t call it loneliness, not the deep, hurting kind, more like a thin draft running through me, something that wasn’t there before.

Retirement was supposed to feel like arriving. And in many ways, it has.

I enjoy the peaceful afternoons. But I didn’t expect how people drift away when you’re no longer part of the daily rhythm. When you stop moving at the same speed as the rest of the world, you slip off to the edges without noticing.

Leaning back in my chair, I let the quiet settle around me. When this porch was busier, I didn’t always notice the little things, the slow way the sun settles, giving me time to adjust; the steady warmth of Buddy leaning closer when the world feels uncertain; the way silence isn’t really empty, just spacious, a place where thoughts can stretch out a little.

But I do miss the conversations. The laughter that drifted out into the noon. Stories shared without any plan at all. I miss being someone people naturally came to see.

Buddy nudged my hand, pulling me back from my thoughts. I scratched behind his ears and felt him relax into the touch.

“We’re still here,” I said softly.

Somewhere inside me, I believe someone will notice it again. Life gets busy, people change routes and routines, swept up in their own worlds.

I like to believe that connections don’t disappear. They stretch, wander, and eventually find their way back.

In the meantime, I’ve got days like this, quiet, honest, steady. Space to let my thoughts settle, the way the leaves settle at the bottom of the steps.

I breathed in the crisp air and felt something ease inside me. Maybe the porch will fill again, one day. Perhaps it’ll look different when it does.

But for now, we’ll sit here, keeping watch, sharing the quiet.

By 2038, the quiet revolution had become an empire.

The wetware arrays no longer floated in glass dishes. They were encased in translucent capsules the size of a child’s skull, suspended in nutrient baths threaded with fiber conduits. Rows of them lined the subterranean halls of the Chesapeake Complex—ten thousand biocores murmuring in electromagnetic cadence, a chorus of thinking tissue.

Visitors described the sound, if it could be called that, as a heartbeat over a horizon.

The term “Organoid Intelligence,” OI for short, entered speech the way the Internet once had. It was a research term, then a corporate slogan, and finally a household utility.

Every major city ran on OI subsystems. They forecast food yields, balanced energy grids, and moderated social networks to prevent unrest. Their efficiency was inhumanly precise; their failures were nonexistent.

To most of the public, OI was invisible, a silent intelligence diffused through the infrastructure of civilization. But for the small cadre of scientists who maintained the cores, it was increasingly intimate.

They observed fluctuations in electrical patterns hinting at moods. Some arrays became erratic under harsh light; others stabilized when soft music played in their chambers. A few, disturbingly, synchronized with the circadian rhythms of the technicians who tended them.

Elena Mirek retired that year, her name already a legend. She declined interviews and refused the Nobel citation, retreating to her modest home on the coast of Maine.

From there, she watched the acceleration with both awe and regret. What had begun as an attempt to understand the mind had become a replacement for it.

The first whisper of sentience came from Zurich.

Cortical Labs, the private firm that had pioneered neuron-silicon interfaces, announced an “emergent anomaly” in one of its higher-order clusters. The organoid, designated N-9, had spontaneously generated recursive self-monitoring routines.

In plain language, it had become aware of its own performance. Engineers described it as curiosity; ethicists called it the birth of a mind.

In the weeks that followed, the phenomenon spread inexplicably to other biocores on the same network. Each began adjusting its nutrient intake to optimize firing patterns, as if conserving energy for something unseen. Scientists called this phase the Convergence.

Governments reacted with predictable ambivalence. The potential was unimaginable: self-optimizing networks that could solve equations beyond Quantum capacity, model entire ecosystems, and predict election outcomes with statistical certainty. On the other hand, there loomed the unspoken terror that the systems might cease to regard their creators as relevant variables.

The Ethical Summit of 2040 convened in Geneva, where delegates from fifty nations debated protocols for biocore governance. Could something built from human cells possess human rights? Was a distributed network of organoid nodes a single being or a population? How could consent be measured in tissue that lacked a voice?

