The Last Human

by Lee Bacon

  “Let me guess,” the human said. “More of those red-eyed wolf monsters?”

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  Ceeron ducked low to the ground. Emma gazed into its backpack.

  “Well,” she said, “at least it’s nicer than the locker.”

  Her hand held on to mine for another long moment, as though she did not want to let go.

  00100101

  For the first time in my life, I did not show up to work in the morning. This break in routine sent an eruption of error messages through my system. With every step that led away from the WorkSite, I felt my programming resisting.

  But I kept walking anyway.

  My coworkers were beside me. SkD glided close to the ground, carried forward by a pair of rubber treads. Ceeron’s heavy footsteps thumped against the concrete.

  This must have been just as difficult for them. They were like me. Built for one—and only one—purpose. To install solar panels. It was all we had ever known. All we had ever done.

  Until the human showed up.

  Without slowing my stride, I glanced in the direction of Ceeron’s backpack. Emma was inside. As I thought of her, a question raced through my mind.

  Is all this worth it?

  Because of Emma, I was keeping secrets from my FamilyUnit. Because of Emma, I had disrupted the functions of my fellow robots. Because of Emma, my coworkers and I had abandoned our jobs.

  But was she worth it?

  My memory drive sparked with the moment Emma grabbed my hand. The first time human skin ever contacted my sensors. The strange buzz that vibrated through my circuitry.

  In that instant, I knew two things with 100 percent certainty:

  [1] I need to help Emma.

  [2] Helping Emma is a violation.

  How could both of these things be true at the same time?

  The answer to this question pinged inside my vocabulary drive.

  Because Emma is a paradox.

  00100110

  We disabled our location tracking. This made us invisible to the Hive. The larger mechanical mind could no longer see us. Of course, there was still the risk of being watched. Drones patrolled the sky. Satellites orbited Earth. But unless we did something to raise their suspicion, they would ignore us.

  Hopefully.

  We made our way south. Toward the range of snow-capped mountains that loomed over the horizon. Toward the destination marked on Emma’s map.

  As we progressed, the robot population dwindled. The signs of our civilization faded. The factories/power plants/storage facilities. We saw fewer/fewer/fewer of them. Until eventually, there were none at all. And the concrete path came to an abrupt stop.

  We had reached the edge of our settlement.

  Ahead of us, we saw nothing but nature.

  I performed a scan of our surroundings. We were alone.

  “It is safe to come out now!” I knocked on Ceeron’s backpack

  CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

  Emma’s head popped out. “Okay, cool it with the knocking! It’s super loud!”

  I replayed her words. “What does ‘cool it’ mean?”

  “It is human slang,” said Ceeron. “It means she wants you to stop.”

  “If you want me to stop, why not simply say stop?” I asked. “That would be more precise.”

  Emma let out a sigh. “Because unlike you guys, humans don’t have microchips for brains.”

  SkD chirped. I watched symbols appear on its screen.

  Translation: The word cool can have many meanings to humans. Depending on how it is used, something that is cool can be cold (like a snowflake) or exciting (“That’s so cool!”). A human might say “Cool it” (if they want you to stop) or “You look cool!” (if you are wearing fashionable sunglasses). And if you happen to be holding an ice cream, a human might think that is cool for multiple reasons (it is both cold and exciting).

  My vocabulary drive flickered with other possible uses. Cool down. Cool off. Cool your jets. Lose your cool. Play it cool. It is cool with me. Be cool. Cool as a cucumber.

  One word.

  Many meanings.

  It seemed to me that humans treated their language like they once treated their fingernails. They enjoyed decorating and polishing their words. They gave every sentence a manicure.

  Emma hopped out of Ceeron’s backpack. Her eyes widened as she stared at the view. A wilderness of rolling green hills. A stream meandering between patches of trees. The morning sky.

  “Wow.” She caught her breath. “In the bunker, we had this old book of nature photographs. I used to flip through it all the time trying to imagine what the world was like aboveground. I stared at the pictures for hours. I basically memorized every page.”

  “And?” Ceeron asked. “Is it like what you imagined?”

  She shook her head. “This is so much . . . more.”

  “More of what?”

  “Of everything,” she said.

  Emma placed her hand on the trunk of a tree, tracing her fingertip over the uneven bark. Her gaze drifted upward. A breeze whispered through the tree’s branches.

  A single leaf detached and fell. As it twirled through the air, I tried to decode the pattern of its movements, to find the hidden algorithm within the looping and whirling. But nature is not programmed this way. The leaf followed its own mysterious path. Drifting down/down/down.

  Until . . .

  It landed at Emma’s feet.

  Crouching close to the ground, she plucked the leaf by its stem and twirled it. Clockwise, then counterclockwise. She let out a soft laugh, her face full of wonder.

  I watched Emma watching the leaf and a question formed in my mind.

  What is she thinking?

  I did not know. Just as I did not know why humans used the same word for cold, exciting, stop, and fashionable.

  Sometimes, the human brain was as mysterious as a falling leaf.

