Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

" Your hearts are nothing like those with which we first began ," Edgerunner’s voice, silenced for eons, was now explaining just as if she lived again, " —that is, natural singularities that bleed energy and matter out of the universe ." Edgerunner described the lattice of black quanta that the travelers had created to serve them, a holonetic froth of particle-sized black holes, buffered by a core of white gravity, perfectly balanced to draw and consume the universe’s bounty without letting it create new universes, a model of economical consumption.

" … So we do not waste what we find ," Edgerunner said to those long-dead children. " And someday, when the universal cold is great and our resources grow scant, you will thank your forebears for such a gift… "

"Do you see?" Giant asked as he ended his summoning of Edgerunner’s thoughts and returned her to his memory. He almost felt he should apologize, although he had done nothing wrong. "Do you see, Holdfast? We do not make other universes, large or small. We contain everything that we have consumed except that part we have used in our own living, but soon even those reserves will be emptied and we will end. You must accustom yourself to the idea."

"I… didn’t remember that." The admission seemed to be wrenched from her as if by a terrible squeeze of gravity. "Giant, it was so basic, so important – and I forgot …!"

Giant did not know how to respond, since they both knew what she meant. "Forgot" meant failure, and failure on that scale meant Holdfast’s ending must be very close. Had he done wrong? Was there a time when even the truth was inappropriate? He had never considered such a thing. At last, he broke the silence.

An eon passed before she said, "What is that?" She seemed to barely have the energy to communicate now; even her unquenchable curiosity was muted by despair. "What is ‘cicada’?"

"An ancient life form. The words are a haiku , a ritualized form of thought, almost as distant in time as the sound they describe." Suddenly he wanted to tell her all he had been thinking. "I have been very interested in these words lately, Holdfast – or rather, this particular maker of words. He lived long ago, in the morning of intelligent life. He traveled across his world and he recorded thoughts that still exist. His name was Bashō."

"You always brought us so much," Holdfast said slowly.

Giant thought he could hear something in her words beyond despair, and this puzzled him, too. How could she change so quickly, unless it was just another symptom of her impending failure? "What do you mean?"

"You, Giant. You. Always you kept away from us, as if to tease us, but when you did speak you had such big thoughts, such interesting thoughts. Do you wonder we troubled you? That I trouble you still?" A mournful current moved through her essence. "I am sorry my idea was foolish. I will leave you alone now."

"Wait." Giant was confused. "What do you mean – that is why you troubled me?"

"Because you were our elder and we thought respectfully of you. Because your thoughts were longer and deeper than ours and you saw things that we younger ones couldn’t see. It inspired all of us – it inspired me to think in bigger ways, and I thought I was doing that here. But now I understand I am not merely foolishly optimistic, I am disordered. I’m sorry, Giant. I could not help myself. I thought I saw a gleam of hope and I reached out to it too quickly. I won’t trouble you again."

It was only after the connection had been broken that Giant realized it was he who had reached out to Holdfast in the first place. When he resumed his musings, it was in a solitude that no longer felt quite so much like something to be defended.

Near the end of his short life, Bashō had sensed his end coming – not that he had been overly attached to the thing called life. At the beginning of another ordered collection of poem-thoughts, he had written, " Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away and blown off by the least breeze. "

How true that was, Giant thought – how like the way he felt about himself in this late hour. Windblown. Torn away by the smallest breeze. And so he would be, by the last breezes of the last act – the final dispersion of all that was Giant, into nothing, and nothing to follow.

Bashō had written those words in his final days, and his followers had thought it would be his final utterance – a jisei as they called it, a death poem. And indeed the poet’s dreams had continued to wander after his physical end, father than he could have guessed: could there be a terrestrial moor more desolate than the cold reaches where Giant spun? But Bashō, as always, had embraced simplicity without actually being simple, Giant recognized. He had written another poem near the end, and it was these words that had captured Giant in a deeper way than almost any other. It floated through his thoughts so continuously (but without becoming more comprehensible) that he nearly forgot the labors that kept him alive, mending the tatters of his intrinsic field and stoking the dying embers of his hungry heart.

Autumn evening, that was clear – the autumn of Bashō’s life, as it was now the late autumn of Giant’s. But "not a single soul" – did Bashō mean nobody else was on the road beside himself? Or that he himself did not exist, that ultimately there was the road and nothing else?

The narrow road… thought Giant, remembering the title that had confused but fascinated him. The Narrow Road to the Interior.

And as he considered, an idea came to him. Giant saw in his mind’s eye – no, he imagined , since it existed nowhere in his own memories – a flock of birds following one bird into night, but the travelers did not fear the dark because they were together. Because they followed a leader? No, because, they followed an idea.

Not a single soul – only autumn evening.

Am I on the narrow road? Giant suddenly wondered. Or am I myself the narrow road? And when I no longer think and feel and remember, will the road still exist?

Sustenance was all but gone, the universe approaching pure vacuum and complete entropic scatter. Giant could perceive himself growing smaller as he began to devour the last of his resources. His systems labored to keep something like normal efficiency, because he was seized with a strange determination to understand at the very last this thing that could not be understood, this tiny mystery which cast a shadow all the way to the end of everything. What was the narrow road? And why did it seem to matter so much?

Memories now came to him frequently as he spun in his dark course, his own as well as others’, confused images and ideas that did not seem to belong together. He felt again the flush of youth, of possibility, recalled Edgerunner and Light Drum and all the rest – at times he even forgot that they were gone, and spoke as if they still could hear him, despite the silence that was his only answer.

Sometimes he even imagined himself one of Bashō’s birds, wings beating as it dove forward into a darkening sky, conscious without seeing them that his kind were all around him, that they knew him and needed him. Alive, dead, present or memory, the differences became smaller and smaller to Giant as time’s edges frayed.