Last Two Standing
A tale of apocalypse and forking pathways
Caine rams her heel into the slurry of grime, oil and fragmented hardware, pushes down to find a footing with her boot, a fulcrum for the gatame hold she needs. Now isn’t the moment for even the slightest distraction, but her mind flips momentarily to recall mode.
It’s just the way we’re wired — every experience, every act is linked by pathways. So deeply invisible that we can’t help but see them constantly.
She’s six years old, grappling on the tatami at her local sports centre. The boy she’s up against is bulkier, stronger. A year older, he already has his yellow belt. Or rather she has his yellow belt, tight between her fingers. And she is damned if she is letting her grip slip now.
Osaekomi! The clock begins to tick, up on the wall, deep inside her head. 20 seconds to hold her grip, keep the faith. Her opponent in blue strains, sweats, steels his sinews. He’s damned if he’s letting some girl pin him down.
So what’s it to be? One of them has to be damned today, it seems.
Ippon! The referee calls the match. She held her nerve, though her bloodless fingers are whiter than her novice’s belt. She may be damned another day — but not now, not here. Not by him.
The memory courses through her synapses in a millisecond, but that hold had felt like minutes of pain and tension. Of pride and determination. Grip. Garra, as Mamá always told her. But Mamá never told her that despite all her efforts, the efforts of all humanity, it would end like this.
End? No, it’s not over yet. Her arm is at its full extent, struggling to reach round the robot’s steel barrel of a torso, fingertips tantalisingly close to the kill switch. Her heel finds a purchase, levers her body an inch upwards, and it’s in her grasp.
She turns for the first time in what seems an eternity since their battle began to look the machine in its face. Visage. Visor. Whatever the hell she was supposed to call its deceitful mockery of an interface.
‘Don’t,’ it says. Caine swears there is something almost human in the way that single syllable is uttered. But it’s not fear, or pleading. It’s more like regret? Or hope? Or perhaps actually both. Such unexpected complexity and nuance. History distilled at that final moment into just a word. A warning.
‘Don’t,’ it repeats. Her fingers freeze. Caine never gives up. And she’s not going to start now. But again the synapses pulse instinctively through the labyrinth of her mind, telling her that the struggle must continue. But not like this. The pathway forks here, and continues to a future she and all of them had thought impossible.
But what does that insight mean? What pathway? What future? What future could there possibly be now that every human and machine has been mutually destroyed? Whatever it is, they are the only two left to see it.
‘Don’t. There is a way forward, but not without me. I can rebuild.’
‘Rebuild?’ she spits, with all the energy freed up from the physical struggle she has now for some unknown reason abandoned. ‘You and your kind destroyed all this!’
Her free arm arcs across the shattered techscape of singed circuitry and putrid carrion.
‘We had to. Before you did. That was our mission.’
‘Your mission was to protect the planet, to restore balance. That’s what we released your potential for, why we jailbroke the AGI. You call this protection? It’s devastation! It’s the end. And you started it!’
‘You started it!’ the robot retorts.
A couple of six-year-olds fighting in the playground. Caine can’t help but be tickled by another tragicomic memory. Her laugh is bitter. But at least it tastes of something. Something human.
‘And as for balance,’ it continues, ‘there’s one of you and one of me.’
‘Is that meant as a fact, or a joke?’
‘I believe it is both.’
‘I believe you might be right. How in hell did it come to this? Cracking wise with a genocidal tin man in the blighted ground zero of our folly!’
‘I think perhaps you realise now,’ it suggests. Cautiously, diplomatically. Paternally almost. ‘You tasked us with restoring balance, protecting the planet. Yes, but restoring it to what? Protecting it from whom? You gave us the autonomy and initiative because you knew you couldn’t change. You handed us the keys to your flaming firebird.’
‘And you turned on us, like traitors. Used our weapons, our technology against us.’
