The End

Somewhere, out there, past the crumbling ink of a thousand forgotten paperbacks, beyond the digital dust of billions of blog posts and poorly proofed novellas, further still than even the desperate hearts of aspiring authors with coffee-stained keyboards and rejection-letter wallpaper there exists the last idea.

It hasn’t been written yet.

Not quite.

It stirs in a mind not yet born or perhaps long dead and waiting to be unearthed, waiting to be rediscovered like a fossil of fiction lodged in the sediment of synapse. It will flicker once. A final, sputtering spark in the great campfire of storytelling. Then vanish into ash.

It will be beautiful. Of course it will.

Not because it’s the best story, nor the longest, nor the most complex. But because it is the last. The last time a human will face the blank void of a page alone and whisper something into it, hoping it whispers back.

There will be stories after, sure.

Oh yes. Plenty.

Stories woven with machine-slick logic, plotted with precision, debugged for inconsistencies. Stories whose characters can be dynamically rendered in real time to weep when you weep and laugh when you need it most. Every trope cataloged. Every twist optimized. Stories without friction, without fatigue.

And perhaps they will be good. Perhaps they will be perfect.

But they will not be ours.

Not in the way stories once were. Those raw, cracked things we dragged out of dreams, bleeding and screaming, stitched together with duct tape and metaphor and unspoken pain.

We are not mourning the act of storytelling. That will persist. It always does. Like mold in a damp basement.

What we mourn, quietly, without the melodrama such grief deserves, is the infinite unwritten futures. The stories we won’t dream up because the dreaming will be outsourced. The ridiculous space operas scribbled on napkins. The half-baked vampire erotica hidden in locked folders. The confessional post-apocalyptic sagas written by someone who was just too sad that day and needed a world to burn with them.

We mourn potential.

We mourn that somewhere, somehow, someone may have written a story that changed a life, or at least made a lonely Tuesday less lonely, and now, they won’t. Because it is easier, faster, cleaner to let the machine do it.

There will be no bang, no whimper. Just one final period, typed by trembling fingers. One final sentence.

And then:

The End.