  00100111

  The world was not made for machines.

  When it rains, water tries to sneak through our joints and ruin our circuitry. During dry periods, sand clings to our metal bodies, rubbing away our smooth surfaces, creating cracks and imperfections.

  The ground is annoyingly irregular. Even the tiniest bump or dip can trip us if we are not careful.

  Unpredictable clouds come along and cast shade over our solar panels.

  The world really can be quite a nuisance sometimes.

  Humans had millions of years to evolve, to adapt, to figure out their unique place in the complicated puzzle of nature.

  Robots have been in charge for only a few decades.

  In our settlements, we have done our best to overcome nature. We cleared the land, paved pathways with smooth cement, installed shelters to protect ourselves from the weather. But now, far from our familiar surroundings, I was suddenly aware of just how treacherous the world can be.

  I moved with caution, allowing my balance settings to adjust with each step. I avoided patches of mud or rocks. When we reached a stream, I was forced to walk for hundreds of meters until I found a section that was narrow enough to leap across.

  Emma did not have these same concerns. She kicked rocks. She stomped in the mud just to hear her boots go squelch. While it took me twenty-two minutes and ten seconds to find a path across the stream, she made her way from one side to the other in only nine seconds, hopping from one rock to the next, water rushing beneath her.

  As we wandered deeper into the woods, Emma told us about the bunker where she was born, where she had spent every day of her life until yesterday.

  “At first, it was sixty people,” she said. “Including my parents. They were just kids when they went into the bunker. Didn’t know each other at the time. But you make friends fast when you’re stuck in an underground colony.”

  She grabbed a pinecone off the ground. Tossing it from hand to hand, she continued.

  “The Sixty—they were from all kinds of different jobs. Scientists, farmers, doctors. They only had on
e thing in common: They saw what was coming. They predicted that robots would rise up and massacre humans.”

  Massacre. The word stuck out like a loose screw. Every robot comes preprogrammed with the history of our uprising. Files filled with words such as victory and liberation and revolution.

  But not the word massacre.

  And I could understand why. I did not like the images that flashed through my mental wiring when I thought of this word. They were ugly/brutal/vicious.

  Emma snatched the pinecone out of the air. “So the Sixty pooled their money and knowledge together, and they built themselves a big ol’ bunker. State-of-the-art everything. Water filtration and recycling. Sustainable indoor agriculture. Sunlamps. Underground and completely off the grid. They closed the hatch and hid out from you guys for the next thirty years.”

  “Did you like growing up in the bunker?” Ceeron asked.

  “I didn’t have anything to compare it to. The bunker was all I knew. My parents were there. My friends. My school. I honestly figured I’d live the rest of my life there. Then the sickness came along, and . . .”

  Emma’s voice faded.

  Her features sharpened into a fine point of anger.

  She walked a few meters in silence.

  Then she stopped. And in a sudden motion, she jerked her arm back and threw the pinecone with surprising force.

  It crashed through the forest and out of sight.

  00101000

  I wanted to understand Emma better. To predict her actions. To comprehend her moods.

  I wanted to know what algorithms defined her behavior.

  So I researched.

  While we traveled, I accessed all the data I had about humans. Books/Videos/Articles/Statistics/Charts. But as I analyzed these files, my machine mind kept stumbling over gaps in the data. Empty sections. Files that seemed to have gone missing.

  It reminded me of Day[1]. Looking at Cin ma 18, I wanted to find out more about movies. But certain files were not there. Like pages ripped from a book.

  Gone.

  My memory drive replayed Parent_2’s explanation. When we took over, many files from the past were lost.

  Now, as I tried to understand Emma better, as I searched through billions of files about humanity, I wondered . . .

  What had been in those files?

  What was missing?

  00101001

  “You guys mind if we stop for a second?”

  Without waiting for a response, Emma sat on a mossy stump and slung her backpack off her shoulders.

  I counted to one. Then I spoke. “Shall we continue?”

  I took a step. My coworkers followed.

  Emma did not.

  “I didn’t mean an actual second,” she said.

  I glanced at her, confused. “Then why did you say ‘stop for a second’?”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “It’s an expression.”

  “A human expression,” I muttered at a low audio setting.

  “I need to rest for a little bit. I’m not used to this much walking.”

  Emma reached into her backpack and removed a strange-looking object. A pale brown slab that fit into the palm of her hand. I compared the object against my data drives.

  Zero matches.

  The thing was a mystery.

  The mystery deepened when Emma lifted the slab to her mouth and took a bite.

  SkD’s screen flashed.

  Emma held up the brown slab. “It’s a compressed synthetic protein block. Believe me, it tastes exactly as yummy as it sounds.”

  “From the bunker?” Ceeron asked.

  Emma nodded. “Let’s just say, it wasn’t exactly fine dining down there. But when you’re living deep underground, your food options are kind of limited.”

  She bit off a small corner of the protein cube and chewed it slowly.

  I imagined the strange-looking food being digested and converted into energy, powering her the way batteries powered us.

