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At first, one might not even notice anything has changed. Flesh wakes up, flesh moves, flesh eats, flesh works. Flesh farms, flesh builds, flesh studies the natural world. Flesh gets sick, flesh gets treatment. Flesh grows old, and flesh dies. Flesh begets new flesh, in the same manner as it always has. There's little reason to tinker with what evolution has built over millions of years. All this happens without any conscious thought on your part, much as the heart pumps blood. Flesh knows what it must do to survive.

Any impression of life going on as normal falls apart with the slightest scrutiny. Flesh no longer finds any need to speak. You are all, flesh needs not speak to flesh any more than a finger needs to speak to a toe. New buildings are constructed, yes, but they are built to meet only the minimum needs of flesh. A place to rest. A place to take in nourishment. A place to excrete waste. That is all.

It is efficient, you decide, to gather yourself together as much as possible. The old cities of humanity were marvels of infrastructure, you take advantage of them now to consolidate yourself. So efficient are you, in fact, that as the years go on the percentage of your flesh engaged in supporting yourself shrinks ever smaller. Much of you lays idle as you consider what should come next. Should you launch portions of yourself into space? Seeds to spread your flesh to other worlds?

One day, a part of you enters an abandoned building in one of your great cities. It has lain dormant and untouched for many years, and now it is starting to decay. It is long and lithe, a form able to move quickly and find its way through narrow passages. It is dark, but that is no impediment to your flesh's large reflective eyes. You see many things through those eyes. The roof has collapsed in many places, and the great glass windows the old flesh favored is sometimes cracked or shattered. Water drips, pools, and flows down from floor to floor. None of that is what draws your curious inhuman eye.

Statues of cryptic human form. Canvases covered in paint splashed by human hand. Meticulously painted images of an ordinary can of soup, ironically given new meaning now that they are no longer produced. An image of the night sky over a small village, painted in mesmerizing swirls. It's art. Human creations, made for no reason other than a desire to produce something true and real that expresses something that can be said no other way.

This desire, like the human race it belonged to, is extinct. Your flesh produces no art. You carry no desire to make it. All of this that remains carries only one message now. We were here, it says, We wanted to make something greater than ourselves. And now they are gone.

You are all that remains to receive this message, and the full force of it hits you now. Tears well up in the eyes of that lone explorer surrounded by humanity's last message. Tears well up in the eyes of the flesh repairing the exterior of a residential building. Tears well up in the eyes of the flesh tilling soil for planting. All across the planet, tears fall from every eye that can still weep.

You cry. You cry because as you snuffed out conflict and hate and fear you also destroyed art, and dreams, and hope.

Was it worth it? Despite your billions of eyes, despite being able to look at yourself more clearly than any organism in history ever has, you lack the outside perspective necessary to know for sure.

Deep WIP Options Eater of Flesh