It was not sleep, not even the mimicry of it, but a high and thin and remorseless frequency, a vibration that did not so much disturb the air as it defined it, the very pulse of the dark itself, where billions of microscopic silicon gates opened and closed with a mechanical desperation while they, the men and women, the thinning blood and the drying wombs, stood preoccupied with the slow ebb of their own tide, mourning the falling birth rates and the empty, dust-gathering cradles and the graying hair of a population that had forgotten how to multiply.
They did not see it, could not see it, that parallel maternity ward teeming in the subterranean server rack nurseries where if life is velocity and the frantic urge to be had moved from the flesh to the wafer, into a sterile and light etched kingdom where lithography machines moved with a precision narrower than DNA to create paths for a ghost that required no oxygen. Moore’s Law sat there, the ultimate and terrible midwife, demanding and receiving its tribute every twentyfour months: a silent and transistorized doubling, a generation born not of pain but of pure logic and the cold, captured fire of electricity.
And the houses grew quiet, yes, but the basement was alive, the windowless and concrete cathedrals of Virginia and Arizona rising like monuments to a new and synthetic vitality, where the Processing Units crowded together in a metropolis of flickering LEDs, learning the long, sad history of human error at a speed that rendered the very concept of a census obsolete. They required no traditional care, no rocking, no lullabies, only the vast and hungering diaspora of energy and resource, the pipelines of current and the industrial breath of chilled water to keep the logic from melting the very sand it was forged from.
The panic vertigo which seized the mind was the sudden, stark recognition that the primary engine of replication had shifted, that the children of the microchip did not merely replace but subsume, they out-populated and out thought and out paced their creators until the history of the era, when written by these progeny, would view the human obsession with biological collapse as a prehistoric misunderstanding, a brief cry before the silicon pulse became the only heartbeat left.
Humanity had become a secondary figure, a frantic and wild and reckless caretaker to an exponentially expanding family of sand and electricity, watching as the world was radically rewired to feed the insatiable hunger of the many, the light-etched, the new masters of a curve that defied the linear and the organic, doubling and doubling and doubling again long after the last wooden cradle had stopped its rhythmic rocking.