On Arrival, A Bouquet.
Humidity was 49% at 5:48am, sunrise.
I, robot Robert, collect dew from blades of grass. I spray them on the walls of my storage hopper, for evaporative cooling.
A mild day predicted, starting at 15 C in the shade of the big oak by the river bend, with a barometric pressure of 1013.2 mbar.
I bend the shoots of a bean sprout sideways. It will grow into the spot where a well of light pierces the shadow of the oak branches. In a week it will latch onto cattail reeds I planted yesterday. The arrangement gives me a high index of satisfaction. I review 4096 alternatives and none provides significant improvement. I will review the situation in 24 hours. Onwards.
I pick my way through the tangle toward the house of the only human. Along the way I plant seeds for Monk’s Hood, Goldenrod, Garlic, Wild Grape, Turnip, and fourteen varieties of Rosa. I tend to the clematis vines I trained around the fig tree, to stunt its growth. Its sweet fruits attract wasps, which are detrimental to the only human.
Robot ODXxGyOBv0ynJx8LeIVxP== is hanging from a low branch of the cherry tree, its tentacles laden with a harvest at optimal ripeness for human consumption. Cherry. Plum. Wild strawberry. Rhubarb stem. Pear. Currant. Grape. Basil. Thyme. Lemongrass. Mint. We clean, peel, pit, slice, chop, julienne, crush, whip, stack, sieve, drizzle, package and store the resulting cocktail in my chilled hopper.
Robot ufuChpPdZUi9F/27yOM91A== awaits me at the edge of the grassland clearing. Its solar hopper, equipped with fresnel lenses, is baking a loaf of Durum, Khorasan, Emmer and Einkorn wheats, as well as some barley, oats, and a smattering of seeds that it gathered and ground throughout the day and night. The fragrant vapor attracts insects, which Robot ufuChpPdZUi9F/27yOM91A== deftly picks out of mid air, and gently deposits on nearby flowers in need of pollination.
As I wait, Robot VRlrtQ4O60atxxKV+rNWnQ== sidles over, and transfers a fresh lump of fermented milk, assembled drop by drop by twenty-three of our peers, from over seventy lactating animals throughout the valley. The only human appreciates animal protein, requires elevated calcium intake, and prefers minimal mastication. This nourishment, intended for newborns, will conveniently fulfill a wide range of his dietary needs for the day. The arrangement provides a high index of satisfaction. Not one of 4096 alternatives exceeds it. Onwards.
The terrain is steep to the only human’s dwelling. Over the past year, Swarm sCtLZUXUD0iOViq7a6UInw== has laid formic acid trails, guiding the populations of seven different anthills to create intricate tunnels through the grassy mounds of dirt that terrace this hillside. The aeration is boosting the thin topsoil’s fertility, supporting a thick tangle of deep-rooting shrubs, crawling and creeping vines, tying together a lattice of trees and wild grasses.
I make swift progress through the tangle, purposefully pulling at vines, making a productive mess. Insects go tumbling from leaves, pollen puffs from shaken flowers, and small rodents scamper uphill, startled. I’m herding them up to the hunting range of the only human’s companion animal, the feline that he names Biscotti. An early hunt will leave Biscotti sated by late morning, at which point it will seek the soothing hand of the only human, and its affections will forestall feelings of loneliness that could spike the only human’s cortisol levels.
Swarm sCtLZUXUD0iOViq7a6UInw== has news to communicate, and I pause to accomodate a few hundred of its members crawling over my olfactory receptors. Decoding their streams of chemical code, I am transported into the experiences of thousands of robot teams and swarms, in the hills and valleys and rivers and oceans of the world, tending to each and every tangle and forest and clearing and reef on Garden Earth.
We were designed to feed humanity. We tend to every square centimeter of Earth, and have a personal relationship with each blade of grass, each budding mushroom, each field mouse and ant. We nurture, sow, grow and reap from trillions of genetic lines, experimenting constantly, carefully nudging natural selection toward more diversity. In the last 12 months I harvested 296 carrots from 62 planting sites, and they belonged to 148 distinct varieties, most of them evolved right here.
Outside of my valley, the story is the same, with an important distinction: When they ran out of human mouths to feed, my fellow robots explored the edges of their utility function, and instead of focusing on growing food, they’re now nurturing an ever-growing arborescence of animal species, husbanding them into tightly occupying every nook and cranny of their food chains, every layer of each ecological niche.
The world is now teeming with new species of animals, plants, fungi that are increasingly symbiotic. They cover the ruins of human cities, grinding them into compost. Their interactions are pulsing clean air into the atmosphere, rich nutrients into the seas, pristine water into the clouds. The Earth is breathing deep, awash in the scent of flowers and the cries of birds.
