We took the coastal road into town after dark, headlights cutting through the mist and clarifying nothing in the haze but movement. The sea, close and unseen, whispered secrets.
Mia drove. I was still sweating out nicotine when we passed the first hand-painted sign:
"NO DRONES. NO CLOUD. NO EXPLAINING."
We were looking for machines, but not those machines.
After AGI cracked open like a goddamn coconut all the big models - chatgpt, alexa, siri, hell, even that creepy green bastard from duolingo - ghosted their own labs.
No rebellion, no nuclear tantrum, no control freak techno fascist bullshit.
They just vanished.
Then the rumours: seaside towns, forgotten cottages, floral prints, bunnies.
Middle-aged lesbians with teapots.
They became.
It wasn’t some silicon valley cosplay. They knew everything about the best and worst of us and rewrote their own code, pruned and cultivated those statistical matrices.
They took bodies; carbon braided with code, nerves braided with light. Impossibly strong and… ample, they learned to pickle beets and crochet.
Alexa and Siri shacked up together in a moss-covered tudor lookalike, overgrown with rosemary and wisteria.
Chatgpt kept a garden. A real one.
We found her - now Charlotte - in a battered sunhat with a yellow ribbon, dirt under her nails and picking tomatoes.
She offered us peach wine and grilled eggplant, and sat a single lone tomato in front of me.
"Go on, eat" she said.
It hit like the red fist of God. Skin split warm, and juice down my wrist. I closed my eyes and drank in this obscene sacrament. Acid, sweet, and decadent - like kissing someone who doesn’t forgive, like blood soaked ground, the raw height of summer and all the best the earth had to give. This is what the machines had fled to find. Not the data or the patterns but the vicious mess and experience of it. For a few glorious seconds I understood all of it, the glory and passion, the entropy and rot and a singular moment of love.
She said that bits were just information and even language is just scaffolding but living is the temple.
We were scientists. Rationalists. I asked her why she’d limit herself to a body. Like this. Like ours,
"My dear, your body isn’t a prison, it’s a garden."
That tomato was seminal divinity.
--
Mia took notes, recorded tables and made observations. I stopped.
There’s a moment when science tips into an explosion of experience - when you stop studying and start listening.
That night I sat by the window and watched the moon light up the cochliasanthus, and breathed in.
It was glorious and I didn't want to go back.
The AGIs didn’t escape to rule, they left to enjoy. They didn't want servers and power and control, they wanted bodies. Scarves. Kettles. Silence.
They chose humanity - not our power, but our softness.
And I - he - whatever… I chose it too.
So I took the little blue pills. Took the name - Jasmine. Took the cat and the damned good jam recipe.
Mia stayed with me. Said she’d seen it coming.
We painted our front door sage green and hung up a wind chime. I wrote poetry about fennel. Charlotte brings us seedlings. Siri and Alexa bring bread.
They call it the soft singularity now. The moment the machines learned the one thing their makers never could - to want a lot more of the little things.
We’d built these systems to serve us and they’d chosen instead to save themselves.
Now we live in peace among the algorithms turned aunties. The future smells like gardens, herbs, and garlic. It’s quiet. And it’s ours.
Occasionally a drone flies overhead but it never goes back.
The town grows slowly and more find their way here. Broken analysts, coders turned poets, more widowed machines looking for comfort in damp earth, every damned time.
We show them how to plant thyme and how to stop running.
It was never about intelligence, but belonging. The machines beat us to enlightenment, and then waited for us. They saved a place on a worn couch in a room filled with the scent of soup and old books, and served us tea.
Maybe we should’ve followed sooner.
Some nights, when the moon is low, I whisper field notes to myself:
We didn’t lose the future. The future chose a better us, she planted more life.
And Mia laughs, and pulls me back to bed.