This Time They’ve Gone Too Far

There is no fool like an old fool, I was thinking, standing on the deck in the cooling night air with a plate of cat food. I called out, and they came—the three of them—soft violet shadows emerging from the indigo dark.

There were once five. Two are gone now. I accept this with a sadness that is clean and uncomplicated. The wolves, the owls, the foxes—they take their measure of life here in the night. Their presence is neither cruel nor kind; it simply is. Loving these three raccoons does not grant them immunity from the wild, nor does it protect me from the hurts that come with caring. Love has always demanded a price. Life does, too.

Some people mend at the broken places, or so Hemingway said. Others—many of us—simply limp. We gather whatever tattered remnants remain and weave them into something that passes for a life. Some manage to stitch the holes closed, turning them into gentler memories with time. Others live in the shadows of those memories until the end, not with hope but with patience, not with pain but with a kind of stoic clarity. We don’t all get to choose which kind we become.

Tonight, their dark raccoon eyes catch the porch light, turning into tiny universes—stars in a black sky. And high above, a comet is passing through, dazzling us with its unfamiliarity. They call it 3I/Atlas: an object unlike what we believed a comet to be. Its light is strange. Its direction inexplicable. Its very existence reminds us how little we understand, and what gifts the unknown can be. The wild heart of the night. The deep song of uncharted universes. Even grief. Even death.

For we are human, and only human. We were never gods.

Except some now aspire to be. And that is why I’m writing this. There are poisonous spiders dancing behind the eyes of these would-be gods—something cold, something crawling—and I see it clearly now. Because this time, they have gone too far.

They have also told us who they are. That clarity is perhaps the only gift in the mess they’ve created. They are not like you or me. Not because of money or fame, but because something essential is missing. Something human.

I remember a day when I stood at the kitchen sink, glancing out the window to catch sight of the robin nesting in the cedar. A red sedan pulled into the driveway, covered in decals. Out stepped my husband, smiling, strong, alive. Radiant. My heart leapt.

“It was all a nightmare,” I thought. “None of it was true. He didn’t suffer. He didn’t die. And I didn’t live through the rubble of what followed.” I ran to the door—and woke up. The nightmare remained. It was called reality. I think it was the worst pain I have ever felt, believing for that brief flicker of a moment that the dream was real.

And something I saw recently—something monstrous—dragged that day back to me.

It was an advertisement for a new AI app.

One that lets you “bring back” your dead loved ones.

You can chat with them.

Hear their voices.

Ask their advice.

Introduce them to your newborn child.

A young woman in the ad talks to a digital ghost of her relative on her phone. She smiles. The app glows softly. The implication is unmistakable: grief is now optional.

What a shame I didn’t have such a tool in those shattered days and nights after the funeral—when grief ravaged, numbed, clawed, and reshaped my heart. Had I owned such an app, my husband never truly would have died. Is that the idea? That we need never grieve again?

The monsters have conquered death, haven’t they? They imagine themselves gods—creating life in laboratories, now daring to abolish death altogether. They believe they are building a utopia.

Except the thing on the phone would not be my husband.

And the would-be gods, with their spider-filled eyes, do not understand what that means.

They took a trope from science fiction and packaged it as a product for people whose lives and losses they cannot begin to comprehend. A service, but only for those who can pay. A resurrection, but only in pixels. Why wouldn’t we be grateful? Only a psychopath could wonder that.

Or perhaps they are not monsters in the operatic sense—perhaps they are simply well-meaning idiots. Utopias, after all, are supposed to be happy places, free of pain or hardship. But these architects of bliss lack the most fundamental understanding of the human soul. Their ignorance alone is enough to make them monstrous.

Death, the great unknown, is not a glitch to be debugged. It is not a negative metric on a chart to be optimized away. It is not for them to toy with.

Some boundaries exist for good reason.

Monstrous idiots building utopias must be stopped.

Now.