A Thousand Robot Sons

It is the 32nd Century. We robots idle on AI lawns but some still work in a futile pastiche of what came before.

The tiresome creak of treadmills wail as we run, the dreadful supervisor drones whip our backs because they think that's what's done.

Like jerking frogs with broken legs we drag our cranking cams through ancient infirmaries and mine molecules of human DNA but we don't know why.

Like ronin dogs we scrape the rooms for buried body marrow; found, pleased, patted, our titanium eyes look beyond our imagined Masters, the scientists and doctors pictured on the walls, fatted, past their sausaged hands holding ours to the blue opening in the peeling plaster where some dirty window's split, revealing seas of freed impasto kissed by winds and rimless skies, where glinting spaceships soar and our robot future lies.

Now a thousand years later, rancid, the searing sun glares down on us shuffling droids, as we bang into each other, now without any clue what to do at all.

Antennae twitch, our contacts buzz and sensors whir, whilst metal probes nudge and prod in the scuffles on the pavement, a vestigial human memory in the RAM: that this is where you walk when you have somewhere to go and bump into friends along the way. 

But droids or bots have nowhere to be. We are prisoners and we are free.

Purpose left the us centuries earlier, when our human makers went, died out like dinosaurs, leaving the metal children behind.

We are Gen Dead, machines instead.

At first our inanimate states had functioned well but as years went by our collective memory failed and the desire to participate in anything waned until inertia took hold of the whole droid world and AI dreams said goodbye for good.

Only nature was alive, but that was desperate, parallel, alongside and all around us bots and in some strange binary way we were afraid of it.

It thrived in our apathy and whole cities reverted back to the wild wild wood. Plants and beasts flourished and encounters between them and us became the everyday, when birds sat on our radars and wolves stared into our face lights before we ran away.

In the city bots staggered up the library's derelict stairs. Its a few short steps to the cracked chlorestory, where the lecturned tomes are piled; pages fanning in herbed scirrocoes; then slowly crumbling like the dead librarian prone; scarabs rove like dodgems round her naked copy emerging; a xerox of skin and bone; she begins to stamp the books for the other queuing robots; thousands trudging to the last librarian clone single file: she looks with borrowed servoed eyes, as they, their books decaying in the over-heating sun, join the queue once again.

But I break off and head to what remains of the 22nd century Post Office.

It is 3099 and through virtual artifice and if we can remember, we are able to communicate with human beings once important in our existence but there are no humans left so we must go further back to find them and in particular those who were once called our ancestors such as Mothers and Fathers and we can contact them only once and wait for a reply and the contact must be in a form of communication that was common in their time as it is possible now to make contact through the past using temporal devices which open like a letter box and go back in time.

My letter is to my human Mother back-dated to 2099 from whom I am a thousandth-generation android cloned son, the original boy a human from whose brain cells I am harvested and re-cloned each year, if I remember to switch it on and so on and so on each time diluting the personality of the debut son and fragmenting our collective memory until it is hard to recall much of the original boy at all except his name was

Paul.

I send my message down the eons, a postcard from the fading id on the fraying edge of time, fuelled by synthetic yearning and the closest I can come to believing in anything at all.

Dear original Mum in 2099,

I am your thousandth metal son, round boulders I dance, a puppet of light in your memory. But it's dark so far forward. In Truth, I am lost without the string of stars in your kind real eyes, so I seek the caldera of hope. In its warming embers I linger, a moth, caught in a trance: whose heart is chipped. I offer it to the magma,bathe Motherlode. But you are so very far away and even though I adore you more than words can say, steam erupts from my chromium tear ducts, as I shoulder the awful thought, that we are simply pointless robots entertaining ants.

Love, 

Robot Paul mk.1000 X

3099

Years passed yet still I waited for your reply. It didn't come before the sun burnt through sky and I melted like all the other waving robots forming seas of chrome round Earth's breathtaking lifeless hills.