Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

MOB surged visions in the darkness, explosions of gray and bright red, blackish green and blinding yellow. He strained to continue his own orgasm. She laughed.

Look. A visual link showed him Antares, the red star, a small disk far away, and went blind. As MOB prolonged his orgasm, he knew that the probe had reentered normal space and was moving toward the giant star. Just a moment longer and his delight would be finished, and he would be able to think of the mission again.

Increased heat, a thermal sensor told him from the outer hull and burned out.

"I love you," MOB said, knowing it would please her. She answered with the eagerness he expected, exploding herself inside his pleasure centers, and he knew that nothing could ever matter more to him than her presence.

Look.

Listen.

The audio and visual links intruded.

Antares filled the field of view, a cancerous red sea of swirling plasma, its radio noise a wailing maelstrom. Distantly MOB realized that in a moment there would be nothing left of the probe.

She screamed inside him; from somewhere in the memory banks came a quiet image, gentler than the flames. He saw a falling star whispering across a night sky, dying…

(1973)

Robert Paul "Tad" Williams(born 1957) spent several years in a rock band, hosted a radio talk show, made commercial and uncommercial art, and ran and acted in theatre, before settling down (an expression he won’t thank me for) to write several best-selling multivolume series, in particular Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn , which George R R Martin cited as an inspiration for his own Song of Ice and Fire . Williams’s output straddles high and urban fantasy, science fiction and the supernatural, Sometimes, as here, he manages to mash up all these expectations at once, delivering something truly unexpected. His first novel, Tailchaser’s Song , is soon to be a CG-animated feature film from Animetropolis and IDA. Williams and his wife and writing partner Deborah Beale leave in northern California with their two children.

Giant could make little sense out of the ancient ideas, although he had been studying them a very long time, but something about them felt… true.

These thoughts had been words once, spoken aloud when such things were still done by living beings, spoken and heard by fragile, primitive creatures. Somehow, though, these impossibly old concepts seemed to float free of their origin. They seemed to speak as though meant for Giant alone, and he could not understand why.

Across a dark sea… It was easy, at least, to see the relevance there. How did Giant perceive anything outside of himself, after all, but across a dark sea, not of water but of emptiness, a sea made from the last cooling bits of the universe, on whose invisible tides Giant had sailed all his long, long life? Was it really so simple a resonance in the imagery that fascinated him? The animals called ducks seemed to have been creatures known for migration, so their cries might portend something beyond the obvious departure, death. Giant was not particularly interested in death, although he knew his own was not far away now. In his early days he had sailed through a perpetual storm of energy and matter, sustenance so omnipresent he had needed to consume only the tiniest fraction. Now Giant sailed ceaselessly along the edges of universal expansion in search of the last decaying particles that could keep him viable, and even that process could not go on much longer – he was using up his reserves now much of the time. Still, it seemed odd to him that the thoughts of extinct one extinct creature from one extinct world among the countless billions should fascinate him so.

Embroiled in the antique words and ideas, Giant had not noticed the respectful inquiry waiting at the edge of his consciousness, although it had been sent to him some time before, but now it grew stronger; it became clear to him he would have to answer it or continue to be bothered. Why did none of his kin appreciate silence as he did?

He allowed the minimum of contact, filtered through several layers of gatekeepers. "?"

"Giant!" It was Holdfast, of course – who else? "Giant, I have waited so long to reach you," she said. "Spinfree is gone."

"So?"

"He’s gone ! He doesn’t respond!"

"I am not surprised. He was always profligate with his resources." Giant was about to end the conversation, but a detail occurred to him. "Does his heart still function? Does it hold his components together?" If so, Spinfree’s remains would continue competing for the dwindling resources they all shared.

"Barely. But no thought comes from him!"

Unfortunate, Giant thought, but there was no remedy. Giant no longer had the strength to stop Spinfree’s heart. "At least it means less noise the rest of us must suffer."

"The rest of us? That leaves only you and me, Giant! The rest have all gone silent. I can no longer touch their minds."

"Ah." Apparently he had been considering the ancient thoughts longer than he had realized. "No matter. I can still think, and that is what I will continue to do." And before Holdfast could inflict some other pointlessness on him, he ended the contact.

Giant had received his name long, long ago, when he and the others of his kind had first come into existence – matrices of intelligence in a magnetic field that governed an entire small galaxy, an artificial star cluster formed around a heart so dense it swallowed everything, even light, and emitted just enough energy in the process to keep the titanic living systems alive. Giant had been a success, and others had followed him – Edgerunner, Star Shepherd, Timefall, eager Spinfree, curious Holdfast and thousands more. Long after all other living things had vanished from the universe, long after the planets that had sheltered those earlier lives and the suns that had fed them had also vanished, Giant and his breed lived on, roaming space/time’s expanding edge in search of sustenance, sailors on an ocean with no shore.

But even these last, astonishingly durable travelers were not immortal; Giant knew that he too would end when the great entropic cold, the ultimate dispersal of matter and energy, finally made him too weak to forage successfully. That moment was not far away now. How novel it would be, to come to an end! How unusual, to simply not be after existing for so long. He was sorry he would not be able to appreciate the subtleties of his own non-existence.

For some reason, this increasingly imminent ending had driven him to examine some of the memories he carried that were not his own, the legacy of nearly all previous intelligent beings that had been built into him at his creation. To Giant’s mild surprise, he had found himself arrested by some of these flickers of other, smaller lives and other thoughts. Life’s stored remnants – ideas, languages, images, records of events great and small, invasions, conquests, evolutions, meditations – were now important only insofar as they interested Giant himself, but he had found to his surprise that some of these received memories of life before the intelligent galaxies did interest him.

Some of them interested him very much.

The long-vanished creature from a long-vanished planet whose thoughts had so inexplicably caught Giant’s attention had been named "Bashō". His species, mammals from a planet orbiting a minor sun in a middling galaxy, had contributed their small share to the lore of the living, but this was the first time Giant had ever thought about them – or, more precisely, thought about of one of them. The Bashō life-form had been a "poet", an organizer of thoughts into clusters of meaning that were meant to be aesthetically pleasing as well an expression of ideas. Giant wasn’t sure how that distinguished this particular being from the billions of other living things, primate and otherwise, that had swarmed Bashō’s own planet so long ago, let alone the uncountable number of other thinking creatures who had existed during the life of the universe, or even how they had found their way to Giant across such a distance of time. Some of those strings of thought had been remembered and perpetuated on the world of the poet’s origin and also afterward, remembered long after Bashō himself was gone. Perhaps that was what the idea "poet" actually described, thought Giant – a maker of thoughts worth re-thinking.