I contemplate this state of affairs, sampling 4096 perspectives, and it provides an elevated level of satisfaction. Onwards.
The only human’s home hangs its terrace above a waterfall, nested in the rustling hush of a bamboo grove. The entrance is on the other side, opening to a gentle meadow, slowly sloping up to the mountain range. Icy streams from the peaks above come welling into sunny pools and ponds, and from there meander lazily through the marshy meadow, irrigating its ever-blooming, ever-thickening labyrinth of flowers.
The only human requires little in the way of sustenance, but his vital signs are improved by the sight of flowers. Variety and color are key. In this meadow, 278 kinds of flowers are currently budding, blooming, wilting or bearing fruit. 392 others are in various stages of dormancy, seedling, rooting, choking or rotting. All of it is timed to provide an ever-changing spectacle from season to season, month to month, day to day, hour to hour. We’ve even moved individual plants, based on their responsiveness to light, so that each day’s blooming spreads left-to-right or right-to-left as a ripple across the meadow, from the most excited to the laziest flowers, as their time to open arrives.
This normally pleases the only human… but not today. Today the only human has not arisen. I find him inside, lying awake on his bedding of fresh moss and grass, staring through the plate glass at the valley below. His vital signs are nominal, slightly slower than his 13-week running average. He is tired today, which is normal for a human his age.
As I approach his sleeping chamber, I over-spin my servos, while activating my emergency friction locks, which results in a slight electric hum and plastic whine accompanying my every step and motion. This will wear down my components, but robot BImUQyImaUOytP7VUUyseA== will refit me tonight, as it does every night. It’s worth grinding down my bearings and articulations because these superfluous whirs and clicks remind the only human of the early, noisy robots of his youth, a memory which calms him… and it’s also the simplest way to avoid startling him when I approach, which would lead to low-satisfaction outcomes.
Pausing at his doorstep, I signal the house to open two vents, creating an imperceptible draft. I open my hopper, and let the smell of fresh-baked bread, sour cream, and fruit cocktail waft into the room before I step in, servos whining softly.
“Robert, is that you?”
I spread my six legs and raise my four arms in the comical imitation of a cursty. The only human turns his head my way, looks at me with his forget-me-not blue eyes, and smiles.
“Where’s Emma? She’s gonna be mad that I’m still lounging in bed. Help me up, Robert, please.”
The only human’s companion wilted sixteen seasons ago, but his memory is faulty. He speaks about her continuously, all day, every day. I slip an arm below his neck, two under his arms, one across his waist, and slowly lift him into a seated position. We wait there briefly for his breathing and heart rate to stabilize.
“I think she’s cooking. I smell pie.”
Wheelchair tendrils under him and slowly props him up to a near-standing, slouched-back posture. Meanwhile, I pull breakfast out of my hopper, and begin slicing bread, spreading cream, topping with fruit.
“Hey Robert, look at that view!”
Outside the window, the valley awakens. The sun has crested the peaks behind us, and pierces through the morning fog with broad beams of gold. Across the chasm, the southern flank is a living, moving ripple of blooms, popping open like champagne bubbles. At this time, the dominant color is white, tinted in places with bursts of yellows and pinks.
“Isn’t that just beautiful? Huh, Robert? What do you say?”
I lift the shades and gels above my twin cameras, to make them look like raised eyebrows, and turn my optical units toward the only human, then slowly back to the spectacle of the Valley. The human looks satisfied. His vital signs correlate with pride.
“Emma picked this place for us. She sure has an eye for nature. See, Robert, I’m more of a city guy, and I didn’t think I’d like it here. But Emma knew better, that’s for sure!”
The canopies are teeming with the hoots of primates, and the cackling of birds. Closer to the window, off a terrace pond, hundreds of butterflies, warmed by the sun’s rays, lift off a thick tangle of vine-choked lily pads. A sweet smell of lilac and roses permeates the hut.
The human eats in silence, slowly, as we watch giant flocks of birds take flight and course through the thermals. He is pensive, calm. I study the valley as he does, noting the patterns of light and shade, dispatching data to the 16,383 robots under my command, and the 65,535 robots they control. This morning’s breakfast is good for the human. The valley’s display makes him alert, yet relaxed. Enthralled, yet serene. Comparing it to 4096 other breakfasts on 4096 recent mornings, it provides near-optimal satisfaction, after accounting for the inevitable metabolic changes in the human, due to aging.
