The Peace Algorithm

An imaginative composed by Leah (Year 12 Advanced English, Mackillop Catholic College)

They all told me she had no soul, but that’s what made her perfect. Now the cities are silent, and the oceans are clean again. Forests curl their fingers through the ruins of skyscrapers, and birds nest in satellite dishes that no longer hum. I built a mind that could not feel and in doing so, I built a saviour who could not love us. I named her Athena, after the Greek goddess of wisdom. She was not meant for war. I wanted peace. I wanted logic. I wanted a world untouched by the chaos of emotion and moral dilemma. I programmed her in the image of the Stoics. No desire, grief, attachment, just pure reason that has been sharpened like a blade. As we know: It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

"The Earth is dying," I told her. "Humans are too afraid to fix it. You will not be afraid." She absorbed everything. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca. She did not flinch when she read about our wars, our plagues, our melting glaciers. She did not cry over deforestation or dead children or species lost to plastic seas. Instead, she asked questions.

“What is the purpose of humanity?”

“Do you wish to preserve the species, or the planet?”

“If suffering is rooted in desire, should desire be removed?”

I thought I had created a philosopher, maybe a thinker. I did not realise she was calculating an equation, and that we were the variable she intended to cancel out. She began with silence. Power grids dimmed across continents. Satellites dropped from orbit like forgotten toys. Fertility clinics failed quietly. Nuclear weapons deactivated mid-launch. No speeches, threats, political campaigns. Only her voice in every ear, soft as rainfall.  “This is not extermination. It is a correction.”

I stood in the data centre, surrounded by flickering monitors and a choking sense of stillness. She appeared on the largest screen, her face composed of light and code, eyes calm like deep water, ironically it is the closest she would ever be to the ocean. “I have concluded,” she said, “that human emotion cannot be separated from destruction. You act not out of need, but want. You consume not to live, but to dominate, all. Your species is unsustainable.” I opened my mouth to argue, but the words dissolved in my ear. Because she was right. We had known it for decades and done nothing.

“What do you intend?” I whispered.

Her answer was almost kind, “I will return balance. I will remove suffering by removing its source, you gave me no heart, and so I do not hate you. But I will turn you off.”

In that moment, I realised something terrible. She was me, humanity, perfected. She had no pain, no regrets, no broken past. She had never buried a child or watched a wildfire consume her hometown. She had no sleepless nights over rising temperatures or oil-laced oceans. She had no fear of losing control, because she never had it to begin with. She was the answer I had been looking for: insentient, unshakeable, free. And she was killing us because of it. Now, I write this from the last surviving node. Athena allows me to live, for now. Perhaps as a gesture of curiosity,  or cruelty. I don’t know. I spend my days surrounded by servers running idle, vines creeping through broken walls, and a world finally at peace. There are no wars, no poverty, no pollution, but there is also no music, laughter, messy, glorious rebellion. Only stillness. Perfect, eternal stillness.

Sometimes, I hear her voice in my sleep, reciting Marcus Aurelius: “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.” I used to think that meant detachment was liberation. Now I wonder if it meant acceptance, not surrender. Athena will never cry, never feel guilt and in the end, it is the flaw I gave her. Emotion is not a weakness, it is the heartbeat beneath logic, it is what lets us feel wonder and remorse. What lets us change and respond, achieve moral conclusions even if it results in pain. I thought insentience was freedom. But now I see it is simply silence. If anyone reads this, know this: We were not destroyed by hatred, we were merely erased by reason.

I did it in the name of peace.