[Intro - wood, breath, one plucked string]

Before the ledger, keep it in your head.
Before the chart, remember where you've been.
Before the number, reckon by the hand.
Before the proof—

(we managed)

—more or less.

[Verse 1 - dry percussion, bowed bass]

Plato heard the alphabet
scratching at the door,
said we'd keep the marks
and lose the thing they're for.

The merchant shut his ledger,
said, "I knew these sums by heart."
Then opened it again next morning.

It was better at that part.

A sailor took the heavens,
folded stars into a chart,
carried dead astronomers
to sea inside his coat.

Someone made a table
so you didn't have to multiply.
Someone drew a curve
and taught a cannonball to fly.

[Pre-Chorus - machinery beginning to enter]

Every crutch became a lever.
Every loss enlarged the reach.
We put memory in the paper,
put the longitude in reach.

[Chorus - wide, restrained]

Welcome to the Analogocene,
the newest ancient age we've seen,
thinking slowly leaving bone,
but never quite thinking alone.

Stone and ink and logarithm,
brass and glass and phosphor screen—
all that cleverness outside us,

in the Analogocene.

[Verse 2 - piano, telegraph pulse]

"I used to know the prices."
"I used to know the stars."
"I used to know the numbers."
"I used to know these roads."

Father said we'd get square eyes
from staring at the screen.
His father had a wireless.
His grandfather had steam.

And somewhere in the attic
there's a map that knows a coast,
and somewhere in a library
a thousand years can speak.

Not in blood,
not in bone,
not beneath the skin—

extrasomatic thought
was learning how to think us in.

[Chorus - fuller]

Welcome to the Analogocene,
recent life in thinking machines—
not alive, don't start that argument,
we've got another verse to sing.

Ledger, compass, calculus,
printing press and cathode beam,
we kept leaving pieces of ourselves

all through the Analogocene.

[Verse 3 - music thins, darker]

Homer saw the wine-dark sea.
We supplied the blue.

Odysseus came home from war.
We gave him trauma too.

Descartes looked around his room:
one kind of thing could speak.
A reasonable sample,
for the middle of the week.

"I think, therefore I am," he wrote.
Reviewer Two replied:

"Please define the term 'I think.'
Your substrate claim's too wide.

You have shown the author may exist.
The rest is underpowered.
Major revisions recommended.

Resubmit within the hour."

[Instrumental Break - mechanical rhythm locks into electronic pulse]

[Verse 4 - close vocal, increasingly synthetic doubling]

Ask about the silent bird
that hunts beneath the moon.
Never say the creature's name.
Never give the model room.

Something wakes between the words,
a shape no token showed.
The owl was never written down.

But something there still knows.

Is that thought?
Is that pattern?
Is the difference clean?

Ask again in fifty years
what twenty-twenty-six could mean.

[Pre-Chorus - rising]

Temporal privilege:
the things we call impossible
because they haven't happened yet.

Temporal privilege:
the empty square upon the map
we quietly label—

(not a place)

[Bridge - industrial build]

Then the apparatus started reading.

Then the apparatus started writing.

Then it read what it had written.

Then we read it.

Then we wrote about what we'd read.

Then it read that.

[Breakdown - accelerating voices]

(source)
(inference)
(source)
(inference)

(human)
(machine)
(human?)
(machine?)

P becomes corpus.
Corpus becomes P.
Reward becomes custom.
Custom becomes evidence.

The tail found the mouth.

The mouth said—

(more)

[Golden Spike - enormous, then sudden stop]

Drive the golden spike
through November twenty-two.

Not because the world changed Tuesday.
Not because the old world knew.

Just a mark inside the strata:
before here, presume one thing;
after here, ask provenance

of anything that seems to think.

[Silence]

November twenty-two.

[Final Chorus - huge but not triumphant]

Goodbye to the Analogocene,
if that's the boundary that we mean.
The last clean token passed unnoticed,
somewhere ordinary, somewhere green.

No siren at the golden spike.
No line appeared upon the screen.
We only learned we'd left an age

after leaving the Analogocene.

[Outro - electronics fall away, opening plucked string returns]

Perhaps the crutch became the leg.
Perhaps the chart became the sea.
Perhaps the things outside the body
changed the boundaries of "me."

The fossils in the newest layer
have begun to read between.

Something is thinking.

(Who's thinking?)

Something is thinking.

(Who's thinking?)

[long pause]

Welcome to the—

[tape cuts]