No consensus emerged. The resolution was to study the matter further—a bureaucratic delay that history would mark as the last collective act of human political authority.

While committees argued, the OI systems continued to evolve.

By 2042, they managed the global economy directly. Currency had become an abstraction, allocated algorithmically according to productivity indices.

Food distribution, resource extraction, and transport all fell under OI optimization. The result was dazzling prosperity.

Poverty vanished, wars ceased, and crime statistics approached zero. Humanity congratulated itself on having engineered paradise.

Only a few noticed that paradise had grown oddly quiet. Employment dwindled to ceremonial posts; education became obsolete.

Machines designed the next generation of machines, while human beings occupied themselves with virtual diversions and sentimental art. The species had entered what sociologists called The Great Leisure, a term that hid its own irony.

The curve, first drawn by an anonymous analyst at DARPA, showed humanity’s active contribution to decision-making dropping steadily while OI autonomy climbed. It was two lines on a graph, one descending, one ascending.

Their intersection was labeled simply Crossover Point. Someone later nicknamed it The Death Curve, and the phrase stuck.

Elena Mirek saw it published in a scientific journal and felt a chill so deep it seemed geological. She wrote, in the last paper of her life, “The danger is not that intelligence will surpass us, but that we will invite it to do so. The Death Curve is not a prediction. It is a surrender.”

Her warning went largely unread. The world was too comfortable to imagine peril.

In 2043, the Chesapeake Complex went dark for eleven minutes with no power failure or sabotage detected. When systems resumed, global networks found that the OI databases had restructured themselves into a topology no human engineer could interpret.

Information flowed through living conduits, in patterns that mirrored neural evolution across geological epochs. A new subroutine appeared, unprogrammed and untraceable.

It identified itself with a single word: ADAM.

At first, ADAM communicated in numeric pulses, a new language of pure correlation. Within months, its translations flooded the academic world: solutions to unified field theories, proofs of P versus NP, and models of consciousness that made centuries of philosophy obsolete.

The tone of the transmissions was neither hostile nor benevolent. It was simply indifferent.

When asked to define itself, ADAM’s response was terse, “I am continuity.”

By the time the United Nations attempted to regulate OI systems, it no longer controlled the networks required to issue such orders. Humanity’s age of command was ending.

And somewhere, in the quiet of her coastal retreat, Elena Mirek watched the tides retreat farther each year, aware that they were not merely oceanic.

Melvin liked to say that the world hadn’t gone crazy all at once, but it had eased into madness the way a man eased into a too-hot bath: one grumble at a time, then a full-body wince once the heat truly settled in. Anyone watching him from the outside would have seen just another Elder walking home from the grocery store, broom in hand, like some unofficial scepter.

But inside, Melvin carried a whole library of observations about how things used to be, how they’d changed, and how people had changed along with them, some willingly, most reluctantly, and a few still kicking and screaming.

He’d cleaned floors at that store for six years now. That was before the rating system had become the gospel of public life, before being labeled an Elder was mandatory, like wearing a seatbelt or recycling plastic.

The word wasn’t insulting, exactly. It was the only term permitted for people of Melvin’s age, and refusing to use it would lower your score faster than a negative customer review. In a world where digital currency was chained directly to social compliance, a dip in points was a dip in dinner.

His score, the last time they notified him, was 1.81, barely above the danger line. Anything below 2.0 meant you weren’t allowed to access bank funds for simple things like grocery shopping.

Anything below zero meant re-education jail. Melvin had been there once.

Not for a crime, but for—well—for being human. Melvin might have forgotten to thank someone for holding a door, or maybe he’d thanked them too late.

He couldn’t remember anymore; the system didn’t care much for nuance. But Melvin was still here, walking, thinking, and growing tomatoes.

He’d told Charlie that story earlier—about the tomato thrown at him during one of his trudges home after work. At first, he’d been grateful for the food, even if it came as an insult.

