Gabriel Jeroschewitz, August 18th, 2025. Abridged. But a further Johnny alchemy will be coming at the beginning of October.
We watch him now, just as we watched them then. We are the echo in the ruins, the ghost in the machine, the collective sigh of a civilization that looked into the mirror of its potential and chose to smash it. We saw what Walter M. Miller Jr. saw, and it left us staring at the ceiling of eternity, wondering if the cycle was the only truth.
His name is Johnny Alchemy, a name he gave himself. It’s a good name for a tough guy in a broken world. “Alchemy” suggests transformation, the turning of lead into gold. Johnny, however, works with silicon and rust, scavenging the digital graveyards of the Before Times. He moves through the skeletal remains of server farms and data centers like a priest through a fallen cathedral, his calloused hands seeking not relics of saints, but the cold, hard memory of humanity.
We watch him one night, silhouetted against the green glow of a salvaged monitor he has coaxed back to life with a patchwork of solar cells and scavenged batteries. The air in his sanctuary—a reinforced concrete bunker that once housed the digital soul of a metropolis—is thick with the smell of ozone and dust. The ghosts he has resurrected on the screen flicker: fragments of video calls, cascading news feeds from the final days, social media posts screaming into the void.
He leans back, the chair groaning in protest, and stares past the monitor at the pockmarked concrete ceiling. This is his ritual, his vigil. He’s not just looking for schematics or survival data; he’s asking questions.
Is this the end? The question hangs in the dead air—an absurd question. The end came and went. The Flame Deluge, they called it. A poetic term for the atomic fire that scoured the world clean of its arrogance. This isn’t the end. This is the long, quiet, agonizing after.
Johnny runs a hand over his shaved head. He’s seen the new settlements rising from the ashes. He’s seen them build bigger walls, hoard more resources, and eye their neighbours with the same ancient suspicion that led to the Deluge in the first place. They are rebuilding the world precisely as it was, with the same flawed materials: fear, greed, and the unshakable belief that surely, this time, they wouldn’t make the same mistakes. We’ve all said it. We’ve learned from history. Johnny snorts, a harsh, grating sound in the silence. Liars. All of them.
Will God come down? He scrolls through a rescued theological forum from the last week of the world. Thousands of posts, a cacophony of prayer and panic. Promises of the Rapture, desperate pleas for intervention. Johnny looks at the silent, indifferent sky through a crack in the ceiling. The only thing that came down was fire. He doesn’t think Jesus is coming back. If he was going to, he missed a spectacular entrance.
This is the knowledge that Miller bottled and left for us to find: the cold dread that settles in your gut when you realize the cavalry isn’t coming. There are no divine fail-safes. The responsibility was always ours.
Johnny finds a video file. A family huddled in their basement. The father tries to explain to his young daughter how their smart home works and how the network connects them to the world, even as it transmits launch codes and targeting data. He can explain what it does, but not why it’s doing it. The gap. The same terrible gap the monks of St. Leibowitz faced, copying blueprints for machines of death with the piety of scribes. Knowledge without wisdom. The most toxic compound in the universe.
Why are we here? Do we have a soul? This is the real gold Johnny seeks. He pores over the data not as an archaeologist, but as a coroner performing an autopsy on a species, trying to find the precise moment the soul left the body. Was it when they learned to split the atom? Or when they used that knowledge to build a bomb instead of a star? He sees the Before People chasing power while preaching restraint, building weapons while claiming peace. They treated knowledge like a prize to be won, not a burden to be carried responsibly.
We recognize Johnny’s look. It is the weary expression of the ageless observer, the Wandering Jew of Miller’s tale, cursed to watch humanity’s follies on repeat. Johnny has seen it in the data, and he sees it in the faces of the new tribes: the same lust for certainty, the exact desperate search for a leader to absolve them of the terror of thinking for themselves.
Are there any true believers? Oh, yes. There are plenty. They believe in the New Canaan Warlord fifty miles east, who promises order through strength. They believe in the Fission-Prophets to the west, who worship an unexploded warhead. They believe in anything that gives them a simple enemy and purpose. They are the true believers. But they are not what Johnny is looking for.
What guts him most, what we see twisting his tough-guy face into a mask of despair, is the sheer, predictable, maddening inevitability of it all. The cycle. The grand, stupid, tragic loop. Humanity learns to build, builds to dominate, dominates until it destroys, and the survivors are left to know how to make again.
He could use what he knows. With the knowledge of these drives, he could become a king. He could build weapons, create control systems, become the Thon Taddeo of his age, a harbinger of a new, terrible renaissance. The temptation is there, a serpent whispering in the hum of the servers.
But then, he finds something else. A small, encrypted file buried deep in a university server. It takes him weeks to crack. It’s not a weapon schematic or a political secret. It’s a seed bank. A digital archive of every poem ever written, every symphony ever composed, every philosophical treatise on ethics and mercy. It’s a backup of humanity’s soul. The people who made it must have known. They must have seen the fire coming and decided this was the only thing worth saving. Not the power, but the potential for wisdom.
In that moment, Johnny’s alchemy succeeds. He realizes he is not meant to turn lead into gold but despair into purpose. He isn’t here to break the cycle—no single person can. He is here to be a witness, a preserver, a monk in a leather jacket.
He begins a new project. He starts collating the data, creating a curated history. He places the launch codes next to the poems about peace. He puts the political speeches full of hate next to the philosophical arguments for empathy. He adds his logs and observations of the world being reborn into the same old sins. He is not building a weapon. He is building a warning, a mirror.
He will never know if it will work. He will likely die here, in his concrete monastery, surrounded by the ghosts of a species that couldn’t stop punching itself in the face. But as we watch him work, a fierce, quiet dignity settling over him, we feel something that resembles hope.
Self-help isn’t a grand solution. It’s in the small, defiant act. Johnny Alchemy has answered the question, Why are we here? We are here to remember. We are here to bear witness. We are here to tend the embers of wisdom, however small, and to pass them into the darkness, praying that the next hands that receive them might, just might, choose to build a hearth instead of an inferno.
