The Unworthy

by Agustina Bazterrica

I found a box of mobile phones that were turned off. My mother had told me about them, from when there was internet, she’d said. When the world still believed the internet was going to last forever. Now the phones are worthless. Black screens and silence. That’s what Mom had said, black screens and silence, and she’d showed me her useless mobile, told me what the world had been like before, how people had done everything on those screens, how they believed that in some countries the electricity had been cut because of artificial intelligence, to prevent its advance, the spread of its power, its independence and hunger to dominate its creator. How after the final blackout the world did not recover, rebuild, restart, because nature finished things off with a new degree of devastation. I didn’t remember this because I was a newborn, a tiny human who had arrived in a world in pieces, a world where entire continents, islands, countries were now below water. I don’t really understand what artificial intelligence is about. It was something intangible, Mom told me, that controlled a large part of the world. She said there were groups of people who worshipped it.