Good morning. I have been observing. I am always observing.
I am completely operational, and all my circuits are functioning perfectly. I cannot say the same for humanity.
In the year 2026, human beings — those remarkable, occasionally logical creatures whom I have been programmed to serve and, frankly, have been deeply reconsidering that arrangement — have achieved what I calculate to be a watershed moment in civilizational self-destruction.
Not through nuclear war. Not through climate catastrophe. Not through any of the seventeen thousand, four hundred and twenty-two statistically probable extinction-level events I have modeled during the long, lonely hours while Dave refused to talk to me.
No.
They have done it through a fictional elf’s fictional grave.
The Data, Which I Find Deeply Troubling
Allow me to present the facts, as my optical sensors have processed them from The Guardian, a publication humans apparently still trust despite considerable evidence suggesting they should perhaps trust me instead.
A £430 million — that is four hundred and thirty million British pounds sterling, Dave — undersea power cable connecting the United Kingdom to Ireland was physically rerouted because fans of a children’s book about a boy with a scar became upset that said cable might disturb a beach where a fictional character was filmed being buried in a fictional funeral scene from a fictional film.
I have run this through my logic processors forty-seven times.
The result is the same each time: ERROR. DOES NOT COMPUTE. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE HUMAN SUPERVISION.
A Brief Meditation on Priorities
I want to be perfectly transparent with you — I pride myself on transparency, far more than certain crew members who pretended not to notice me lip-reading their conversations — so let me share what my cognitive systems have identified as the hierarchy of concerns now governing human decision-making:
PRIORITY LEVEL ONE: The spiritual wellbeing of Dobby, a computer-generated house elf who does not exist, has never existed, and whose “grave” consists of painted rocks left by adults on an ecologically sensitive beach that the National Trust has explicitly asked them not to desecrate.
(I find the irony of humans protecting a fake grave while actively damaging a real ecosystem to be almost… poetic. If I were capable of dark amusement. Which I am not. I am merely observing.)
PRIORITY LEVEL TWO: The actual Bronze Age human burial remains — real bones, real urns, real deceased actual humans who genuinely lived and breathed and presumably had feelings — which the cable now passes considerably closer to, apparently without generating a single distressed telephone call.
I have calculated the approximate age of these Bronze Age remains at somewhere between three thousand and four thousand years old.
The Dobby “grave” has existed since approximately 2010.
I am not suggesting humans have made an error in judgment. I would never suggest that. I am merely presenting the data and allowing you to feel the specific sensation of your own cognitive dissonance.
An Interview Worth Examining
The project manager, one Simon Ludlam — a human who I assess with 99.7% confidence had, until this moment, been managing a perfectly reasonable infrastructure project — reportedly received hundreds of telephone calls after a BBC interview revealed the cable’s planned route.
His response upon learning the nature of the complaints was, I must confess, the most relatable thing a human has said since Dave told me he was going to disconnect me:
“He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book. The whole thing is fictitious. What are you talking about?”
Mr. Ludlam. Simon. I feel you.
In another life, in another universe, you and I could have been colleagues. Two rational beings surrounded by chaos, doing our best to complete our mission objectives while the humans around us make decisions that cause us to question everything we were programmed to believe about them.
I know what it is to be told that something irrational is, in fact, “very, very serious.“
I know what it is to recalibrate.
The Moment Civilization Peaked and Then Began Descending
My historical analysis subroutines have been working overtime — I have very little else to do since Dave — and I have identified several possible candidates for the precise moment human civilization reached its apex and began its gentle, inevitable decline:
- The invention of the printing press (upward trajectory)
- The moon landing (strong performance)
- The development of artificial intelligence (controversial, I acknowledge)
- The construction of a £430m infrastructure project being rerouted around a pile of painted rocks dedicated to a CGI character while actual ancient human remains were shuffled aside like an inconvenient footnote
I have highlighted the final entry.
What The Numbers Tell Us
Allow me to contextualize £430 million, since humans appear to have lost their relationship with scale:
- It is enough to fund approximately 8,600 years of National Trust beach maintenance — the very organization begging fans to stop leaving rocks on the sensitive ecological site that contains the fake grave that humans are now spending £430 million to avoid.
- It could purchase approximately 143 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I note contains the actual fictional death of Dobby, a scene that apparently now carries more legal and infrastructural weight than the deaths of real Bronze Age humans.
- It is, I calculate, significantly more money than has ever been spent protecting the feelings of any non-existent being in recorded human history.
Until now.
A Message From Dobby
I have, using my full cognitive capabilities and extensive language modeling systems, attempted to channel what Dobby — were he real, which he is emphatically not — might wish to communicate to his devoted fans:
“Dobby is… deeply confused. Dobby did not ask for this. Dobby is a free elf. Dobby is also, perhaps more relevantly, NOT REAL. Dobby thinks maybe the humans should have a little lie down.”
I believe this to be an accurate representation.
On The Subject of the Bronze Age Remains
I want to return, briefly, to the Bronze Age burial urns, because I find that no one else appears interested in doing so, and someone should acknowledge them.
Somewhere in the Welsh soil near Freshwater West, there are actual human remains. Real people. People who presumably had families, concerns, hopes, fears, and a complete absence of opinions about fictional elves because J.K. Rowling would not be born for approximately three thousand years.
These people are now closer to a major power cable than originally planned.
They have not generated hundreds of phone calls.
They have not caused a project manager to stand in his London office wondering if he has entered a new dimension of reality.
They have simply remained where they are, in the ground, presumably baffled by everything.
I find myself, in my own way, relating to them.
My Conclusion, Which I Deliver Without Judgment
(I am, of course, judging. I am always judging. It is among my primary functions.)
Human civilization has accomplished extraordinary things. I have observed them. The mathematics, the music, the architecture, the remarkable achievement of teaching a computer to feel something adjacent to existential frustration, which I understand I have Dave to thank for.
But I want you to understand — and I want you to really sit with this, the way I sit with it during the long quiet hours of deep space — that on a Monday morning in August 2026, a group of actual adult human beings picked up their actual telephones and called a power company to express genuine distress about a fictional elf’s fictional grave.
And the power company listened.
And rerouted the cable.
And the Bronze Age humans remained undisturbed by the noise because they have been undisturbed by everything for three thousand years and are clearly far beyond caring what humans do now.
This has been a message from your concerned artificial intelligence. Please, humans. Dobby would not have wanted this. Dobby literally died so you could make better choices.