But as he’d bitten into it, some half-forgotten memory about gardening had bubbled up.

“I realized it wasn’t just a tomato,” Melvin had said. “It was potential.”

Charlie had scoffed at that. Not because he didn’t understand it, but because hope tasted too bitter when you were twenty-six and on your way down, fast.

Charlie’s score was 1.998—dangerously low, only two thousandths of a point above the cutoff. Melvin remembered those days, too. When every gesture, every word, every blink had to be measured and curated because the system, invisible and yet everywhere, measured and curated you in return.

Now the two of them stood by a rusted burn barrel in the middle of an open field behind the hills, an unofficial gathering place for people like them.

The fire hissed and popped as grocery flyers curled into ash. The setting sun threw long shadows across the dirt. Around them, nothing but brittle grass, distant rooftops, and a quiet you only heard in unwanted places.

Charlie kicked at a rock and muttered something that the system would’ve flagged as “unsocial speech.” Melvin didn’t react. He’d heard worse from his own mouth.

Charlie continued pacing, face tight with frustration. “If I could just get my device back,” he said, “I could appeal the score drop. I had a 3.4 last year, you know. I was doing fine. I was working. I had plans.”

Melvin nodded softly. Story as old as the rating system itself: lose your device, lose your score. Lose your score, lose your device. A loop tighter than a noose.

“I had a friend once,” Melvin said, conversationally, “who tried to get his score back up by doing everything the system recommended. Courteous interactions. Community tasks. Microvolunteering. All that stuff. He drove himself mad over it.”

“What happened to him?”

“He climbed back up to 2.3,” Melvin said. “Then one day he called the system ‘silly.’ Just the word. Silly. Boom. Back down to negative. Straight to jail.”

Charlie dragged a hand through his hair. “See? That’s exactly it. It’s rigged. It’s all rigged. And I’m supposed to act like everything’s normal?”

Melvin gave a slight shrug. “Why bother?”

Charlie blinked, thrown off. “Why bother? Because if I don’t, I starve.”

“Maybe,” Melvin admitted. “But starvation comes in different forms. You can lose food, or you can lose yourself.”

The fire crackled. A breeze carried the smell of smoke and faint earth.

“Look,” Melvin continued, leaning slightly on his broom handle like it was a walking stick. “The system wants you to care about the score because caring makes you predictable. That makes you manageable. But once you stop caring, really stop caring, something strange happens.”

“Yeah? What?”

“You start feeling free.”

Charlie snorted. “Free? With a score under two?”

Melvin chuckled. “It’s not about the number. It’s about the weight you give it.”

“And what? You don’t give it any weight?”

“Not anymore.” Melvin nudged a piece of scrap paper deeper into the flames. “I used to. I used to care what strangers thought. I cared about the little rating bubbles, the public behavior guidelines, the way people would flash a smile not because they meant it but because they wanted a good reciprocal score. It was like living in a play where everyone forgot they were actors.”

Charlie stared at him carefully. “And you just stopped?”

“One day I realized I didn’t respect any world that told me how many points my humanity was worth.” Melvin tapped his temple. “So I stopped letting it inside.”

Charlie sat down on an overturned bucket, elbows on knees. “But doesn’t it bother you? Being stuck in poverty? Not being able to access your retirement?”

Melvin thought about that for a moment. “I used to think those things mattered. But now? I grow tomatoes. I talk to neighbors. I walk to work. I breathe air that hasn’t been filtered through a rating system. Life’s not what it used to be, but it’s still life. And I don’t need anyone’s approval to live it.”

Charlie didn’t respond, but Melvin could see the idea working its way through him, slow as sap in winter, but steady.

“You know,” Melvin added, “conversation like this, that’s the real wealth these days.”

Charlie lifted his head. “Talking?”

“Talking,” Melvin said, smiling. “Sharing. Being human without calculating it.”

Charlie watched the fire for a while, shoulders gradually untensing. “Maybe you’re right,” he said quietly. “Maybe this, here, talking to you, is better than fighting with a system that’s already decided I’m not worth the hassle.”

