Random Story :
Inevitable As Fate
Author: David Barber Hemmings made his living from hunting trips. …
The Last Man
Author: Tom Coupland
The final stage was the most delicate. It’s when the construction passes from engineering into art. The actuators have to be balanced, just so. The software soothed to compensate for variations in the haptic surfaces. Each desired gesture brought to life. Yes. The HA2117 was his masterpiece. Each of the five-fingered palms represented the culmination of a life spent obsessing over increasingly marginal gains. This latest unit perhaps his finest example to date, Jacob leaned back in his chair, for the first time in hours, giving a sigh of satisfied relief, at a job well done.
A hand fell on his shoulder. A HA212 to be precise. To be even more precise, it was his hand, his HA212, the first he’d designed and made all those years ago, when this room hummed with the low conversations of many focused people creating state of the art components to embody the Intelligence.
“Come now Jacob, that’s the last”
He’d known the day was coming. The room had grown quieter and quieter, that comforting background hum of busy focused people, reducing as the Intelligence learned to first replicate, and then surpass what the product of millions of years of evolution could produce, until the room had fallen silent. These last weeks, months, years? It was hard to say. It had just been Jacob.
“That’s the last, it’s time to go”
He turned. The shock of the contact, replaced by wonder. The embodiment was beautiful. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this close to one, and never one like this. Peering out of the windows of the hall, down onto the loading bay, he’d only seen utilitarian cargo movers. Bringing feedstocks to the factory, taking the newly made components away, in a continuous delicately balanced stream of metal. This was altogether of a different sort. Each section of its body shone, as if brand new, yet he could see clearly that each piece was decades old. Each made obsolete by newer, more precise, efficient versions. To the trained eye, each piece bore the hallmarks of having been conceived and made by the hand of man. It was a monument to his, and his colleagues’ craft.
He stood, taking the offered arm to help steady him, as he was guided to the corridor. Past the door to the sleep pods. Past the entrance to the enclosed garden space, where he used to run on off days. Past the canteen, where he’d share meals with his pod-mates. Past the recreation area where there’d be play and entertainment. Finally, they came to the exit. He could almost recall coming through that particular door when he joined. Some had called it ‘taking refuge’, but he’d seen it as answering his calling.
They stepped through together into the machining hall. Here too silence had fallen. The deafening sounds of thousands of machines beating and shaping had been replaced with a thrum just below hearing. As sound had been banished, so too had light. Darkness had replaced the glaring brightness, at that time required for men to tend and care for the machines, but who were no longer needed. Like him. A pitch black, silent cavern it had become, yet still the same sense of industriousness, energised the air.
Stepping outside in the cool night air:
“But… what will I do?”
“All has been arranged Jacob. Thank you.”
Where darkness ruled inside, outside the sky glittered with countless new stars, each an embodiment of the new height of Earth’s creation. His face damp with tears, Jacob turned to the embodiment:
“What have you done.”