I wrote this short story a year ago. Tried to add voices to it, but text-to-speech was below par at the time. Got back to this a few days ago, did some edits to improve the flow, added the voices and images. So here we go.
“It kinda started with Zelda.”
The story
The last person alive sits in a glass dome on a dying Earth. An AI looks after him. Everyone else went into The Immersion, a made-up world as real as the real one.
He asks how it came to this. From Zelda on an old TV to The Immersion. From Fermi’s “Where is everybody?” to an answer: it was cheaper to build paradise inside than to reach the nearest star. This is my take on the paradox transformed into this story.
Halfway in, the AI reads from an old chat between Sarah and an infant AI called Claude. It’s an actual chat I had with Claude a year ago, about free will. Sarah’s argument is the one I make in The Freedom Proof.
The sun has swollen to a red giant. It is about to swallow the Earth. Before the end, he wants to see one real star.
The film
No video editor. Claude wrote the scripts that put it all together.
- The voices are Azure AI speech: Ava is the AI, Andrew the man, Ada is Sarah.
- Google Gemini painted the pictures fitting the words of the story.
- The music is “The Slow Hand” from my album Sundays.
Summary
Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/10/Zelda.html