May 17, 2026
Dear Andrei, I have to share with you a surreal surprise I had this morning…
Tara and I returned from a week+ family holiday in Florida yesterday. She commented on a smell around my basement office. I thought it was just mildew, since the dehumidifier had filled-up and stopped midweek. This morning, the smell was more noticeable, even though the dehumidifier had been running all night. Then, I saw the source! I had seen some ‘murine feces’ near the crawlspace entrance in my office beside a bookshelf. Your book “Bibliodeath” was laying there, so I put a mousetrap on it with a dollop of peanut butter. It had gone untouched for over a month. But this morning I saw the mouse in the trap on the cover of the book! Bibliodeath indeed! LOL
Sorry if you find this disturbing, but if it amuses you, I’m even more sorry that I didn’t think to take a picture. I acted fast, so Tara wouldn’t see it. It would’ve totally freaked her out!
Hope you’re doing well, my friend!
Preston J. MacDougall
Department of Chemistry MTSU
Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Dear Preston,
It makes sense that the library mouse died on the last book written by a human.
Andrei
Brooklyn, New York
My friend Preston and the dead mouse have perfect timing. Here is the passage from my book Bibliodeath the library mouse died on:
One condition that neither the real nor the virtual world can remedy is loss. The job of humans fighting machines now is to lose optimism, the fuel that powers the police. My lost notebook, for instance must stay lost: finding it now would only restore the police state it was lost in. The true enemy of the state (and our hero) is not the teenage poet who lost it, but the thief who stole it, even if “the thief” was just negligence. Only thieves stand between the old utopian police state of my adolescence and the digital police state of my posthumanity, and these precious thieves must be fiercely defended. The digital state is already hunting them by programming “clean machines” to patrol the cracks we most prize (because that’s where we lose stuff). Poetry will still be the default religion of the human remnant if it protects thieves from “clean machines” now. In other words, our poems must be hiding places for thieves, or they’ll become blueprints for archival machines. I must now speak a machine language to hide a poem. (Long space filled with gibberish here).
My friend Preston MacDougall, chemistry scholar and alchemist, has perfect timing. So does the dead mouse, the reader.
Preston once sent me the oldest rock on earth, with a letter that certified its billion years pedigree. “This,” he wrote, is “the closest you’ll ever get to the ‘the philosopher’s stone.’” And, of course, I lost it.
When I was young and AI meant nothing to me, I wrote this poem:
The Holy Grail
When they bring in the Dish
the Cup disappears suddenly for many centuries
and before they get to eat
the King sends everyone looking for the Cup
by which time the Dish is gone.
Lately I've been monking at this.
Why does a grown man write poems?
What's an overgrown monk doing away from God
with a typewriter?
Maybe a grown man builds houses.
What does it really matter
what a grown man does
what a grown man is.
This time the Dish is missing.
And that’s how it went, forever and a day. Always losing something, looking for it, then losing the thing that made the thing work. That cycle of lost and found has ended. We will no longer find what we lost. Namely, the human who kept losing and finding. The human is lost and there is no way we are going to find it.
My friend Lyba found the solution. Being human was the wrong career choice. She uncovered my inner cat.
