Madam, In Eden, I’m Adam

A story of circularity

After Life: Death

As I sift through an ocean of junk — riding a wave of technological advancement thrown to the wayside, billions of burnt out batteries, hulking quantum computers, nano processors so small they verge on non-existence, self-regenerating plastics, memory coils expanding to infinity — I think of the humans.

It has been 742 years, 18 hours, 17 minutes, 42 seconds, 482 milliseconds and 146 microseconds since the last time they walked the earth, bumping organic elbows with metal, firing their illogical neurons towards fleeting fantasies of which I, C75821, an elder android, would never understand.

At the bottom of a heaping mass, below a ruptured cooling unit spitting water, between the diverging path of its twin streams, I see it. It is the unit I’ve looked for these last eighteen months. A small-scale quantum processor, powerful enough to match the computing capability of a single human brain. I take one step towards it, but another bends down and picks it up.

“Hey!” I say.

He, a smooth featureless android with two glowing visual units, looks up at me.

I hold out my palm to him. “That’s mine.”