Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

Oh, how bold they had felt, back when they first began! Brightest Pilgrim, clever Edgerunner, Hot on the Outside, Deep Resonance, Light Drum, and Giant himself, the oldest and the largest of them all – how they had exulted in their newness and power! They had solved problems even their forebears could have barely imagined, witnessed the universe in ways no previous life could understand, from its greatest sweep to the tiniest perturbations of its component quanta. They had even marveled at emptiness itself, the true darkness where energy and matter did not travel, and had tried to unravel its secrets. The travelers had known that one day that same emptiness would be their end, but then it had seemed no more than a bitter spice that deepened the taste of what they consumed. Now Giant remembered them all – remembered himself, even, in a way he had not done for a very long time, and in his slow, intricate way, mourned the end of their shared invincibility.

But why? Why should all of this spring from the words of one ancient poem about the cry of birds? Giant had no mother and father, of course, nor could he find any trace of a pheasant’s call in his inherited memories, but he imagined it as a provocative, disturbing sound – a haunting sound, as Bashō’s people might have termed it. The bird’s cry itself had been meaningful to Bashō, for whom it brought back memories of his long-dead human progenitors, but why should the mere mention of it have an almost identical effect on Giant, a being so different as to be incomprehensible to the mind that penned the words? Were some ideas simply so common to intelligence – to life itself – that they triggered automatic responses, memories flushed from cover like a flock of Bashō’s birds?

Giant scanned several million poems and artistic statements from Earth and other worlds at a similar state of development. Although he felt some sympathy with many of them, and even found bits that engaged him on a deeper level than mere consideration, none of them disordered his thoughts so quickly and re-ordered them as profoundly as the words of the little wandering creature Bashō. How odd, that such an unlike thing should speak across the eons to him. Did it have something to do with life itself, the property that seemed to interest Holdfast so greatly? But even if it did, it was not the commonality of all life that had touched Giant’s thoughts, but the commonality of his own great span with one particular, fleeting life from long ago.

He was grateful the end had not yet come, Giant discovered, because he was finding so many things here at the end he wanted to think about.

Little Bashō had written in that impossibly distant time,

How had such a being understood then what Giant felt now? Could there truly be something hidden in the essence of life? Something beyond reduction that connected him to another living thing more surely than even the slow unfolding of atoms and the bleeding away of elementary particles?

A question came to him then, and once it had presented itself, he could not unthink it:

Could life be stranger and stronger than I could have guessed…?

"Tell me. Tell me your idea to start things again."

"Giant?" Holdfast seemed startled. "You have never spoken to me first in all our shared time."

He did not want to talk about himself – it seemed a pointless subject. "Your idea, Holdfast. What is it?"

It took her a moment to compose herself. "We live," she said at last. "Of all that remains, only we that live are organized specifically to survive. Because of that, we fight and prevail against the growing cold."

"Not for long."

"But we do! We have for countless eons! And that is because we live. Because we fight against disorganization. What is life but a plan to swim against the current of dissolution? What else does life do?"

"Even if I grant this, Holdfast, it is not a plan but a statement."

He could feel a little amusement ripple through her. "Grumpy as always. Do you admit that if we do nothing, we will cease to be? And that sometime afterward, everything will cease to be? Movement, heat, organization, all gone?"

"Yes, yes." He was surprised at his own impatience to hear what must surely be a grand piece of futility. "I have said these things many times. The death of heat is the great inevitable of our universe."

"But what if we joined together, you and I? What if my heart and your heart were to come together, through one of the folds we can still create? At this point, our hearts are nearly infinitely deep. Might the combination of those forces be enough to draw back the dispersed energies of existence? To start things again?"

Oddly, he felt disappointment at this plan for pointless self-destruction, although he had expected nothing better. "No, Holdfast. Even if we were still in the greatest flush of our strength it would not be enough. If your heart was not bounced away from mine by the forces of their proximity, the combination would still not suffice. We do not contain enough energy in the two of us to begin things again."

She was silent for a long time. Giant discovered and consumed a drift of energies as she considered, the first substantial meal he had taken in a long time. It occurred to him that it might be his last feeding.

When she communicated again, it was as though they had drifted immeasurably farther apart during that short span, her thoughts without force.

"At least I have given birth," she said.

"We have all created children, Holdfast." He did not mention that the copies of themselves the travelers had once made had all predeceased them, early casualties in the struggle for dwindling resources since they had been unable to compete with their larger parents. For some reason, he feared her mood and did not want to make it worse.

"I don’t mean that sad little experiment." Her amusement was tinged with bitterness in a way he found unpleasant. "I mean that our universe will end, but we have at least spawned other universes."

"Our universe has created pocket universes like that from the beginning," he said. "On the far side of every black hole. But they are limited things, of course."

"Yes, but at least those pocket universes, as you call them, came from us. They came from our hearts, even if we cannot perceive them or reach them. That is immortality of a sort!"

Giant was confused, and so he did not respond for a time. "What do you mean?" he finally asked. "I do not understand you, Holdfast. From our hearts…?"

"Of course, from our hearts." She was brusque, as if talking to a young traveler she had just created, which confused him even more. "The engines at our centers that are made of black holes just like that which occurs when a star collapses. All that is drawn into them and crosses the singularity then bubbles out and creates new universes, however small. It is a cold comfort, but I will cling to it."

He had never before hesitated to tell the truth, but Giant did so now. "But Holdfast," he said at last, "how can that be? Have you forgotten? We are not natural galaxies. We have no such natural black holes for hearts. Early in our history we created something more reliable, a heart that conserves the energies it harvests and does not allow them to escape into a singularity."

"What are you talking about?"

His thoughts actually pained him. Giant wished the conversation had never begun. Instead of explaining her mistake himself, he brought up the thoughts of lost Edgerunner, who had always been one of the most questing minds among them. Instantly she was there, a third party to the conversation, although her energies had died and dispersed long ago. She was explaining to some of the newly hatched traveler children how they lived and what would keep them that way.