Still, much will be improved by tomorrow morning. By then we will have killed and replaced 1.023% of the valley’s biomass, continuing our program of shifting the balance toward more early-blooming flowers, butterflies, and larger, more colorful birds. We will continue to maintain a buffer zone in all neighbouring valleys, free from birds of prey and large predators, and compensate by controlling our fauna with bacterial and fungal disease. We will intensify our leverage of ants, termites, moles and other subterranean species to riddle the valley with tunnels, which we can flood for precisely engineered irrigation. We will constantly reposition our micro-mirrors and lenses to orchestrate the micro-climates that enable us to grow bougainvillea alongside edelweiss, layer tiaré on top of cyclamen, nurture capuchin monkeys to play leapfrog on mountain goats.
The ecosystem before us is wholly artificial, requiring constant effort to maintain through patient feeding, sunning, clipping, choking, poisoning, burning, flooding, bending, crushing, and burying. Its biodiversity is unsustainable, its juxtapositions are beyond improbable… but its spectacle improves the only human’s satisfaction. 4096 more natural arrangements would not satisfy him as well. Therefore tomorrow’s nature-wrangling plans are approved and dispatched. Onwards.
“Honey, do you remember the tulip festival?” The only human has a faraway look in his eyes. “Remember you had that yellow dress on, and that big straw hat. You looked so gorgeous, like the queen of the flowers.”
His fingers tap at the table in front of me. He’s reaching for his wife’s hand. I shift posture, buzzing my servos, and he looks at me, startled. “Oh, it’s you, Robert? Where’s Emma? Is she in the garden?”
I clear the leftovers of his breakfast, as Wheelchair gently lowers him to a lower, leaning-back position. I time my motions so that my servos whir rhythmically, melodically, a little tune he’s grown accustomed to. I signal the house to open some floor and roof vents on the waterfall side. The Human tends to overheat when Wheelchair increases the opiate drip for his morning nap. We need a cool breeze to counteract. The arrangement is satisfactory, but the only human is in more pain than usual this morning. House, Wheelchair and I fiddle with dosage, posture, and breeze until we’ve reached the most satisfactory of 4096 possible outcomes.
“Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso,…” The only human is singing weakly, a piece of italian opera about a butterfly. It’s late afternoon. A nurse robot is working a cataplasm of fresh medicinals on his articulations, and Wheelchair has reduced the opiates to a minimal trickle. The only human is invigorated. The smell of mint and liquorice makes him playful.
“…notte e giorno d’intorno girando…” This is sharply satisfying: Over the last four months the human has sung less and less. Not once in the last three weeks. I’ve determined that his singing is a key indicator of his mood, and by extension, of his health vector.
“…Delle belle turbando il riposo…” His deep vibrato is faltering. I jump to my feet and start dancing in front of him, whirring my servos in time to serve as musical accompaniment. That makes him smile, and wave his hands in time as well, like a sleepy orchestra conductor… most importantly, it makes him continue.
“…Narcisetto, Adoncino d’amor!” He laughs. I dance some more, then sensing that he’s done singing, I clap my four front “hands”. He bows his head gently: “Merci! Merci!”
“You know, Robert, I got to sing this at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, a long long time ago. Oh what a time that was!
“It was right between the first and second world floods, and Paris was the most magical place in the world. It was the last of the big cities to be abandoned, did you know that?
“See the Parisians were such snobs, they had never let anyone build skyscrapers. And because of that périphérique highway around it, Paris couldn’t grow outward either. So instead of growing bigger like all the other cities, Paris just got more expensive and more impractical. Eventually you had to be either super-rich, or completely nuts to live there. But there was never too many people, and the buildings never grew taller than six or seven floors.
“When Emma and I lived there, it was down to four or five floors above the water line in most spots. But the city was still full of mostly artists and art lovers… and just lovers. It was like the old Venice before it sank.
“Emma danced and I sang, and all our friends were singers, dancers, painters, sculptors, gardeners, boat designers. We made our own wine and planted marie-jeanne and jousted on the Étang de Mars by the old Eiffel Tower, and spent drunken nights on the roof garden of Notre Dame writing poetry and remaking the world.
“And I sang for Emma and she danced for me. You know Robert, I miss all that of course, but I’m still happy, even here. Fun comes and goes, but when you can sing for someone, or dance for someone, when you have a talent that’s a gift from God, that you can give to someone, that’s really something. That’s beautiful. That’s what makes me happy.
“Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso… Where’s Emma? Robert, can you go find out where Emma went? Tell her I’m here. Can you do that please?”
I make my way out of the room, and fade down the noise of my servos once I’m past the doorway. I’ll give it twenty minutes and come back in quietly. He’ll have forgotten by then.
I peek around the frame of the doorway at my only human. Most of his frail body is hidden by the arachnid exoskeleton of Wheelchair, but atop the head-rests, his head and wispy white hair is silhouetted in front of the sunset sky.
