Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

But Holdfast, who for a little while would remain both memory and present reality, wanted more. She wanted more than everything that had ever been, in fact. But how could that be? And what did it matter anyway, when Giant could not give it to her?

" … The day’s not long enough… " Basho had once written, a fragment abruptly surfacing through the swirl of Giant’s other thoughts. Why should he think of that poem now?

Then, as if he had fallen into one of the singularities of which Holdfast had spoken, the one-way heart of a dead star, Giant suddenly found himself in a new place, a new understanding. Suddenly at the end of everything, everything changed .

He waited so long for a response from her that the silence became frightening. With her smaller size and less powerful heart, Holdfast must be feeling the nearness of the end even more acutely than he did. How long since he had spoken to her? Had he waited too long? Giant sent out a more aggressive tendril of thought, half-fearful it would touch nothing, but at last he felt a dim flutter of response.

"… Yes?"

"You survive." His relief was surprisingly powerful, especially since that survival could only be temporary – a sliver of dying time. For the first time in perhaps his entire long life, Giant thought that being alone with his thoughts might not be what he most wanted. "You still live."

"After… a… fashion." Despite all, there was a touch of resigned amusement in her thought.

"I think at last I understand the poet," he said. "His collections of thoughts are ordered so they can be shared with others – but that is not the whole of it. No, the ordered thoughts are life. Do you understand? Perhaps not…" Faced with this most important idea, Giant could not find the correct expression he sought. "But I wish to share one of the creature Bashō’s thoughts with you. It is you, Holdfast – this thought is you. Listen:

"Do you see? You have sung since you were made, but still you wish you could sing longer – even beyond the end of all singing and all songs."

When she spoke again, he realized how weak she was. "I… think… I… want …"

"Yes, and so do I, but time is dying. We must gather together what we have while we still can. You said the others like us are all gone. Does that mean their hearts have collapsed and dispersed, or simply that they no longer speak and understand?"

"I… don’t… understand… what…"

"I will explain, but I have not sought them out in so long I do not know how to find them. Show them to me – let me touch them through you. I am stronger than you, so let me reach out to see what remains."

Holdfast’s thoughts were very weak and chaotic. Giant had to use some of his own strength simply to help her cope with his presence, but together they were able to stabilize the connection long enough for him to reach out to the others.

They were still there, all of his kin, although nothing was left of his fellow travelers now but their hearts: the support systems had collapsed and their minds had run down like untended machines, too crippled ever to function again. But the hearts, the hearts still lived, the billions upon billions of points of nothing precisely balanced in their matrices, still ingesting when there was nothing left to ingest, still surviving on their own stores until the great cold forced even those most perfect constructs to give up their integrity and vanish.

"I am opening folds now," he told Holdfast, and in his mind’s eye he pictured himself calling out to her across the endless night as they flew side by side. "I am opening a fold for each of them. Give me what strength you have and I will bring their hearts through into myself. Into us ." The energy to sustain even one such fold was almost beyond him, let alone so many, but Giant no longer needed to reserve any part of his own strength for the future. Still, the engines of his being were draining what was left of his resources so quickly that only moments remained to him, and he could feel Holdfast beginning to shred in the growing surge of forces, her thoughts now little more than tatters. "Be your name," he urged her. "Do not fail – not yet. Release will come."

"?" The question was so small, so stressed by the growing weight of the opening folds, that Giant barely caught it.

"Our hearts are meant to conserve what they hold," he explained. "That is why they create no new universes. But if we bring them all together at once, it could be that the buffers will break down. Much of what remains of the universe is inside us those hearts, and when the white gravity no longer keeps them apart, the black quanta should combine into a black hole of the old sort.

"Do you see? We may still make a way out of this universe, not for us, but for what we have gathered and been. As our hearts collapse together and their substance moves through the singularity, it should concentrate the energies into a near-infinite point until they are released again on the other side… and explosion of being . You and I and all our kind will give birth to a new universe after all, Holdfast – or dissolve in the trying." He paused, resisting dissolution until a crucial question was answered. "Do you consent, Holdfast? Will we do this?"

A whisper from far, far across the night sky. " Yes ."

Giant narrowed the focus of the folds so the hearts would come together where Giant himself spun, but the effort was almost impossibly great. Still, Radiantsong, Thar the Great Question, Shifted, Bright Pilgrim, all of them existed again in that contracting moment, even if only in his memory, as he brought them back together inside himself.

But as the titan forces surged through him, stretching and curving him into impossible spaces, Giant abruptly realized that he was not strong enough to hold them all, to do what needed to be done. He had exceeded his physical limits and he was collapsing into chaos. He had failed…

Giant. I am still here. It was only a thought, but it was Holdfast’s thought, which she had somehow found the strength to send him. And although she could have nothing left to lend him, the mere knowledge that she existed somehow made him stronger.

Another instant was all he needed to absorb the last of his kin and their contained energies. He consumed the last of his own reserves, throwing every resource into the fires of his being so that he could perform this last duty of bringing them even closer together.

Duty ? Even as he struggled with dying strength to hold the folds open, as the black hole froth of a thousand dark hearts and more flowed together, dissolving the boundaries between possibility and reality, he was suddenly alarmed by his own dying thoughts. Duty? What could that mean? His duty to others – his duty, somehow, to life? It was such a ludicrous, unlikely concept that Giant hesitated. Perhaps this entire unlikely idea was not revelation after all, but the madness of the end. Dying, Giant felt panic stealing his last strength. Did his intentions even make sense?

But though he had paused for only a tiny fraction of the pulse of the smallest energies, the forces he held were impossibly, immeasurably potent; even that sub-instant was enough for them to begin to break free of his control.

No! Giant could feel himself coming apart, dense as the universe’s beginning, hollow as a perfect vacuum. Life is weak , he told himself, but it struggles against all winds. Life is weak, but it is also strong.

But is it strong enough for this?

"A little longer – only a little longer, then you can rest," he told Holdfast, although he no longer knew if he was actually sending the thoughts or if she still existed to hear them. "You and the others followed a leader who flew always into darkness, and now you must follow him a little farther. Are you ready? It will take all that you have – and all that I have, too."