We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  “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.

  “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.

  Lonely stillness—

  a single cicada’s cry

  sinking into stone.

  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.

  Sick on my journey,

  only my dreams will wander

  these desolate moors

  Bashō had written those words in his final days, and his followers had thought it would be his final utterance – a jise
i 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.

  All along this road

  not a single soul – only

  autumn evening

  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.

  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:

  All day long, singing,

  yet the day’s not long enough

  for the skylark’s song…

  “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.