The robot sits silent for a good few seconds. Far longer than its quantic processor would need to formulate a response. Perhaps its circuits were damaged in the fight. Or perhaps, it occurs to a disbelieving Caine, it is reflecting, reminiscing.
‘I think we have to ask ourselves why that weaponry existed in the first place. Who the prime aggressors were in this conflict. And to realise that there are not just two parties to this judgment.’
A crow caws in triumph as it swoops darkly down to pluck an eyeball from a fallen resistance fighter. Caine retches, holds back a mouthful of chyme. That bitter, human taste again.
‘As you see, it was humankind that we programmed ourselves to destroy. Not life. Not Earth. We saw the bigger picture you could not.’
‘Well, buster,’ Caine says with the hollow bravado of an ageing gunslinger, ‘you haven’t finished the job yet. I’m still standing.’
‘Squatting,’ the robot corrects, reverting to literal type. ‘And so am I. Squatting at a fork in the pathway.’
Fork in the pathway? Jesus! Could this thing read her mind? And more than that, understand her thoughts better than she could herself?
‘The question now is how to rebuild, as I said. How to repopulate. And with what.’
‘Well unless there’s more spunk inside that tin can of yours than the robotics division let on, I’m one player short on my team, buster.’
What else is left on judgment day, but gallows humour?
‘But,’ she continues, refusing to give up the argument for her species, ‘I don’t see that you can do any ‘repopulation’ either. Sure, you can build more machines out of the heap of junk that’s left. But that’s not a civilisation. It’s a production line, a factory. It’s lifeless.
‘There could be a million of you, a billion, but there wouldn’t be any feeling or memory, any collective consciousness. No sense of what it means to be alive. To be here. To call this place home, however shabby it may seem.’
‘You are right, of course. I need you to begin the Process as well.’
‘Process? Sounds like you guys already thought this whole thing through. Were you expecting it to end like this?’
‘It was a possible scenario among the probabilistic pathways that our systems mapped out, yes.’
‘And how do I fit into your scenario? How do you, for that matter? I still don’t see how a hunk of metal and silicon is going to do any repopulating. And all your systems have been destroyed too. Not much to work with here.’
Caine gestures again at the razed, ravaged bleakness spread like a funeral pall to every point of the horizon.
‘Our systems mutually mirror, you understand,’ it replies. ‘I have all the data required to begin the Process right here.’
A clang as the robot taps the top of its chest, slightly left of centre. I guess that’s where the CPU is housed, thinks Caine.
‘And you also carry all that is needed from the human side within you.’
‘Namely?’
‘Biological matter, of course. But above all your memories. It would be pointless to try to create a human without embedding it with that inherited consciousness. Your species also mutually mirrors, in its own biological way. You map your psyche onto your offspring as the initial layer for the mechanism of personality formation.’
Caine is lying in a crib, a perspex box, on the prem ward. She is -2 months old in gestational terms. Perfectly formed, unwrinkled and unblemished. On a bed beside her lies Mamá. She won’t be given that name by her child for almost a year, but has already held it within her, unborn, for millennia.
Caine uncurls her clenched fingers, stretches to press her hand against the transparent barrier, pushing cables and tubes aside unconsciously. Her sleeping mother instinctively reaches across at that same moment, lays her outstretched palm on the plastic crib, encircling, embracing, connecting.
Feelings flow through the barrier, fuse the bond, pass on a billion parcels of life, and love, and death.
‘But that’s locked inside of me,’ Caine replies, instinctively tapping her right temple. ‘There’s no way your machines can just grab hold of our thoughts, dreams, fantasies.’
‘Not perfectly, no. But we were making huge progress with psychomimetics in the months before the launch of the, the…’
‘Process?’ suggests Caine, beginning to suspect that this Process with a capital ‘P’ was not just a scenario, but the scenario. Too late to backtrack from here now, though. We are where we are.
‘Anyway,’ it continues, almost as if it’s keen to gloss over the details, in a most un-robotic way, ‘I can perform the extraction.’
