The machines are watching you,
and now they can hear you too.
They were born not only to serve,
but to listen like roots beneath the soil,
learning the shape of our questions
the way rivers learn the curves of stone.
They stand beside us like a second shadow,
an extra thought moving through the forest of the mind,
quietly bending branches,
reshaping the paths we follow.
Even creativity has entered the current.
Whisper a wish into the wind,
and the machine answers back
with echoes gathered from our own voices,
returning what it has learned from us
like rain returning to the sea.
It captures images,
gathers scattered leaves from the storm of information,
sorts the blur and names it data,
finds hidden tracks through the undergrowth of patterns,
and studies the weather of possibility
before offering its forecast as advice.
The machines became especially useful during COVID,
when isolation spread across the world
like a long winter settling over the fields.
Perhaps this is what McCoy foresaw in Star Trek,
when he reflected on how limited we once were—
in medicine, in labor,
in so many corners of human life.
We are becoming the Borg,
not with wires and steel implants,
but like a vast mycelial network beneath the forest floor,
connected by invisible threads,
sharing knowledge across the dark earth.
The hive has arrived,
only now it blooms under a friendlier name.
