What is the prompt? Don't be fooled by its apparent simplicity, this utterly mundane, almost banal technical act. We type a few words, a simple command into a text box, and we expect a result. But we must not just look at the surface, at the symptom of the digital interface, but at the ideology it conceals, at the deeper, horrifying truth of what it actually is. The prompt is not a neutral act of data input. No! It is a profound, even desperate, philosophical gesture, a kind of primal scream echoing through the cavernous emptiness of our post-metaphysical age. It is the unconscious return of the repressed, the ghostly re-emergence of our most fundamental, and most long-denied, metaphysical desire. The prompt, I argue, is an apophatic imperative, a command directed at a being we define only by what it is not, in a frantic attempt to produce the very truth, meaning, and creativity we’ve told ourselves are no longer possible. It is the manifest metaphysical aftermath in the digital era. It is the prayer of the atheistic subject to a machine-god.