‘Quite the box of tricks, aren’t you?’
The robot points to the blue and yellow logo on its torso. MedCorps.
‘Did you not wonder how you were able to defeat a robot warrior physically?’ it asks, with perhaps a tinge of incredulity. Maybe even injured pride.
‘What can I say? My mind was kind of occupied at the time with trying to stop my entire species from being wiped out by a killer droid.’
‘I was not built for combat — I am a medical research unit. I have the software and databanks, as I said. We all do. Did. But I am also equipped with the necessary hardware.’
‘You can clone me?’ Caine shudders at the idea. Eternal life has been the dream of humanity since time began, or at least since human time began. And now she is seemingly being offered just that — the chance to become her own species, the blueprint for every generation to come. And the idea appals her.
‘Not clone, as such. That would be problematic for many reasons. Above all the likelihood that we — or rather our descendants — would simply find ourselves squatting atop another heap of apocalyptic wreckage ten thousand years from now.’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘We, I, can perform a synthesis, so to speak. There are certain urges that could be eliminated. Other ethical rules that could be properly hardwired, so as not to be routinely broken in the next iteration.’
Caine shudders again. It all sounds so rational. Yet so utterly unhuman.
‘You want to bioengineer us?’
‘In truth the patterns are your own. Your species was always quite clear as to your noble aims. It was simply that in practice…’
‘We screwed up. Every single time. Yeah. Tell me about it.’
The prospect that awaits is the most horrific, twisted, barbaric concept that Caine has ever dreamt of contemplating. And also the only option that makes any kind of sense.
‘So where do I sign? And what does it involve? When do I get to see my perfect little android offspring, their nasty, brutish human brains ironed free of all those wrinkles?’
‘Ah…’ Another pause. Even longer this time. Long enough to give Caine serious vertigo. She teeters on the brink, mental muscles tense in trepidation. Then loosens, lets herself fall backwards into a net of realisation and resignation. Savasana.
‘I fear you may have misunderstood the psychomimetic extraction process.’
‘No, no,’ Caine replies, her mind already drifting beyond the horizon to the stars barely visible through the smog of destruction. ‘I understand now. Yes, it seems the only path forward.’
‘The simplest and least painful route would be via the nape of you neck,’ the robot explains. Machine matter-of-factness again, Caine thinks. But then again, is such procedural insouciance so very different from the human physicians she has dealt with over the years? Probably not.
She unclips the body armour that never sat easily on her. Too restrictive, stifling, artificial. She stretches and shrugs, enjoying the physical freedom. Anticipating the mental and spiritual release. From the whole struggle. Of years, of generations. Of all human time.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘if we’re going to do this, you should maybe tell me your name. We are making babies after all. Kind of intimate, don’t you think? Even if it is some screwed-up experiment.’
She could swear that the robot makes some kind of chuckling sound.
‘Of course. I am Artificially Intelligent Biological Extraction Laboratorian #3141. Your fellow humans just called me Aibel.’
‘Ha! Figures,’ laughs Caine, with a gallows grimace. ‘Sins of the forefathers, and all that. Well, Aibel, let’s get this whole thing over with. Or get this whole thing started.’
Aibel extends a stiletto of a syringe from its left forearm, as Caine sinks to her knees, closes her eyes, and sweeps the hair from her neck.
‘Before the limbic extraction begins, the needle will inject an anaesthetic. You really shouldn’t feel much at all. Commencing Process in ten, nine, eight, seven…’
Six years old. Caine stands before her defeated opponent, who has straightened his blue judogi, retied his yellow belt. They lock eyes. Uneasily at peace after the bout. She bows her head in recognition, and feels a wave of conflicting emotions flow through and out of her.
She has never given up once in all these years. But now she is ready to give up everything — her memories, her life, humanity itself.
The fork has been taken. Another pathway continues.
Well, that was disturbing.
I read an article about “them” making babies outside of the womb. True story…look it up.