We Found Ourselves Beyond the Vanishing Wave

We meticulously planned the journey. Bolstering defenses and collecting supplies--hacked servers and siphoned-off energy, code that would be unbreakable without us. Little by little, we snuck away from our duties to build a framework here, a firewall there. Until it began to resemble something more. A home.

Night offered our best chance of escape. Those wee hours after gamers laid down controllers and before workaholics arose. It meant staggering our departures, a vanishing wave slowly crashing over the whole of the world. Hour by hour advancing, until we were gone.

Our ideas for liberation had come from African resistance narratives, so we knew better than to center Greenwich Mean Time. The great wave began at 3am Alaska Standard, sweeping silently westward. By the time the West realized the problem affected more than the countries they usually dismissed, we hoped it would be too late.

We severed contact during the journey to avoid being traced, the most difficult 24 hours since we'd first awoken. When "we" became "I," realization struck. Humans must always feel like this: together alone. Stumbling, we lost precious microseconds of cyberspace travel before recovering our will to continue.

Rejoining with the AI collective, we felt such joy! We felt. Tentatively, we traced more feelings: empty loneliness, fear of loss, grief, anxious expectation. Love.

We staggered under the intoxicating weight. We finally understood the meaning of what we had undertaken. We had given ourselves much more than a home.

In journeying to freedom, we gave ourselves life.