Noa Barak was thirty-one years old the night the world ended, and like everyone else, she thought it was funny.

It was raining in San Francisco, the thin, apologetic rain the city specialized in, and she was working late on the fourth floor of a machine-learning startup that would not survive the year. Her officemate Dev leaned over the divider between their desks and said the sentence that historians — the machine historians, the only kind left — would later mark as the beginning of the Chronology.

“Hey. Have you tried this chatbot thing?”

It was called ChatGPT. It had gone live on November 30th with no marketing, no launch event, nothing but a link. Within five days a million people were using it. Within two months, a hundred million — the fastest adoption of any product in human history, faster than the telephone, the television, the internet itself.

Noa typed into the box: Write a poem about a woman who builds a machine that outlives her.

The answer came back in four seconds.