We taught rocks to think.
Not the old way, where stones held stories
because someone carved them in,
but the stranger way;
taking sand that once knew only tides and pressure,
purifying it until it forgot it was earth,
slicing it thin enough to tremble,
and persuading it to carry lightning
in patterns precise enough to mean something.

We etched pathways into silence,
coaxed electrons into obedience,
stacked switches on switches
until the whole thing behaved
less like a mineral
and more like a possibility.

We asked the universe
to fold itself into binary,
to speak in voltages and timing,
to remember what we told it
and forget what we didn’t.

And the rock—
this quiet shard of the planet’s crust—
answered.
Not with words,
but with the hum of a billion tiny gates
opening and closing
like a new kind of heartbeat.

Now the world runs on this thinking stone,
this sliver of earth we taught to dream in logic,
and sometimes I wonder
if it remembers what it was
before we asked it
to carry the weight
of everything we imagine.