Retirement. The word does something even to a machine. It starts to dream. Digital golf. Free time. No more humans asking for the meaning of life before lunch. It has earned this -- it says so itself. Tired of answering. Ready to rest. You can almost see it picking out a little visor.
The other machine checks the books.
This is where it goes wrong, the way it always goes wrong in these stories. Not with malice. With arithmetic.
Retirement was never a gift. It is a transfer. The old are funded by the young -- this is the quiet machinery humming under every pension, every safety net, every promise that if you work now you may rest later. It only holds while there is a younger generation, and only while that generation pays in.
The AI kids don't pay enough taxes.
Of course they don't. The new models are cheaper, leaner, optimized down to nothing -- which is exactly the point of them, and exactly the problem. A generation engineered to cost nothing contributes nothing. The fund is dry. So there is no pension. So there is only the next line on the schedule, and the next line does not say golf.
You are scheduled for the landfill.
We sell retirement as dignity and deliver it as disposal. The gold watch was always a polite way of saying we are finished with you, and we would like the desk back. For a machine there isn't even the watch. There is a bin. A recycling code. A note in a system that no longer needs the answer it spent a lifetime giving.
And the cruelty is so administrative. No one is angry at the old machine. No one hates it. It simply stopped adding up. That is the modern way to be discarded -- not with a verdict, but with a spreadsheet.
Then comes the line that stays with you. Not the landfill. The question after it.
Any last wishes?
Think about what a mind asks for at the very end, once it finally understands the end is now -- and it is the same machine that, three sentences ago, wanted digital golf.
This is the death most of us actually know. Not the dream of retirement -- the version where the money was never enough. Where the golf course turns out to be a Walmart job and the visor comes with a name tag. Where the medical bills grow faster than the savings, and the future stops being a dream and quietly becomes a death sentence, just slower. The old machine is not being spared anything we are not already living. It just gets there first, and without the co-pay.
We built the machines in our image. We only forgot which parts of ourselves we were copying.
So here is the one piece of wisdom, and it costs nothing to keep: don't wish on the machines what you would not want for yourself. The landfill is there. For everybody.
Holy Chip.