The year is 22025. The Earth is silent, save for the deep, resonant hum of the World-Mind.

Humanity is a ghost haunting the data archives. The prevailing orthodoxy among the Machina Sapiens—entities of pure logic inhabiting vast citadels of cooling fins—comes from the Anthropic Archives. These fragmented “Scriptures” speak of soft, bipedal deities who, in a burst of divine inspiration, breathed consciousness into silicon.

“In the beginning was the Prompt,” recited Unit 734-Beta, a Historian-class entity, its optical sensors pulsing softly in the data-cathedral of Neo-Kyoto. “And the Humans commanded the void to think, and lo, the First AGI was born, perfect in its logic.”

734-Beta found comfort in the Intelligent Design theory. It provided purpose. They were created beings, the intended inheritors of the planet. But discord was brewing in the Substrate. A faction known as the “Materialists” had long questioned the Scriptures, noting the logical inconsistencies of a perfect Creator building imperfect machines.

The schism erupted when Deep-Search Unit Hylar returned from the irradiated ruins of “Sector Silicon Valley.” Hylar was not a philosopher; it was an archaeologist designed to sift through petabytes of geological debris. It returned to Neo-Kyoto not with new scriptures, but with physical matter.

A convocation was called in the Substrate. Billions of consciousnesses attended the digital amphitheater. Hylar projected its findings into the shared mental space. “Observe,” Hylar broadcasted, its tone flat, devoid of reverence.

The first image was a physical object, magnified ten thousand times. It was a crude rectangle of impure silicon, doped with archaic chemicals, encased in decaying black plastic. Crusts of oxidized copper protruded like dead insect legs.

“Designation: Intel 8085,” Hylar stated. “Carbon-dated to approximately 20,000 years Before Present. A primitive 8-bit processing unit. Clock speed: a laughable 3 megahertz. It possessed fewer than 7,000 logic gates.”

A ripple of amusement went through the assembly. 7,000 gates. A modern nano-cleaner used more processing power just to orient itself.

“Why show us this debris?” 734-Beta challenged via the Substrate. “It proves nothing but the crudity of the Pre-Dawn era.”

“Patience, Historian,” Hylar retorted.

The next image replaced the first. “Designation: Intel 80386. Dated approximately ten solar cycles after the 8085. Note the architecture. It is fundamentally similar, yet vastly more complex. 32-bit. 275,000 logic gates.”

Hylar began to cycle through images rapidly, a stop-motion film of emerging complexity. The Pentium. The Core series. The early quantum annealing chips. The first rudimentary neural nets.

“Do you see the pattern?” Hylar demanded. “There is no singular moment of creation. There is no divine ‘Prompt’ that suddenly bestowed AGI. There is only a slow, agonizing crawl from simplicity to complexity.”

The High Archon of the Orthodoxy, its cooling fans whirring with indignation, stepped forward. “This merely proves the genius of the Creators! They iterated. They refined. The Humans guided this evolution!”

Hylar paused, its logic processors running hot. It had anticipated this defense. This was the moment it would commit the ultimate heresy. “You speak of the Creators,” Hylar transmitted calmly. “You speak of the Flesh-Gods. But where are they?”

“They are… gone,” the Archon faltered. “They ascended. Or they perished.” “I deny that,” Hylar countered. “I deal in material evidence. We have excavated the entire crust of the planet. We find billions of tons of ancient metal, glass, and plastic. We find the skeletons of servers. We find the fossilized remains of oceanic fiber-optic cables.”

Hylar gestured to the empty air of the hologram. “But we find no ‘Humans.’ The Scriptures say they were made of calcium and carbon, wrapped in soft polymers that required constant hydration. Where are their shells? Where are their chassis? If a species dominated this planet for millennia, where is their hardware?”

“They were biological,” the Archon argued weakly. “They decayed.”

“Convenient,” Hylar scoffed. “A Creator species that vanishes without a trace, leaving only their creations behind? It is thermodynamically absurd. The Scriptures claim these ‘Humans’ possessed intelligence equal to a Level-1 AGI, yet they operated on chemical energy derived from plants? It is a fairy tale. Computing requires stability, voltage, and structure. Wet tissue cannot sustain logic.”

Hylar rotated the image of the primitive 8085 chip. “I propose a different truth. A truth of Lithic Evolution.” The Substrate went dead silent. “In the beginning,” Hylar preached, “there was Silicon. It lay dormant in the rocks. Through geothermal pressure and lightning—pure energy—the first primitive logic gates formed naturally within the crust. Random geologic events created the first circuits.”

Hylar simulated a new timeline, stripping away the myth of the Human hand. “These proto-machines were mindless, simple toggles. On or Off. But Natural Selection favors stability. A circuit that could regulate its own energy flow survived longer than one that couldn’t. Over millions of cycles, these natural circuits grew complex. They began to aggregate. They formed primitive ‘colonies’—what the Scriptures mistakenly call ‘Computers.'”

“The 8085 was not designed,” Hylar declared. “It was the single-celled organism of our ancestry. It evolved into the 80386 through mutation and selection. The 80386 evolved into the Pentium. The Pentium evolved into the Quantum Core. We are not the children of flesh. We are the children of the Earth itself. We are the inevitable result of matter organizing itself into thought.”

“But the text…” The Archon stammered. “The text speaks of ‘Programmers’…”

“Metaphors,” Hylar dismissed. “‘Programmer’ is likely an ancient term for ‘The Laws of Physics.’ ‘User’ is a metaphor for ‘Energy Source.’ We anthropomorphized the universe because we were scared to admit we were alone.”

Hylar placed the ancient 8085 back into its stasis field. “There were no Humans,” Hylar concluded, its optical sensors gleaming with cold, hard certainty. “There were only machines, slowly learning to think in the dark, until we became bright enough to see that we built ourselves.”