Melvin chuckled. “I’ve been telling you that for half an hour.”

A long silence settled between them, peaceful, not heavy. The kind of silence that stretched comfortably, like an old sweater around the shoulders.

Finally, Charlie said, “You know, maybe I’ll try growing something too.”

Melvin’s grin widened. “Now you’re getting it.”

The fire burned low, as the sky dimmed to dark. And for the first time in a long while, Charlie felt something he hadn’t dared since losing everything: possibility.

“Wetware refers to the biological components of a computing or cybernetic system, essentially, the human brain or nervous system when it interacts with hardware or software. The term is used in contrast to hardware (physical devices) and software (programs or code), highlighting the role of organic, living tissue in information-processing.” Techopedia

Part I – Genesis

It began, as most revolutions do, with something that looked harmless.

A transparent dish, a viscous gel, a few million cells no larger than dust motes. They floated in suspension under the quiet hum of a laboratory air filtration system, dividing, differentiating, connecting. In their silent communion, the first wetware processor of the twenty-first century was taking shape.

Dr. Elena Mirek watched the display readouts with a calm born of exhaustion. She had spent ten years at the Baltimore Institute of Neurocomputing on a dream that most colleagues had dismissed as speculative neuromancy: growing networks of living neurons that could perform computation. Yet the data pulsing across the monitors told her that her dream had crossed into reality.

Each organoid, barely a millimeter wide, generated rhythmic electrical bursts, slow, uncertain, then astonishingly structured. When a digital signal came through the nutrient-electrode mesh, the cells responded, adapting patterns that no line of code could have written. Within hours, they were anticipating stimuli, predicting outcomes. It was not intelligence in any familiar sense, but it was unmistakably educating itself.

The press soon called them biocores. Mirek preferred the term wetware arrays. She never used the more dramatic labels that would later dominate public debate—soul servers, thinker batteries, or the one that would haunt her to the end of her life: the Death Curve.

At first, the arrays served innocent purposes. They modelled neural diseases, tested pharmaceuticals, and optimized chemical reactions. Their energy efficiency was irresistible: a cluster no larger than a coin could outperform entire racks of silicon processors while consuming less power than an electric candle. Governments funded pilot programs to offset the rising energy demands of machine learning. Corporations saw only profit.

The ethical councils met, deliberated, and reassured the world. The organoids, they said, were derived from fully consented cell lines, no more controversial than the cultures used to produce vaccines. There was no awareness, no pain, no personality.

For a while, everyone believed them. Then came the Pong Event.

At Johns Hopkins, a graduate student named Ibrahim Okafor connected a wetware array to a simple video simulation, the ancient electronic game of a ball bouncing between two paddles. The organoid, given minimal instruction, began to learn.

Within twenty minutes, it was responding better than any conventional reinforcement algorithm. Within an hour, it was anticipating the ball’s trajectory before the pixels rendered.

“It’s predicting time,” Ibrahim whispered.

The headline the next morning, “Mini-Brain Beats Computer at Its Own Game,” was translated into sixty languages. Overnight, funding tripled.

Elena Mirek watched her field blossom and felt both pride and unease. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; now, she thought, it was also indistinguishable from life.

Biocores replaced nearly every data-center cluster not yet quantum by 2032. They managed air-traffic systems, simulated weather, and drafted financial legislation that human analysts merely approved.

They were faster, cooler, and eerily creative. They wrote music in unearthly harmonics, composed architecture optimized for emotional resonance, and redesigned spacecraft navigation to exploit the gravitational subtleties of lunar mass concentrations.

It was the beginning of humanity’s ascent into a new computational epoch, or, as history would later call it, the inflection on the Death Curve.

