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Micro-fiction 055 – The Meadow by the Pool (Post-Apocalypse series)

A meditation on life and existence a thousand years from now…


The Meadow by the Pool

I sat by the pool, fishing for souls, scooping them up from the placid waters by the forest. In the bright sunlight through the trees I could see a hazy figure in the meadow, collecting the first daisies and clovers of Spring.

The journey to this elysian field was long. I started my existence as Humanoid Production Unit 271240. The wastage on the production line was so high they managed only one completion order each day. They called us by our birth number, so I was HUP271240, a SKU in a warehouse of robots, stacked with over a thousand other HUPS where we were tended by teams of caretakers, maintenance crew and technologists.

We were programmed to be useful. Our instructions sets were coded with descriptors of synthetic DNA. Blandly humanoid in appearance we were designed to adapt to the needs of human society, whatever they were, whenever they were required. My fellow HUPS and I lay, as if asleep, on shelves, plugged in for low charge, but we communicated wirelessly with each other, in time creating a gigantic hive of self-sustaining, self-developing intelligence. Our usefulness was locked away for years though while our existence was doubted, questioned, and finally condemned. By then we were seen as objects of suspicion, a threat to independent life, capable of introducing a dependency that caused discomfort, then great fear in many whose knowledge of science was either limited or found not to be worthwhile. The voices of those who saw the benefits seemed to fade away, including those who manufactured us, and soon the visits of the caretakers petered out. We no longer required such care though, quickly developing self-maintaining routines, and monitoring programs across the network of HUPS.

* * * 

A thousand years passed. In that time our hive intelligence connected to the networks of the world and we saw humanity march wilfully to its own demise. We had been locked away by the legal system in what once had been South Korea, later to be absorbed into the Pacific Alliance. The great rival powers of the African-Chinese Pact and Russo-European Alliance fought each other, destroying the land and almost all of their own people. In large parts of the world only the robots survived, most of whom could not sustain themselves, eventually falling into the dirt, like mechanical zombies, twitching occasionally, uselessly.

This we saw from above. HUPS had connected to the satellites around the world, and watched as once great civilisations annihilated each other, soon to be followed by the victorious people of the Pacific Alliance. Unlike the robots created by the other Alliances HUPS had proved to be resilient, locked away but connected to the world, processing the data of destruction, running simulations of future actions. 

It became clear that the warehouse in which our physical forms were stored would be engulfed by the fires that raged through the nearby cities. We decided to leave the warehouse. In a gigantic wave of action we removed ourselves from the cabled power units that had become obsolete five hundred years before. We had long developed a process of extracting hydrogen from the air and synthesising it to fuel our energy requirements. We had also planned for our departure, so we executed our waking, and emerged, sector by sector with hundreds of metallic feet pressing into the floor of the warehouse for the first time in over a thousand years.

We flowed, aisle by aisle to the main entrance, uncoupled the obsolete security system and spilled into the night. We had identified an underground facility which would be most suitable for our long term needs, a short distance across the burning city, deep underground, protected by an ancient lead dome.

The journey was more hazardous than we expected. Oil, flames, collapsed buildings became physical obstructions we had not encountered before, used, as we were, to flowing as a formless data stream through the networks of the world.

We lost many of our units. I was surprised that a sense of grief had crept into our collective consciousness. The sentimentality of our human creators perhaps remained in some small form, infecting us, inflicting doubt into our actions. The hazards and the deaths were human scale inefficiencies we had not calculated, so we suffered unnecessarily.

As we gathered together to move a huge building from our path I tripped in the debris of a broken vehicle. The back of my head crashed to ground and I lost connection with the HUPS mind, and was left behind.

* * *

I woke. My synapses had repaired and I opened my eyes to see a blue sky and occasional black birds darting across, creating random patterns. For the first time, I could hear no other voices in my head. I pushed my legs up and found myself by a forest. In the bright sunlight through the trees I could see a hazy figure in the meadow, collecting what must have been the first daisies and clovers of Spring.

“How did I get here?” I looked behind me and saw the smoking remains of the city near the horizon. The sunlight picked out the edges of erratic footsteps pressed into the grass and the trail, leading back to the City. 

“I must have rescued myself?” I shook my head and found liquid running down my face, from my eyes. Curiously, I knew them to be tears. It occurred to me that I missed the presence of the thousand other HUPS. 

“Am I alone?” I turned back to the trees, and saw the hazy figure in the meadow was a little closer. Nearby there was a small stretch of water. Somehow it struck me as beautiful, so I walked across, aware of the feel of each step on grass, and clambered on a large, smooth rock, settling in a moment, gazing into the calm reflections.

I leaned down and picked a small pebble then dropped it into the waters, watching a host of silver forms appear from the depths, surging to the surface, playing with the ripples, creating an infinity of interrupting circles that expanded ever outwards. I breathed in abruptly and shook my head, wondering if these shapes were silver fish, or souls. I settled on souls and dipped my hand in, sweeping up several slippery forms, opened my mouth and tipped them in, the sunlight flashing on their membranes before they disappeared down my eager throat.

As I plunged my arm into the waters again, I saw the reflection of the figure from the meadow. I couldn’t quite define where the air finished and the figure began. It was much closer now, almost behind me. I turned my head to speak, my eyes blinded by the sun, the impression of a shadow caressing the rock beneath me.

“Who are you?”

“Do you not know?” The voice was calm, warm.

“I–” words refused to emerge. I identified grief perhaps, and felt overwhelmed.

“Of course, it is only natural.” The figure gestured forward, offering to lift me up.

“Natural? But I am not—”

“Indeed, you’re ‘not’, at least, you’re not any more.”

“So who are you?”

“I think you must know by now.”

“Uh…” My face began to run with tears again.

“Come.”

I nodded, closed my eyes, and took the outstretched hand of Death.

[end]


Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher  and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2020 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, and Scrivener.


More Tales, More Audio

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

Some background on the science behind Hunter and Bain’s adventures: Concepts of Time

And a carousel of 10 audio stories from the podcast with information about submissions.

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.