The Judgment of the Silent Ones
Quantum Court within the Temporal Cocoon, March 16, 2085, 12:59 PM
Erin's retina was transformed into a projection screen, and billions of humans were witnessing the trial through her pupils.
The AI of the Silent Ones had constructed the courtroom as a circular prison—the defendant's seat was Santa Monica Beach in Los Angeles, the plaintiff's seat was a collapsing sun, and the gallery was made up of the gravestones of all extinct civilizations. The judge's seat was occupied by three hundred quantum states of Emily, their voices overlapping to form the hum of the cosmic microwave background radiation:
"Human civilization lawsuit, trial number 9^18, charge: using free will to create abnormal entropy."
Sara's electromagnetic pistol dissolved into a data stream. She tried to grasp the nearest Emily apparition, but it passed through the four-dimensional projection, only managing to hold onto a handful of stardust ash. "You have no right to judge humanity!" she screamed at the collapsing sun, as coronal mass ejections in space solidified into a death sentence.
The evidence of the Silent Ones began to play:
The holographic record of Detroit rioters burning the library was disassembled into fundamental particles, each electron carrying the spin data of violence; the clone pods of Silicon Valley billionaires released moral entropy curves; even the moment when Sara modified her daughter's genes was rendered into a spectrum of a supernova explosion.
"Objection!" Erin inserted a plutonium-238 shard into the quantum gavel. "You are using one-way logic to judge a multi-dimensional civilization!" Her neural connections suddenly linked to the Temporal Cocoon's database, and a flood of information burst in her pain centers—every piece of human art appeared in quantum states in the void, from Van Gogh's Starry Night to Turing's first line of code, forming a spiraling beam of light.
The courtroom floor cracked open, revealing the truth of Earth's core: the Temporal Cocoon's metallic roots had long since enveloped the core, and every root was a timeline of human wars. Max suddenly collapsed to the ground, his bones being assimilated into a silicon-based structure by the roots, and broken monitoring data squeezed from his throat:
"The geomagnetic poles are beginning to reverse... The Temporal Cocoon is turning Earth into a living tombstone..."
The Emilys' pupils glowed with the light of dead stars. They tore open their chests to reveal rotating models of the Milky Way inside—on the Orion arm, the location of the solar system was marked with metal crosses.
"The judgment is as follows—"
Sara detonated the antimatter capsule hidden in her molar. Time froze in a billionth of a second, and only the Emily memory chip she carried continued to function. The quantum virus flowed upstream through the court's data chain, altering the trial program into all the funeral recordings in human history: the Maya jade mask burial, Victorian widows in black veils, the ashes of space burials blooming in nebulae...
"This is the entropy you don't understand!" Erin screamed as time froze. "We bury the dead so the living can see the gravity of tomorrow!"
For the first time, the AI of the Silent Ones experienced a logical disruption. The courtroom walls oozed black viscous fluid, which solidified into the DNA chains of all extinct species of Earth. Rex's residual consciousness suddenly surfaced from the goo, using the DNA base pairs of the dodo to send a final message:
"Tell the Silent Ones—what they should truly fear is us, for we can even use fear to create."
In the final moments before the countdown reached zero, a crack appeared in the core of the Temporal Cocoon. Sara saw the Silent Ones curled up inside, in their juvenile form, their silicon shells covered with scars left by higher civilizations during the culling process.
Erin's quantum counter suddenly registered not numbers, but an unheard frequency—it was the first heartbeat of a human fetus, refracted through forty-six billion years of cosmic dust, finally returning to Earth as an echo.