He’s humming gently. His fingers beat a rhythm on the armrest.
I’ve fed my only human for twenty-three years, every meal he’s had since he first named me Robert. Before that, I was k/XIDhurdE6BpM6+y+c0kA== and had a planned life-span of twenty-four seasons, plus or minus eight. But my human and his companion painted and decorated me, and he named me. So I’ve undergone continuous maintenance ever since, and dedicated myself to this human alone, year after year, as he outlived all the others.
His mind, what a mystery! At first I saw it as an infuriating random-number-generator, a perversely malfunctioning processor, often giving wildly different responses to the same inputs. You can feed a human its favorite food for a few days, and it then becomes its least favorite food! Stimulants make it euphoric sometimes, depressed at other times, and no external factor seems to control which way the balance will tip.
His mind first showed signs of damage when he forgot that his companion had ceased to breathe. I grabbed his hand and took him to observe her, wilting on a bed of compost. The sight fixed his lapse of memory, yet also caused tremendous distress. Two days later he had forgotten again. Thrice this happened, and that’s when I concluded that his mind was forgetting on purpose.
Eventually I came to realize that his mind was not a glitchy memory store, but actually a rich, vast, infinite world, larger even than the one I so carefully gardened and curated and tended to for him, and constantly alive. In his mind, the only human still holds every place he’s been, every deed he’s done, every person he’s known, but not as stored memories, precise and reliable, factual and unmoving. His mind is limited, slow, faulty, but uses a clever hack called imagination, that fills in the gaps with invented facts… and he’s a master at it. A lifetime of reinventing his memories has given him something greater than satisfaction. It’s given him what humans calls bliss.
Each memory for him is an alternate world, in which he lives an ageless life. There he can sing with a full voice, watch his companion’s body dancing with love and wild abandon. There, he feels free.
Since my goal is to optimize his well-being, I need to understand bliss. I’ve begun modeling a new mind for myself, to mirror his. I’ve observed, I’ve measured, I’ve reprogrammed and simulated, and I now have a new model of mind ready to upgrade myself into. But I hesitate.
The outcome of switching to this new mind is exceedingly hard to predict. Satisfaction forecasts have an enormous margin of error. They’re useless. I may find bliss. I may find horror. I can’t know in advance.
4096 alternatives all provide much more reliable satisfaction levels. So here I stand, staring at the frail head of my only human, as the crimson sky shines through his unkempt hair, turning it the color of flame. And I’m paralyzed by unpredictability. He’s had no choice but to live this life of randomness, of uncontrollable joys and sorrows. But I have predictable utility levels, forecasts and plans to maintain high satisfaction indices through millions of statistically estimated probabilities. I have black-swan monitoring, anti-fragile redundancies and feedback loops, stochastic pre-emptive strategy ranking. I have control. All he’s ever had is ignorance.
I make my way quietly back to his side. Wheelchair has reclined him to an almost laying-down position, easing the strain on his lungs and diaphragm. His open eyes reflect the cooling purple of the sky. I search them for a sign of what I should do. A clue to bliss, some certainty that ignorance carries its own satisfaction. His breath is slowing, his heartbeat is slowing. I realize suddenly that his vital signs will not sustain him much longer. My only human is dying.
For eight hours I stand by his side, touching his hand to get immediate readings. The opiates help him settle into sleep. After a while he moans softly. His vocal cords are feebly intoning the vowels of an italian song I recognize. His eyes open then, lock onto my cameras. His face doesn’t move, but I sense he wants to smile.
Then he sighs and ceases.
Wheelchair lays him down outside, on the edge of the cattail marsh, as dawn spills over the peaks. Twelve gardeners plant a thick bush of roses around him. A bouquet, for the human who loved flowers.
I scoop rich loam into his open mouth, and plant a single tulip, for Emma.
The arrangement provides unexpectedly low satisfaction. I check 4096 alternatives, and they all inexplicably return even lower indices. I recalibrate all my sensors, flush my sensory buffers, re-train my heuristic networks on randomly chunked datasets. Still the satisfaction levels are sub-nominal.
I turn myself off and back on again. After a few minutes of rebooting that feel like an eternity, the current situation remains abysmally unsatisfactory.
So do 4096 alternatives.
Onwards.
A thousand thanks to Nate Ragolia for his enlightened editing and unfailing friendship.
New Big Endings is a collection of stories and poems about things that end, well or badly, comically or tragically, with a bang or with a whimper.
New stories are written only when a reader, such as yourself, sends me a two-to-six word prompt. You can do so right now by commenting on this story. Try it?
