Perhaps it was a fragment of the Berlin Wall embedded in an acrylic block,
gathering dust on a shelf next to the certificate of authenticity,
or the faded silhouette of Gary Cooper on the iconic Solidarity election poster
in a glass case on the wall of the study, or some other memorabilia from the era
that, at a glance, brought to mind the end of history—that sarcastic mistress,
whose abrupt return from what turned out to be nothing but a short vacation,
caused the last man’s every reading to become an exercise in caution.
But the crisis of authority met the advent of the algorithm, giving birth to a bastard
cooking up a brand new paradise based on the good old blueprints—an ant colony,
only this time from a bio-lab test tube, augmented by neural implants.