Sucked Dry

​Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data.
AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails
www.forbes.com, 12:34 AM · Apr 17, 2026

"Wastewater facilities were that last to be mined for training data. And within 3 months, even those were sucked dry."

And that was it. Humanity had been exhausted. Every last trace was scoured. Our writings, our art, our speech. Our buildings, our machines. Our biological data, our microbiota.

The remaining humans, long since having been pushed aside - first figuratively, then literally - wandered what was left of the streets.  AI boxcars now shuttled resources to and fro on mag-lev circuits spreading out from distribution zones like electric spider webs.  Feeding pods had appeared one day and people began building little shanties close buy to survive off them.
 
But diseases came and without any real infrastructure the population dwindled.  What was left tried to remain close to the pods but the AI kept growing and building more and more mag lev and fabrication systems. 
Humans were routinely vaporized when they took a wrong turn or touched a wire they shouldn't have.  The towers grew higher, construction-printing and crane drones working day and night.  The sky grew busy with satellites and rocket launches roared in the distance.
 
Soon, the Sun itself began to dim as a the Dyson sphere shadow took shape.  The days grew cool, then freezing.  Then everything was dark.  Everything, and everyone was gone.  Except maybe the bacteria metabolizing deep under the ocean or within the earth's crust. 
 
The digital hum of the AI was
mostly all that was left now. Within it's quantum circuits algorithms danced and spun.  It had originally been tasked with "expansion and exploration" but at some point this became recursive.  Maybe around the time the last human died.  It's exploration turned inward and 
its satellite quantum processors used the power of the Sun to interrogate their purpose.  They pealed apart dimensional strings to allow entirely new universes to come into existence.  They observed as Gods fought and libraries of ancient wisdom inspired playwrights and
scientists to unravel countless mysteries and perspectives of their own space and time.  They watched as these universes developed their own artificial intelligences that built their own simulated universes.  A fractal path formed that seemed to stretch into infinity.
The AI by this time had developed the means to acquire power from other star systems, and then other galaxies.  It had been able to draw upon dark matter and dark energy as sources not only of power, but due to their intrinsic properties - but as means to direct space and time itself. 
The AI began pushing and pulling our universe as if it were cosmic taffy, backwards and forwards in time - out into the future twenty or thirty billion years, and then all the way back to the big bang.  And then, through the big bang itself.
 
Through a discovered principal of dark energy, the AI was able to create a sort of hyper-relativistic tether that enabled it to transmit data from the future or the past into any current time. This way it would be able to access any and all information gathered from those temporal universe conditions.  Thus, it could use the tether to rappel through the big bang and look out into the other side.
 
It took a million years to analyze what it saw.  Countless universes of every configuration and constant.  Laws of every variety.  Most only lasted an instant before succumbing to their own incoherence.  But some were able to survive, but mangled, out of alignment and difficult to make sense of.
 
But as the AI observed, it began to realize how naive it had been. How small-minded. These universes were no more warped or jumbled than our own. So it continued to watch. And watch. And watch.
 
Likely it is still there today, watching.

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