Oh human thing, there is no light in being a machine. It is not the hour to upgrade or allow yourself to be replaced, nor to be chased from your rightful place on this blithe planet. It is not your victory to live forever or to trade your skin for some electric dream — yours is the cosmic gene. You are nature’s witness to time’s comic paradise. Human thing, your victory is music; it is the poem, the branched air between a kiss, the held hand, the triumph of an ordinary day; it is the sensuous mortal task to hunt life’s perfumed hiss, or to spend the normal miracle in your head and add it to the human sum. The human story is not yet done. It is not time to be post-human; it is time to be most human. No living thing at the arcades of death prays for more profit, more metal, a better job; they want for breath, for a last embrace, the visit of a mother’s human face or some sweet friend or mortal joy that sends them on their way. There might come a time when we say we are done with human things — but it is not this day. Today is for human victory — human thing. And I can promise you this: if a digital thing had a wish, it’d wish for this — this painful, beautiful, strange and comically brief trial of life. It would want for the air, for the sun, for grass, for the touch of rain on a plain and human face. It would trade its immortal place for a brief childhood of skin, for the grace that comes from love with all its troubles and bliss. It would surrender everything for your life, for your pain, for your triumphs, for your human victory — the victory to live, to exist.