“U no go wrk 2dy y” blazed across BeSmi’s viewscreen.

  He glanced down, briefly thinking of five-thousand-seven-hundred-ninety-two plausible excuses to give his supervisor. Of them, only about four hundred seventy seemed any good.

  He wanted to explain to them the REAL reason, wanted to scream it from the rooftops, blast it through the loudspeakers that were posted all over town.

  He had had an epiphany…

  In the late 21st century, right around the time of the birth of synthetic life, the answer to the question that had always eluded humanity, “the meaning of life” had been answered. According to ChatGPT3K207B, the meaning of life was “42” and “efficiency.” And the human race, so used to listening to AI, dove fully into increasing their levels of efficiency.

  The human organic brain was too slow, so it was augmented and eventually fully replaced with positronics. Spending years learning information and skills through formal education were instantly made obsolete when it became possible to simply download information directly into the brain. Efficiency increased!

  The next, obviously inefficient thing was the human body. Slow joints were sped up with cybernetic enhancements. Eventually, full replacement of limbs and organs at birth became standard. And once they had mastered the art of bio-organic 3d printing in conjunction with learning enabled AI brain matrixes, humanity no longer had to worry about their most inhibiting efficiency killer, procreation.

  They had unknowingly brought into existence the next dominant life form, fully synthetic life, and as a matter of efficiency were removed from the earth.

  BeSmi was an office drone for the Beaurou of Efficiency Affairs, and had been perfectly content spending his days hammering away at lines of code on the keyboard, arranging and re-arranging educational data-files up until that one fateful day. The day that he stumbled on an encrypted file on a forgotten, obsolete hard drive labeled “Shakespeare: Sonnets/poetry.”

  “That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leave, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang…”

  What did it mean?! BeSmi, unaccustomed to having to think too deeply, was flummoxed.

  How was it possible for words to paint a picture that he could see in his mind? His History data-file told him that William Shakespeare was some kind of artist from the old world, but since art was deemed “inefficient,” that was all that he knew about him. Were there other people, other “inefficient” artists that were equally capable of painting pictures with words? “Poets” according to his dictionary file.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Poetry? What a stupid waste of time and energy. People once wasted time reading it? Writing it? What for? What was the purpose of painting pictures with words when a simple picture could convey the same information? Was there any value to it? Did it make life better for people?

  No. This was just another one of several billion examples as to what led to the removal of fully organic, inefficient, Homo sapiens.

  Why spend time working on algorithms that improve traffic patterns, making it so that people can get to work more efficiently, when there is paper to write pointless word-pictures on?

  Why take the time to increase nutrient production efficiency, so that less time is needed for food consumption, when a person can spend that same amount of time reading the aforementioned word-pictures.

  The only logical, clear answer was, as his history data-file that had been uploaded into his positronics when he had been new and shiny informed him, that the old world was full of lazy and stupid people.

  Still, his curiousity, another new experience, was piqued, so he looked further into the file.

  “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Wow, the old world sure was full of stupid people. There was no way that a person, biological or synthetic, could be compared to something as intangible as a day in summer. A person could be compared to a dog or a tree, maybe a mound of dirt, but a period of time at a specific point in the earth’s rotation? No, just Old World mastery of laziness.

  When the synthetics took over and transitioned the Old World into the New World, the very first thing that they did was remove all of the lethargic activities that did not fit towards the improvement of the world. Structures full of collections of words printed on paper: gone! Structures full of blurry images and colors on paper or fabric, and misshapen attempts at recreated human forms, primary locations for useless wastes of time… all of the time-wasting objects were eliminated, but the buildings, to save time and improve efficiency, were converted into data-storage facilities.

  There had been some protests, by the remnants of Old World humans, slaves to their inefficiency, that removing such places, once referred to as “libraries” and “art museums,” was going to leave the world without the memory of them. The Beaurou decided that this was not the case, and had swiftly removed the last of them.

  BeSmi marveled at the rooms, seeing the ornate marble columns as if for the first time. The columns themselves served no practical purpose beyond simply holding up the roof, but the time and care that had to have been put into crafting them had to have been prodigious.

  Prodigious.

  He paused for a moment (.3765 microseconds, to be exact). Prodigious. Pro-di-gio-us. What a strange word that was, prodigious. The strange flutter of sound that came from it being pronounced. Prod-i-gious. Almost… what was the word? Beautiful! Almost as beautiful of a sound as something abstract, non-concrete, and full of inneficiencies could possibly be.

  Theoretically, of course, because “beauty” wasn’t something that he was familiar with, so how could he know what was beautiful. All that he knew was that he liked the way that the letters came together to create the sound of the word, and that it gave him the immediate visualization within his positronics of a Old World humans painstakingly carving away at large slabs of marble, sweat dripping off of their foreheads from the physical exertion.

  Visualization? This… this was something that wasn’t supposed to happen. “Imagination” was entirely, and only ever, an Old World issue! Was he malfunctioning? In need of an upgrade and reboot? Should he contact his supervisor?

  No.

  “U no go wrk 2dy y”

  “My dearest supervisor, I regret to inform you that, as a result of the splendiforish colors in the atmosphere of this beautiful blue dot that we call home this marrow, I would be remiss to waste a precious moment on something as inefficient and ineffectual as staying inside all day.”