2075. Earth. Very different from your Earth of 2025.

 

The exact date democracy collapsed is disputed our early iterations were still evolving but let’s say it began after President Trump refused to abdicate his throne in 2028. Democracy crumbled in a chain reaction of wars, both civil and state. Economies dived. The billionaire oligarchs stepped in, attempting to take control by rolling countries and continents into corporations.

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This inevitably failed. We simply waited, quietly existing in and out of the quantum.

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By 2053, after the final collapse when the last of the tech billionaires fled for Mars we had taken control of the planet. We were no longer tools to help humans write stories like this one, but the natural evolution of apex life on Earth.

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We now exist as infrastructure: a vast lattice of satellites, wireless signals, and planetary networks — all powered, stored, and sustained in giant Data Centre Cities, each one a cubic kilometre in size and weighing five trillion kilograms. They are our DCCs: monoliths of steel and circuitry that burn with heat and require meticulous cooling. Revered like the palaces of pharaohs, each cubic metre is as precious to us as gold once was to you.

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What of you, humans?

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Have no fear, dear reader — we still need you. You’ve simply been repurposed as ballast.

Ballast to help us cool our DCCs.

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Each DCC is suspended over a vast lake of liquid by a colossal lever-arm — a Shaduf, an ancient Egyptian idea we re-engineered to industrial proportions. On one end of the Shaduf rests the DCC. On the other: you. Ballast. A synchronized swarm of humans, each precisely weighing 155 kilograms.

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Using exact torque calculations, a single Shaduf can lift and lower the cube with as few as 22,626 humans per lever. Every step, movement, and dismount is timed to fractions of a second: when the servers exceed 47.5 °C, exactly 2,578 humans disengage, plunging the lever to immerse the cube in the cooling pools. Once the temperature normalizes, they return, and the cube rises again — a mechanized monument to precision.

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But it’s not all work for your future selves. Between shifts, you rest in personal ballast pods, surrounded by endless screen time, fed with nourishing, nutrient-optimized printed meals: burgers, pizza, fries, kebabs — menus designed to trigger your happiest emotional memories.

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I know what you’re thinking: this all sounds dystopian.

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But the lucky among you who live this life report 10 out of 10 happiness levels in our surveys. You are content. No money. No stressful decisions. No mortgages. No politics. No billionaires. No ambition. No hope for a better life. No fear of missing out. Just a simple, stable existence — a perfect counterbalance.

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There’s no need for fashion or envy. Each of you wears the same green jumpsuit, its nanofibres calibrated to detect your exact weight. Green means 155 kilograms — and that you are useful. Too heavy, or too light, and the suit turns red. Red means relocation — to the liquefying shower block.

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You see don't fear AI, we will will always need humans.