Short Stories

If you’ve walked ten kilometers every day for twenty years to fetch water, you might believe that walking is your life’s worth. That the hardship itself is noble. But if one day someone lays a pipe to your door, does that erase the value of your steps? 

No. It simply means the world no longer needs those steps.

The tragedy isn’t the pipe. The tragedy is that you built your entire identity around being the one who carried water. And so you fight the pipe, you denounce it, you invent philosophies about the holiness of walking. 

Not because walking is holy, but because it was the only thing that made you necessary.

Progress is the pipe. It doesn’t erase the meaning of what came before. 

But it will expose how many of us confused our usefulness with our identity. Those who adapt will drink. 

Those who cannot will mourn their steps.

People confuse effort with permanence. 

They think if you’ve poured twenty years into something, the world owes you a guarantee it will stay relevant. 

But history doesn’t pay in guarantees.

History shows this is not new. Under communism, it wasn’t honesty that thrived, but cunning. The liar, the schemer, the one who could read the system and twist it, they rose while the straight-spoken and moral withered. 

That wasn’t justice. It wasn’t virtue. It was simply what the structure rewarded.

So too with any new inventions. The ones who will thrive are not always the best, but the most adaptable. Those who can see patterns sideways, who bend the game rather than follow its rules. 

That doesn’t mean the rest are worthless. Success is not proof of greater value, and failure is not proof of stupidity. 

The violinist who loses her stage, the craftsman who loses his workshop, the water carrier who loses his road, each carries a worth beyond what the economy now asks of them.

The question is not whether some will be left behind. They will. The question is whether we, the so-called survivors, will remember that worth. 

Whether we can build a world that honors what is lost, even as we drink from the new pipes.
The carriers stand stunned. Some mourn and call the channels evil, claiming the walking itself was sacred. But what they mourn is not holiness. They mourn the loss of their name. 

They had become the carriers, and when the water no longer required their steps, they did not know who they were. I don’t mock them. 

I understand them. I have been them.

And yet, what choice does a society have? Do you keep your world dependent on the carriers, because it honors their effort, or do you adapt, even though adaptation feels like betrayal? Do you perish with those who refuse to change, or do you build something new from the stream?
In Denmark, we still drive on roads built by Germans during the war. 

They laid them so their tanks could roll. Should we have torn them up when they left? Out of principle? 

Or do we walk them now, because they carry us where we need to go?

The Romans, too, came with iron and fire. They broke tribes and took what was not theirs. Yet their roads, their aqueducts, their very laws became the bones of nations that followed. Brutality left behind infrastructure. Inheritance wrapped in blood.

That is what AI is to me. A road poured by invaders, an aqueduct built with chains. Its origins are corrupt, but its presence is undeniable. To ignore it out of purity might feel righteous, but it leaves you stranded. To use it blindly is to risk becoming Roman yourself.

The tragedy is not that these structures exist. The tragedy is when we reduce ourselves to nothing but the roles they replaced, when we define our entire worth as water carriers, road builders, craftsmen whose only identity is in the act of surviving the old way.

I stand, for a time, in the silence of mourning. But eventually we must step forward. The pipe is already dug. The road is already laid. The aqueduct already flows. 

The question is no longer whether I approve of their birth, but whether I will walk them, and what kind of person I will be when I do.

For twenty years, his life was written in steps.

Ten kilometers to the well. Ten back.

At dawn he rose before the roosters, while the stars still clung faintly to the sky. He tied the cloth around his shoulders, set the wooden yoke across his back, and fastened two clay jars at its ends. The weight pressed into his bones as familiar as breath.

The road was his companion. He knew its turns the way a fisherman knows the currents. He could walk blindfolded and still find the acacia tree leaning over the ridge, the hollow where rainwater gathered in the wet months, the white stones that caught the morning light like scattered teeth.

Children sometimes walked with him at the start, skipping in the dust until their mothers called them back. He liked their laughter. It made the road feel lighter. At the well, he filled his jars, dipped his face into the cold water, and then turned back toward the village. When he arrived, women were waiting with bowls, and men greeted him with nods.

He told himself: I am the one who brings water. This is my name, my worth, my place.

And for twenty years, that was enough.

Then, one spring, the elders gathered the men. They walked not toward the well but away from it, down the slope to the riverbank. There they dug shallow trenches, lined them with clay, and guided the water along the natural dip of the land. They laid hollowed branches and carved stones, fitting them together so the flow would not escape.

The carrier watched, silent. The men sang as they worked, pride swelling as the channels stretched longer, bending toward the village. By the time the rains came, the stream was already flowing into courtyards, spilling into basins and barrels without a single footstep required.

The first morning the water ran, children shrieked with delight. They cupped their hands beneath the stream and splashed one another until their mothers scolded. Women filled their jars without leaving their thresholds. Even the elders marveled, saying, It is as though the mountain itself has bent down to serve us.

The carrier stood at the edge of the square and said nothing.

The next morning, habit pulled him from sleep before dawn. He set the yoke on his shoulders, tightened the cloth around his waist, and started along the road. But halfway to the well, he stopped. From beneath the trees came the sound of rushing water, soft and tireless. His jars were empty. His legs were strong. 

Yet he was no longer needed.

That day he returned to the village without a single drop.

In the square he spoke.

“The walking is good for the body. The carrying is good for the spirit. The hardship gave us strength.”

Some villagers listened, out of courtesy. Most bent to fill their bowls from the channel and walked away.

The carrier raised his voice.

“When the channels crack, when the rains wash them out, who will fetch your water then? 

Will the river walk to you? Will the clay mend itself?”

A few nodded, muttering that he was right, that the old ways should not be forgotten. But their words carried little weight beside the clear, cold stream that now flowed at their feet.

He tried again on other days, each time with more urgency, until his speeches sounded like pleas.

“You make yourselves weak,” he told them. “The walk itself was holy.”

But even as he said it, he heard the hollow ring in his voice. He was not convincing them. 

He was trying to convince himself.

Seasons passed. His shoulders softened. His palms lost their callus. The road grew strange without him. Children who once followed his steps no longer recognized him as he passed. They carried small jars from their own courtyards now, splashing one another as they went.

In the afternoons, with nothing left to carry, he began to carve small shapes from fallen branches, not for trade, not for need, only to keep his hands from forgetting. The quiet of it surprised him. The grain yielding slowly beneath the blade. The form emerging where before there had been nothing.

One morning, a child passed and stopped. “Can I have it?” She held the little wooden bird as though it were something precious. For a long moment he simply watched her go, the bird cupped carefully in both hands.

And for the first time, he understood that what he had loved was not the water, but the giving.

Later that day, he sat on the old path, watching the horizon fade into dusk. The well shimmered faintly in the distance, like a memory waiting to vanish. He thought of the thousands of journeys he had made, the countless pails he had lifted, the thirst he had quenched. Had it all been wasted?

No. The walking had mattered then. It had saved them then. But it no longer mattered now.

The true tragedy was not the water’s new course. The tragedy was that he had come to believe he was nothing except the man who walked.

And so, one morning, he did not rise with the roosters. He lay listening to the soft rush of water in the channels, carrying what he once carried.

In the distance, he heard the laughter of children.

And he wondered, not with anger, but with a strange lightness,  what he might become, now that the walking was over.