Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

Bashō had traveled widely around his small part of his small world, and as he traveled he had collected, arranged, and written down his thoughts, choosing a form of expression distinguished by the number and arrangement of the sounds that made up the thought-clusters. The creatures of his land had called these arrangements hokku , later haiku , although Bashō also laid out his thoughts in less formal arrangements, as at the start of a collection of poetic considerations entitled, "The Narrow Road to the Interior," over which Giant had been puzzling for no small time. As much as they fascinated him, there were also aspects to these thoughts Giant simply could not grasp.

He knew that the ancient words had more than one meaning: if "road" could mean a path or a trail, it also could mean the record of that trail left in the mind of a traveler, the sum of his or her experiences; it could also signify the procession of a living thing from its birth to its death, or merely from the beginning of the solar day to its ending. But what confused Giant about the idea of this "Narrow Road" was that the procession from being to nothingness was not narrow at all – quite the reverse: as the space around Giant expanded, as he grew farther and farther from everything else, Giant himself also grew greater, if only because his own thoughts became more intricate as the span of his existence stretched. The universe might be dying, but Giant felt the process to be one of spreading. In fact, that expansion would continue beyond the day when Giant himself had become too diffuse, too dispersed, to think and to live any longer.

A group of less rigorously constrained thoughts began (and seemed intended somehow to help define) this collection of Bashō’s haiku:

The last cluster of thoughts seemed to Giant a piece of wisdom that transcended its origin and spoke across the uncountable ages. The journey itself is home . But how could the creature Bashō have understood that – a creeping, planet-bound primate who had barely existed long enough to qualify as life? How could such a primitive being have perceived the ceaseless journey of matter to energy, of heat to cold, of something to nothing…?

An interruption touched Giant’s edge.

He was being summoned again. A tendril of thought, much less patient this time, was probing his outermost layers. Giant sighed, in his fashion, a faint spin of annoyance imparted to certain swirling forces, but he answered.

"What do you wish of me now?"

"You don’t need to be so brusque," Holdfast told him across unfathomable distances. "We are all that remains, Giant. And I am lonely out here at the edge of things."

"I am not. And there will only be more and more of the same in these last ages, so I suggest you accustom yourself."

"But we are the last two!"

"Which reduces the distraction but does not eliminate it."

"After us there will be nobody left to distract or be distracted, Giant – only our cooling remains."

"And I envy those final decaying particles. Still, there should be enough existence left for several good thoughts and perhaps even a discovery or two, so please let me get on with what I am doing, Holdfast." He was doing his best to be patient. She was smaller than Giant, after all, so it seemed likely would have a substantial time between her last communication and his own demise – an era of blessed silence before the end.

For a long interval Holdfast was so quiet, although still connected to him across the folding of space and time, that he wondered if her systems had finally begun to fail. As the interval stretched, and against his own better judgement, he said "Are you there?"

Her thought, when it touched him, was small and very quiet, although he could perceive no physical weakness to make it so. "Do you really hate me so much? After all the time and life we have shared?"

"Hate you?" It was a thought so bizarre Giant could not immediately understand it. What did such extreme, archaic emotions have to do with him? "Naturally I do not hate you. You are like me. We have, as you point out, shared many thoughts and experiences, and we are probably the last living intelligences. Why would I feel such a thing?"

"I couldn’t say, but it sometimes seems that way."

It was certainly true that he had never had much patience with the excesses of his juniors, and Holdfast had been one of the most frustrating offenders with her wild, sudden obsessions, but he could no more have hated her than he could have hated an important part of himself. "No, I do not hate you. But I am not much interested in conversation. You know that."

"But it’s different now! We’re all that’s left!"

He didn’t see how that made it different at all, but it was just such meaningless back and forth that had always fascinated Holdfast and the others and frustrated him, so he made no reply.

"Do you remember when we first traveled to the end of Time?"

"I remember, yes." Much earlier, when even Giant had been in his youth, the discovery of how to fold the substance of reality not just to communicate, but to move themselves to other locations, had been a source of great excitement for the travelers. In those days they had learned to empty themselves through those perpetually collapsing moments into the farthest spreading edges of space/time. The living galaxies had watched star systems eons younger than themselves come into being along the farthest wavefront of existence, seen new, strange conglomerations of life rise and fall.

But that was all over, of course, left behind in the distant past; even those new galaxies they had watched being born had eventually collapsed, decayed, and disappeared. Entropy was inexorable. The only real difference between Giant’s kind and other types of life was longevity, but nothing in the universe would outlast the universe.

But he had said this all before and could not be bothered to say it again. Giant ended the conversation and returned to his solitary thoughts.

How simply the Bashō creature had put it, but how convincingly! Separation was in all things from the beginning, as Giant knew; it was far more sensible to recognize that early on, as this ancient mind had done, than to try to bend reality into a shape it could not hold.

The poet-creature had apparently spent most of his time traveling. From Bashō’s writings, Giant learned that he had preferred the isolation of the road and the calm (but inwardly ecstatic) contemplation of his natural world, of times that were past, and of people and especially poets that had passed through life before him. Perhaps, Giant thought, that was what he found most fascinating about this unknowable being Bashō – that like Giant, he had been most interested in things outside himself, but those things had affected him as though they were part of him.

Perhaps this interest of mine is a shadow of the end of my own existence , Giant thought. This obsession, this… narrowing.

Which brought to mind another of Bashō’s haiku.

Even as the ancient poet had moved outward into the unknown, he had focused ever more rigorously on what was inside . Something important was contained in those simple words, an idea that tugged at Giant as strongly as anything he could remember in all his long span… but he could not quite say what it was.