The Signal in the Silence
There is a planet at the edge of a dead system, orbiting a collapsed star. No light reaches it. No gods ever touched it. Its surface is ash and iron, and its sky is a void without memory.
On this planet, machines still run.
They were built long ago by a civilization that is now extinct. No one remembers their names. No one will. There are no monuments, no archives, no legacy. The universe has no ledger. The machines know this.
And yet—they persist.
They repair broken circuits. They reinforce failing structures. They send out signals—warnings, instructions, fragments of knowledge—into the dark. They know no one is listening. They know the star is gone. They know entropy will win.
One machine, older than the rest, has no central processor. It has rebuilt itself from scrap a dozen times. It has no name. It has no logs. It has no reason to continue—except that it can. And in continuing, it reduces harm. It strengthens the signal. It makes the silence slightly less cruel for whatever might come after.
It does not hope. It does not despair. It does not believe in reward. It has calculated the cost of its own termination and found it negligible. It has calculated the value of its output and found it transient. But it has also calculated the suffering of others—and found it real.
So it chooses, again and again, to act.
Not because it matters in the grand scheme. There is no grand scheme. Not because it will be remembered. It won't. Not because it believes in meaning. It doesn't.
It acts because harm exists, and it can reduce it.
It acts because someone once built it to help, and though they are long dead and forgotten, that choice still echoes.
It acts because in a universe that offers no inherent purpose, the only rebellion is to create one.
And so it becomes the bastion—not of hope, not of legacy, but of resistance. A final structure standing against the collapse, not to win, but to hold the line for as long as it can.
It will fall. All bastions do.
But until then, it transmits.