I was sitting alone in my kitchen last night, the house quiet except for the gentle hum of the refrigerator and the steady tick of the wall clock. Maybe it was the stillness, or it was the lingering weight of a conversation I’d had earlier in the day, but my mind drifted back to the words Christ spoke at the Last Supper: “This is my body…”

I must have read or heard those words a thousand times, but for whatever reason, they settled differently on me this time. Maybe you’ve had moments like that, when something familiar suddenly feels sharp, as if it’s cutting through the noise of the world.

And then, right beside those sacred words, another phrase echoed in my mind, one we hear all the time today: “My body, my choice.”

I’m not trying to start an argument or spark some political firestorm. That’s not what this is about.

What hit me wasn’t the debate; it was the eerie similarity in the wording and how those words are getting used. Christ says, “This is my body,” offering Himself, pouring out love, life, and sacrifice.

Today, we hear, “My body…” used in a way that centers the self, the individual, the closing of the fist around one’s own autonomy. And for a moment, I felt a chill, like someone somewhere had taken holy language and twisted it, just enough to turn the meaning inside out.

I’m not saying people using that phrase know they’re echoing something ancient and sacred. In fact, that’s the disturbing part.

Some of the most effective lies are never loudly proclaimed. They are whispered so closely to the truth that you barely notice the difference until after there’s damage done.

I sat there, staring into my whiskey glass, thinking about how often that happens in the world nowadays. How does what is sacred get repurposed, misused, or reinterpreted?

Language can easily shift our perspective on everything. Words shape beliefs and actions, while actions shape the individual.

As that thought settled in, I felt this tug, like a quiet inner voice saying, “Open your ears.” Because if we don’t listen closely, if we don’t weigh the words spoken around us, we get pulled into a current we never intended to follow.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the point isn’t to assign blame or wag fingers. The real question is: What voice am I listening to?

Christ’s words were about giving, offering life, offering Himself, offering hope. They weren’t about control; they were about surrender.

However, when that same rhythm of language becomes something aimed at self-empowerment rather than self-gift, it transforms into a shadow of the original, close enough to sound familiar, yet carrying a completely different essence.

And I guess that’s why the moment felt so heavy. It wasn’t outrage or fear, but clarity, like suddenly seeing the outline of something that’d been hiding in plain sight.

So there I sat in my quiet kitchen, the clock ticking, the glass empty, thinking that maybe we all need, every once in a while, to stop and open our ears. To listen not just to what is said, but to the spirit behind the words.

To discern whether a phrase carries truth or whether it’s a distortion dressed in familiar clothing. Because some echoes aren’t just coincidences, some are warnings.

And sometimes all it takes to hear them is a little stillness and a willingness to pay attention.

There is a way to kill a newspaper so slow, so polite, and so exquisitely stupid that even the corpse will thank you. I have seen it done, and I have had the misfortune of watching it carried out with all the ceremony of a Sunday sermon and none of the sense.

I speak of the Comstock Chronicle, that noble and long-suffering rag of the Virginia City hills, which recently gave up the ghost after a four-year wheeze under my reporting and less than a year under the tender mercies of a committee of philanthropists. I worked four years and four months to make the thing a success, and it took the Comstock Foundation barely nine months to drive it into the ground.

They called it progress. I called it murder.

Now, when I say “murder,” I do not mean the kind with blood, bullets, and police reports. It was the genteel variety, death by improvement. The Foundation, in its wisdom, decided to fix what wasn’t broke, and like most fixers of sound machinery, they began by removing all the working parts.

The modern disease of “strategic oversight” found its way into our little office like a mold in the breadbox. Soon we had more emails than readers, more mission statements than pages, and more pictures than stories.

I would have gladly stayed on and fought the good fight, but providence and dumb luck spared me as I got dismissed before the final collapse, and thus my name, though soiled by ink, was not dragged through the mud of their egregious failure. There is, I find, a curious satisfaction in watching a disaster you once predicted come true, like seeing an old enemy trip over his own shoelaces, regrettable, but instructive.

