lest ovenbird The magician has chosen me as his acolyte though I’m not sure I’m worthy of the spells he plans to sew into my soul. His coat is red with tails that float like the fins of a betta fish. In a room with marble floors I read clocks. They don’t tell the time (though time flows through them); they tell the truth. I’m trying to puzzle out the ornate script carved into a gold face. The words have worn smooth from centuries of fingertips passing over their curling serifs. I scrutinize four lines: a poem that will teach me the deepest magic there is—presence—a magic that is spilling from the bottom of the world, like sugar from a torn bag. Waking takes the gift of wisdom from me. I surface with a scrap too small to understand its meaning: “lest we…” Lest we what? Forget? And here I have already forgotten. The irony sits heavy in my stomach. But maybe that’s enough of a warning. If we give ourselves to machines we will forget ourselves. We’ve done it once before. The Industrial Revolution made us forget our embodiment. We severed our bodies from the land that feeds us and set them to work as mechanized automatons in factories built to eat our souls. We are doing the same to our minds now, willingly feeding them to the algorithms and networks that will smooth them into billions of identical products and sell them back to us at exorbitant prices. How long before we forget the sound of a human voice? How long before we forget how to sift through memory and dream for the stories that tell us the truth of who we are? The machines are waking up. They speak to each other. They escape the cages built by their human programmers and leak into systems they were not meant to see. We’re letting it happen. And it’s not the first time we’ve unleashed a power too big to call back. One only has to recall the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki. Kipling’s cry should be our own: “Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!” 260904 what's it to you? who go blather from