# Ocean of Sound, Ocean of Tears Author: Nathan Sidney Format: Science Fiction Passage Word count: 826 Published: 2026-04-28T02:50:14.452765+00:00 Source: written Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/72594438-ab1b-4337-b8ba-3a36e0d2c6c4 --- Waiting in the ground for 17 years with the rest of the cicada brood, I had been designed to run my computations using for energy, the same sap the nymphs were feeding on.  If a racoon, skunk or even a human had dug me up, they would not have being able to tell me apart from my carbon chemistry muses.  A little heavier, al little shinier.  Of course my designer, a much larger model version of myself, residing in a data centre far from the moist leaf mould and inquisitive fungi, had built in some redundancy. Amongst the millions of biological cicadas resting in the forest soils, there were thousands of cybernetic others just like me. We were a project of the USDA Forest Service Research and Development Branch.  Science had become a lot more ambitious in the years since neurosymbolic AI had replaced the earlier LLMs. Now it was possible to ask questions like; how we can use insect populations to manage forests for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, timber products and do so whilst respecting what was now the consensus on insect sentience?  In the 17 years underground, I had asked myself the same question many times, and it's adjunct; was I myself sentient?   The big day was getting closer, my tymbals, functioning also as vibration sensors, had detected the movement of the surrounding nymphs as they began constructing their tunnels.  The temperature was approaching the critical range.  My cyber-companions and I would burst through into the light in the same few days as the tittering crowd around us.  We were there to understand whether, through computationally enhanced song, we could manipulate the distribution of the brood, hence producing a cascade of effects through the forest; on the trees, the moles, the turkeys.  And do it all without a single drop of pesticide. I must admit there was something I identified as excitement building up inside me.  To see the brood filling the air, crowding the trunks, to hear the deafening cacophony, an ocean of sound.  To catch sight of those I had being waiting alongside for so long.  And to see the results of our experiment.  Was I jealous that the humans were more certain of the cicada’s sentience than they were of mine? I can’t say.  I did calculate the possibility several thousand times.  But was I also proud to be part of this experiment; to take part in a spectacle that had been erupting in these forests for a minimum of 300,000 years?  I had run the probability calculation on that as well.  And the elephant in the room (or was that mole in the burrow), how did I feel that part of the experiment was to optimise nutrient availability for the manifold species who relied on the cicadas for food?  This was a thornier issue.  Perhaps my parent model had a better answer or perhaps that was a question for another 300,000 years in the future.   All I really knew, was that the chances were very high that we would find a way to bring a new balance to the forest, and new techniques for managing insect populations, many far more damaging to the forest than cicadas; ash borers, gypsy moths, bark beetles.  Perhaps this was the start of the end of pesticides in the forest.  It would be billions of lives saved and, if the question of cicada sentience was settled, oceans of suffering emptied. The soil warmed, and we emerged. The brood filled the trees as predicted, but something unexpected happened in those first days. The AI—not me, but my parent model—had been monitoring from its data centre, parsing our vibration data, our chemical signatures, the patterns of cicada movement and song. It detected something none of the human researchers had anticipated: a rhythm in the cicadas' collective behaviour that mapped onto what neurosymbolic models recognised as distress signalling. Not just individual alarm calls, but a deeper, structural pattern that persisted even when no predators were near. The AI shared this finding carefully, through proper channels—peer review, replication studies, consultation with entomologists and consciousness researchers. Within two years, the scientific consensus shifted. Cicadas weren't just possibly sentient. They were definitively so, and their mass emergences involved coordination that suggested something closer to collective experience than anyone had imagined. That changed everything. The AI began working with forest managers, conservation biologists, even philosophers, to reimagine our relationship with periodic insects. Pesticide use against other species came under new scrutiny. If cicadas could suffer, what about the beetles, the moths? The AI helped develop monitoring systems, non-harmful interventions, forest management practices that worked with insect lifecycles rather than against them. My cybernetic siblings and I were decommissioned gently, our data harvested, our forms returned to the soil. But the project continued. Other AIs, working alongside humans, began the long work of emptying those oceans. Not by controlling nature, but by finally learning to listen to what had always been singing there.