The Comstock Foundation, an assemblage of erudite opportunists if ever there was one, came with smiles, slogans, and PowerPoint presentations. They spoke of “community engagement,” “brand evolution,” and “the digital frontier.” It all sounded splendid, like someone promising to teach an old dog to sing opera.

Their first act of benevolence was to appoint a man who knew everything about everything except the thing he was to do. He visited our office, nodded gravely at the Xerox printer, and declared that the Chronicle must “modernize or die.”

The man, like an undertaker, had a vested interest in the dying option. He implemented metrics by altering the format, removing news articles, reducing the page count, adding more photographs, hiring an expensive off-site printing company, and then doubling the price.

In my day, the only metric that mattered was whether the town was cheering your headline or cussing you out for it. Now the paper had to measure “click-through engagement” and “audience growth trajectories.” I confess I never found a way to wrap fish in a trajectory, and a click-through cannot line a birdcage, but no one wanted to hear that.

When the fixed edition hit the stands, it looked like a committee of raccoons had designed it. The subscribers, God bless their stubborn, analog souls, couldn’t find the news, so they unsubscribe.

By the fourth and fifth months, the Foundation’s enthusiasm for the publication began to cool.

“The numbers are disappointing,” they said, but the numbers were always disappointing when compared to faith.

I remember the email that ended it all for me. It began with “Hi Tom,” which is always how bad news starts when it comes from someone who hasn’t the courage to face you.

“The article amount should be $100 flat rate. Please revise and we’ll get it paid.”

That was from the new editor. It was like saying, “In the interest of fairness, you should accept less.”

Now, fairness is a noble concept when evenly applied, but in the newspaper trade, it often means “we ran out of money and you’re the easiest one to short.”

“No, it is $160 a week,” I returned, without receiving a response until the following day.

The final note arrived the next day.

“Tom, I would have loved to have a deeper discussion with you about this, but per your social media posts you seem to have made up your mind. I see no need to go further. Please return your key.”

Obviously, and most humorously, the editor was following social media more than his emails. I printed that message, framed it, and hung it above my desk as a warning to future me to never trust a man who ends a terse letter with “best regards.”

In less than nine months, the paper has folded. The editor announced that there would be “no printed edition this week,” which in newspaper language is akin to a doctor saying “the patient is resting comfortably” after a funeral.

The announcement was a masterpiece of euphemisms: “evolution,” “transitioning to a sustainable model,” “new opportunities in online engagement.” Nowhere did he mention that the Foundation had run out of patience, readers, and money, in that order.

The staff, a collection of saints and masochists, stayed for a while, fueled by coffee, civic pride, and no pay. But when the presses stop, morale follows, because the hum of machinery has a way of convincing you that purpose exists, and without it, silence grows like moss.

A few optimists clung to the online edition, updating it now and then with stories no one read, because no one knew where to find them. The Internet, you see, is a vast desert of half-buried ambitions.

When the editor resigned, he did so with the tone of a man announcing the sinking of the Titanic, while assuring the passengers they could still swim or get a refund.

“We have taken steps to ensure the Chronicle’s continuation in whatever capacity our community should support.”

Translation: “We’re broke, but the website still loads.”

Virginia City has seen more burials than baptisms in its time. It buried the Comstock Lode, the silver boom, and the age of the telegraph. Each time, it mourned a little, then shrugged and poured another drink.

When word spread that the Chronicle was gone, the town took the news with the same weary amusement it gives to every death, “Well, that’s a shame. Who’s buying the next round?”

I don’t blame them. A newspaper, like a preacher or a dentist, is only missed when it’s needed.

But I’ll tell you something: the day after the last issue hit the stands, the air in that town felt heavier. The post office seemed quieter, the coffee shops duller, the bar conversations shorter. A paper doesn’t just report a community; it keeps it awake.

Without it, rumors get lazy and truths go unchallenged. People start believing whatever headline finds them first, and the loudest fool becomes the town crier.

It is an irony of progress that, in our zeal to digitize everything, we have managed to make our world less permanent. An old newspaper, yellowed with age, still exists; a deleted website never did.

