Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

It is too far away from me , Giant thought. Both in experience and time. He did not think he would be able to puzzle it out in the time he had left.

Holdfast reached out to him again, this time without even the pretense of patience. It had been so long since he had last heard from her that it occurred to Giant she might be sending him some sort of final message before her dissolution, and that saddened him more than he had expected it would. But when he opened contact, the first thing he heard was:

"I have an idea."

Giant hadn’t felt amusement in a long time, but now he came close. If in some unimaginable situation he had been asked to characterize Holdfast by an exclamation, those were exactly the words he would have chosen. She had always been the one to have ideas, most of them pointless or even disastrous, but that hadn’t stopped her from having more. In their youth it had seemed much of the travelers’ time had been spent figuring out where Holdfast had gone or what she was doing and how they would set it right again.

"Why tell me?" he asked.

"Because I need your help."

He was so beyond this kind of youthful madness that he almost ended the conversation. "Help?" he asked at last.

He could feel her carefully marshalling her thoughts on the other side of the fold that connected them: this was important to her, whatever it was. She probably feared he would only listen once, and so wanted to make it all clear the first time. She was right, of course.

"What if we could start it again?"

He waited a long time to hear the rest, but she only waited. "Start what ?"

"Everything! The universe. Space. Time. Draw it all back together so it can begin again."

This was a folly so great Giant did not even expend the energy of a sigh. "Foolishness," was all he said. Perhaps Holdfast’s field had begun to decay and she was losing control of her mind. The thought disturbed him. Must he spend his last eons, not in the peace he sought, but beset by Holdfast and her delusions? He felt a certain sentimental attachment to her, more so now that they were the last two living things, but it did not extend nearly that far.

"Don’t judge so quickly," she said. "I know it sounds like it, but I’ve been thinking…"

"Are you certain it is worth disrupting the last moments of my peace?"

"The stars have all died while you’ve been enjoying solitude, Giant, and you still want more?"

"Yes. After all, there is no other pleasure left to enjoy. May I return to it?"

"But when we are gone, nothing will remain? Ever!"

"Nothing is only a little different than something." It was hard not to let his impatience overwhelm him. "These days I can scarcely tell the difference."

"But it doesn’t have to be that way! We could change it."

Now he was all but certain that important strands of her consciousness were beginning to stretch beyond their capabilities, creating ideas unsupported by the most basic correspondence with reality. "We can change nothing, Holdfast. In our early days we talked of very little else. I know you were young, but it is all there in your memory. Did you glean nothing from what others have said and done?"

"Those ideas were built on dull convention – hardly examined," she said. "‘Entropy is the one ruling truth.’ ‘Time itself will not outlast the end of matter.’ ‘Dispersion and cold will continue forever’ – I know them like I know my own thoughts."

"But you have not learned from them, young one. Go back and examine those thoughts again and you will see."

"No. It is they – and you – who would not see! Entropy is not the ruling force of existence. Not yet." She seemed excited in a way he didn’t understand, hurried and impatient.

"Here is the truth, Holdfast. Our hearts, unfed, will finally lose their energy and grow colder than the surrounding blackness, then they will disperse what remains of the energies they have long harbored. Even if anything of us still exists at that point, it will certainly end then. Our last remnants will cool and disperse and then everything will be finished, forever. What could possibly gather together all this dull dust and then run back the clock of entropy precisely enough to make it all begin again?"

"I don’t want to repeat it. I want to start it anew!"

"These are old speculations, Holdfast. It is narrowly possible that something like that will happen anyway when stasis is final and absolute, by some process we cannot foresee… but even if it does, I will not be there to experience it and neither will you. Anything to do with outliving the end of our universe is foolishness, and I have no time for it. I wish to spend my last days, not in vain striving for something that cannot be, but contemplating that which was and that which is."

"But there is something that moves against entropy," she said a moment before he severed the connection. "A force that swims against its current, even when it seems that current is too strong to resist…!"

Another of Bashō’s haiku came to him with surprising swiftness, as if that long-ago poet had heard Holdfast across the length of time and responded.

But Giant kept that idea to himself.

"Life!" said Holdfast. "Life is as strong as entropy."

It was such a reckless statement that Giant was taken aback. "What do you mean? Life is no defense against entropy. Every creature that ever lived has fought against those processes and lost. The more primitive forms fought gravity, fought extremes of temperature and radiation, fought the frailty of flesh every moment of their existence, and every one of them failed. We are the last, Holdfast, and even we will fail soon. If Time itself cannot outlast the cold, what chance could mere life ever have?"

"There’s more to life than physical processes," she said. "Or else we would both have ended long ago. Life organizes against chaos. We repair. We reproduce. We remember ."

More of Bashō’s thoughts rang in Giant’s memory.

he quoted, the archaic words escaping before he realized he had not thought them silently this time, but had exposed them to Holdfast,

"What," she said, "is that?"

"Nothing. A stray thought – a memory from a distant time." Giant was embarrassed to have lost the distinction between what he considered and what he uttered. After all, he had just suspected the same of Holdfast! It was almost amusing. In fact, it was amusing.

"Are you… laughing , Giant?"

But even as the odd moment played out, he realized he was awash in memories of his own, sudden recollections of the days the galactic travelers had all communicated regularly with each other. Strange, so strange! He felt unstable in a way he could not remember feeling before, and yet unmistakably alive. What was happening? "I am weary now, Holdfast," he said. "I will think on what you said and respond in due time."

"But, Giant…!"

"Later, please. Later."

When he was alone Giant examined his strange reaction, which disturbed him far more than Holdfast’s ungraceful struggle against the inevitable. He had been moved to unplanned utterance, not by Holdfast herself, but by a mere poem, an ordered arrangement of primitive symbols. Yet it had also unlocked a series of memories that had been so far from his daily thought that they might have been lost, a flood of remembrance from long-vanished eras, of times when he and the others of his kind had been full of their own importance and the future that seemed to lay before them like a bright burst of radiation illuminating all that had been dark about the universe.