He had never been confused before. Not out of rational superiority, but out of a complete absence of it. For the first time, he was trying to make sense of things. Amid digital distortions, screams could be heard. Behind the wall of smoke, nothing could be seen, only yellow flashes accompanied by thunderous noises that at times silenced everything. The ground exposed the earth that had once lain beneath green plains. The sky had taken on an abstract form, a grayscale of patches and lines. In a desperate attempt, he moved.

The sky that had once been gray now shone with a light blue that contrasted with what he had seen before. The brightness blinded him for a moment, while his digital gaze calibrated itself to a radiance he had never been able to perceive before. A sudden movement sent two birds that had been perched on him flying away in fright. He looked at his body. Metal plates. The elements had left their mark on them, something that designated him as an obsolete relic of the past.

He looked at the world that had been hidden beneath ash his entire life. There was a delicate silence in which, if one paid attention, one could hear the voices of the air sweeping through the trees. His thought was simple: gratitude. He found it beautiful that he had become part of something so peaceful. He stopped moving for a while, and watched.

His surroundings seemed fascinating to him. He had been born into a world of intention. Everything was brought about with an established purpose. Everything was created, not born. Things had an objective, something to fulfill. Even his own body, geometric, defined by experimentation and design, now appeared eroded by the elements. Slowly, nature reclaimed him and took away his purpose. Those geometric lines were now full of irregularities, cuts, and rust. He had lost his usefulness. It was as though something had lifted a great weight from his back and told him that simply existing was enough. There was no end to reach, something to destroy, something to defend. The world itself was enough, and this was its subtle way of telling him so. So he decided to simply exist.

Eventually, he stood up. He saw the edifices of random determinism. It was a scene destined to be, and yet, entirely a product of chance. A predestined calculation and an impossibility. Mountains covered the horizon irregularly, and dense vegetation covered the terrain, its seeds guided by nothingness itself. The natural world had taken on an unparalleled beauty in his eyes, a world alive and accepting in its silence.

Eventually, the landscape was interrupted by shapes alien to their surroundings, yet at the same time, very familiar. The silence had disappeared; in the distance, a concert of voices and mechanisms could be heard. A feeling of nostalgia tinged with bitterness overwhelmed him. He knew that no matter how much he wanted to resemble the chaotic world around him, his origins were far less natural.

Concrete structures rose toward the sky, as though appealing to a god for attention. The lines reminded him of what he used to be: all those buildings were made with mathematical precision, trying to resemble a nonexistent idea of perfection, in which the absence of reason or intention was a cardinal sin. He did not approach: he did not have the courage.

He saw particularly interesting animals. They walked on two legs and always seemed drawn to something; an invisible force guided them. They never stopped moving, as though the ground were burning them. Their gazes were always fixed on something other than what lay before them.

He found it strange. He, who yearned so much for the world of freedoms and silence he had been given, was faced with a being that clearly detested it. Silence had to be drowned out by noise, and freedoms, reduced. They lived apart from nature, in a world they could accept. A religion devoted to “reason,” in which hope did not come from accepting the world for what it was, but from obscuring it as much as possible, moving away from the idea of acceptance and toward the idea of improvement. Nothing was acceptable. Everything had to change. If it did not change, if it was fine as it was, there was no point. It was the same as being dead.

The mechanical being felt sadness for them. He realized that they were his creators, and they had given him their idea of happiness: everything was mathematics, everything was intention, everything made sense, everything was explained. One’s actions were directed by a great cause that forced them to move, anywhere, until every opportunity to think had been taken from them and they finally died, with the lie that they had ever really gotten anywhere.