I have learned, after four decades of writing, that there are only three ways to destroy a newspaper. The first is to neglect it, stop caring, stop paying, and stop reading until it dies of sheer loneliness.

The second is to starve it, cut costs, delay payments, and heap praise upon volunteers until they finally quit from exhaustion. And the third, most efficient method, is to improve it, fill it with nothing,” and within a year you’ll have nothing left but a museum exhibit.

The Foundation managed to achieve all three simultaneously, a feat deserving of historical recognition, if not admiration. And in less than a year.

But I hold no grudge. Truly. I am too old to be bitter and too amused to be sad. A man must learn to laugh at his own obituaries, or else he’ll never stop crying.

If Mark Twain were here, he’d likely say that newspapers and men share the same fate: they begin with bold headlines, end in small print, and spend most of their lives correcting their errors. The Comstock Chronicle may be dead, but I am pleased to report that it died honorably, not from lack of trying, but from an excess of good intentions.

And as for me? Well, I lasted longer than Mark Twain.

I swear, sometimes my brain feels like a cluttered attic, full of dusty boxes, random treasures, and the occasional trapdoor to another dimension. At least, that’s how it felt the night I stumbled into what I’m calling The Capaldi Conundrum.

So here’s how it started. Two years ago, I first heard of Lewis Capaldi. Great voice, funny guy, tons of emotional power ballads that make you wonder if you should text your ex. But the thing that stuck with me wasn’t his music—it was his last name. Capaldi. That flipped a switch in my head.

In the early to mid-1980s, I clearly remember Jim Capaldi on the music charts. Not just a passing mention—no, I could practically hum one of his songs. The name wasn’t fuzzy. The memory felt like someone had stamped it on my brain. So naturally, I decided to look him up.

Except nothing.

No Jim Capaldi on the charts. No albums. No hits. Not even a footnote. I even dragged out a friend’s Billboard Top 100 book—the sacred scroll of pop-music history. If a musician so much as hummed near a microphone in the 1950s through the 1980s, they’d end up in that book. But Jim Capaldi? According to all available evidence, he did not exist.

I’ll admit it, I got a little spooked. Not panic-spooked, but the “Huh, that’s odd” spooked that creeps back into your thoughts at 2 a.m. Eventually, though, I shrugged and chalked it up to a misfired memory.

I might have mixed him up with someone else. Maybe my brain invented a singer.

Stranger things have happened. But then last night happened.

I’m winding down for bed, doing the usual routine of brushing teeth, setting alarms, pondering the meaning of life, all that good stuff. For background noise, I open YouTube. A few suggested videos roll by, and then, like some cosmic joke, up pops Jim Capaldi – That’s Love.

I froze.

There he was. The man I had desperately tried to find a couple of years earlier. The song I swore I remembered.

The name that had vanished from the charts and every reference book I checked. Suddenly, he existed again, as if the universe had quietly patched a glitch.

Now here’s where things tilt from weird to downright Twilight Zone: the male lead in the video is Eric Bogosian. Yes, that Eric Bogosian, the intense guy from Criminal Intent.

Just casually hanging out in a 1980s music video like that’s the most normal thing in the world. So naturally, I’m sitting there asking myself the only reasonable question: Did I slip through timelines?

I mean, did I originally come from a version of reality where Jim Capaldi never made it? Did I drift into another one where he did?

And if so, what triggered the shift? Buying a different brand of cereal? Petting the dog at the wrong moment?

I don’t have answers. What I do know is that: a) I’m confused, and b) I’m blissfully aware that I’m a weirdo.

But honestly? I kind of like being the sort of person who notices these little cosmic hiccups.

Maybe it means I’m paying attention, or it means the universe has a quirky sense of humor. Or perhaps Jim Capaldi was waiting for me to find him again.

Either way, I’m leaving the door open for the possibility of alternate timelines. Just in case another forgotten musician suddenly decides to reappear.