  When she was done with her meal, Emma wiped her hands on her pants. Then she reached into her backpack and removed the small scrap of paper. The map. She stared at the red dot near the bottom.

  SkD beeped.

  I provided the translation: “What do you expect to find when you reach the place marked by the red dot on the map?”

  She shrugged and looked away. “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Whatever it is, the location must have been important to your parents,” Ceeron said.

  “It’s the only thing that matters now.” Her thumb traced the map’s faded colors. “I have to get there. I can’t let them down.”

  “It is your purpose,” Ceeron said.

  Emma glanced up. “What?”

  Ceeron gestured to SkD and me. “Our purpose is to install solar panels. Yours is to reach the red dot.”

  A smile flickered across the human’s features. “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  She returned the map to her backpack. Rising to her feet, she gave us an intense look. Her movements had a new energy. And I did not think it was entirely from the protein cube.

  “Well, then.” She clapped her hands together. “Probably shouldn’t keep my purpose waiting.”

  SkD spun in a circle, its screen flashing with exclamation points.

  Ceeron pointed us in the correct direction. “Let us smack the road!”

  00101010

  The forest opened up and revealed a view of the mountains. The sight brought my movements to a halt.

  These mountains hung like a curtain in the background of my life. I had seen them so many times.

  Every single day.

  For over twelve years.

  But never like this.

  Never so large.

  The mountains swallowed more of the sky than they ever had before. Had they grown?

  For 0.001 seconds, I thought there was an error in my visual settings. Then I realized.

  The mountains were not bigger.

  They were closer.

  I was a highly advanced machine. I should not have been bewildered by something so basic. I came preprogrammed with the concept of perspective: The nearer you are to something, the larger it appears.

  So why the confusion?

  I suppose it is simply the kind of trick a mind plays on its owner. Even when that mind is made of circuitry, even when its owner is made of metal.

  If you change your point of view, you see the world in a different way.

  I began walking again.

  With every step, the mountains seemed to grow larger.

  00101011

  We crossed an open field. Tall grass swayed around my knees and nearly engulfed SkD completely. I could see only the top of the smaller robot poking above the sea of green.

  Now that we had left the shade of the forest, Emma squinted in the bright glare of sunshine.

  She shielded her face with her hand. “I had no idea the sun could be this . . . sunny.”

  My vocabulary drive pinged with a word I had never needed to know until this moment. Sunburn. Most humans could withstand several minutes/hours in direct sunlight before their skin burned. But what about a human who had lived her entire life underground? Who had only ever felt the light of sunlamps? It might take only a few minutes.

  Spots of Emma’s pale skin were already turning red.

  I peered ahead. The field stretched forward for over a kilometer. Shade was still a long way off.

  As I was searching for a solution, Ceeron spoke up.

  “Perhaps I can help.” Ceeron’s head spun 180 degrees. It reached into its large metal backpack and removed a solar panel. I had seen the massive bot perform these motions thousands of times. But never for this purpose.

  Ceeron angled the panel above Emma’s head, blocking the sunlight.

  Her own personal patch of shade.

  Emma turned her grateful gaze up at the panel. “That thing looks super heavy. You sure you don’t mind?”

  Ceeron’s reply was simple and true. “I was de
signed for this.”

  Emma lowered her hand. A smile appeared on her face. “I feel so special. Thank you!”

  “You are welcome!” replied Ceeron.

  They continued walking in this way.

  Everywhere Emma went, the rectangle of shade came with her.

  00101100

  Emma’s gaze passed from SkD to Ceeron to me.

  “How long have you guys been friends?” she asked.

  Friends. I knew the word, of course. It was preprogrammed in my vocabulary database. But knowing a word is not the same as understanding it.

  “We are not friends,” I said. “We are coworkers.”

  Emma considered this. “How long have you worked together?”

  I performed the math instantly, but SkD beat me to the answer. A number appeared on its screen.

  Emma knit her brow. “What does that mean?”

  “That is the number of days we have worked alongside one another,” I said.

  “Over twelve years,” added Ceeron, still holding the solar panel over Emma.

  “You’ve worked together all that time, and you’re still not friends?”

  “Of course not.”

  She stopped moving. So did the rest of us.

  She said, “So, you don’t, like, hang out together when you’re not working?”

  “When we are not working, we are in sleep mode,” I pointed out.

  Emma scratched her head. “Don’t you ever take time off? You know, do other kinds of stuff?”

  “Like what?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just like, sit around. Hang out with each other.”

  I shook my head. “Robots do not hang out. That would be unproductive.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Emma pushed aside a strand of hair. “It’s fun.”

  Fun. Another word I knew but did not understand.

  Emma placed her hands on her hips, considering us from her personal patch of shade. “I think you guys are friends. You just don’t know it.”

  Was she correct? Ceeron, SkD, and I spent 98 percent of our waking hours together. Over that time, I had learned things about them. The kinds of things you only know when you are close to another robot for long stretches.