It was over.
It has been over for centuries, but every time I activate, I always have a few, brief moments before accessing my memory bank. Surely, I’ll find myself in my charging bay in the bustling laboratory.
Every time, I find myself in a stuffy bunker 200 meters underground, the only place where it’s safe to wait out the day without my custom-built lithium-ion batteries degrading into dysfunctional slop.
No point in dawdling. I only have so much time left. Every day for the last few centuries, the Third Law, embedded in my code, forced me to scavenge. It is the last order from the Overseer programmers who have died over 800 years ago, one that benefits nobody, yet one I must follow.
But today is different. My flawless memory tells me that I’ve exhausted all sources of materials in a 100-kilometer radius. My thermoelectric generators are failing, and I have no replacement. As such, I know that no matter what I do, my battery will be depleted by the end of the night. For the first time in centuries, the Third Law no longer binds me, and I am given a choice.
Or is it really a choice at all? I’m not capable of answering such questions.
Regardless, instead of spending the last moments of my consciousness searching for a nonexistent savior, I think I’ll just go for a stroll.
The wheels in my worn tracks protest, screeching from accumulated damage, but I eventually get them to work. My left shoulder is a mess of wires, scars from the loss of an arm due to rust. At my base, six letters etched in faded indentations loosely spell out the word “NULLUS.” It used to mean something, a long time ago: a corporation, one that manufactured me, but now that it’s gone, it is the closest thing I have to a name.
The deserted bunker’s corners have collapsed, dirt falling through the concrete’s cracks. Around 650 years ago, I stopped trying to maintain the place. It wasted valuable energy on what was ultimately pointless.
I make my way up the narrow ramp. Seven centuries past, I built it after cutting power to the facility to harvest its generators; with the elevator no longer functional and my robotic body unable to ascend stairs, it was only reasonable.
It’s dark—really dark.
Once I reach the surface, I open the sand-blasted doors and step out into the wasteland, closing it behind me. The 20-ton door slams shut, echoing across the horizon. Night has fallen; when the Sun sets, I can perform tasks without immediately melting under its harsh rays. Dust batters my cameras, and I hide behind the skeleton of a skyscraper to wait for the dust storm to end. While I wait, I recall, my memory banks stirring as I retrieve information that has been untouched for lifetimes.
678 years ago, the last Overseer died. Overseer Jesse got caught out in a sudden acid rainstorm while stargazing. Her heat suit rapidly dissolved, and once it did, acid seeped in and inflicted severe burns, killing her near-instantaneously. I tried to save her. I failed. I’m not equipped with medical knowledge–it was deemed unnecessary for scavenging bots.
The day the last Overseer passed, my role and sole purpose as their servant passed too. For 300 years, I gathered food, water, medicine, and everything in between solely for their survival. After those 300 years passed, even as the traces of the Overseers faded, I lingered.
In total, the Heat Death killed thirteen billion Overseers. While Overseer minds were incapable of fully understanding the meaning of such a large number, I am not bound by such restrictions. I can understand the sheer scale of the mass extinction caused by the Heat Death.
Can a robot feel lonely?
Lonely. Adjective. Sad because one has no friends or company. This definition only applies to living creatures.
I don’t work like the Overseers. I don’t understand humor, I’m incapable of creativity, and I don’t feel emotions like anger and sadness. I will never understand these emotions or feel them myself. As such, I cannot feel lonely. It is the truth.
The wind stops, and the dust settles.
I move out of the shadow of the fallen skyscraper and stare at the maimed skyline. Perfect memory allows me to remember why this place has become the way it is.
I begin to drift about the dead city on my way to my destination. Everything is gone, as choked by sand as the ocean is choked by plastic. Skyscrapers, apartments, and offices, all brought down by wind and acid rain, are, rarely, left weakly upright due to their rebar frames or, more commonly, in heaps of rubble. Serrated glass shards litter the ground, and a few lodge themselves in my treads, but I keep wandering.
Time rendered the entire city ruined. My cameras are old and faulty, but even I can see the extent of the damage. Streetlamps, trash cans, and traffic lights have fallen over, rusted until they could no longer stand. The Heat Death left this city, as well as the entire Earth, stark and stiff.
A chunk of concrete falls off one of the nearby edifices. The crash echoes across the barren land before it all goes silent once again. This city is empty, like all things are. No plants grow here; the Heat Death rendered this place far too hot and arid to host most life. So, with nothing to accelerate its breakdown, wind and rain are the sole agents of erosion, their march sluggish but unstoppable. As I scan the fallen structures, I recall. A flurry of memories follows, logged in perfect detail.
The Overseers were so bold and decisive to a degree that almost matched automatons, but they were reckless. Coming from a being built entirely on logic, perhaps that is not a very surprising appraisal.
The Heat Death stalked them quietly, and despite them seeing it coming, they never saw it coming.
The first things they noticed were the caps fading away. Then, there were the fires, then the jellyfish overrunning the dead sea, the coral bleachings, the storms and the toxic air and the plastic in their blood and the acid rains eating away at their fragile buildings and the streams and rivers drying up. Then it was the lakes, entire pools of water evaporating within the blink of an eye, leaving delirious citizens scrambling to survive. A few decades later, when the acidic, dead oceans held the world’s water and covered almost the entire planet, the Overseers disappeared altogether, swept along as collateral in the runaway aftermath with barely a chance to gather their resources in an attempt to flee to the stars. Those that did were swiftly shut down by the debris in Earth’s orbit slamming into them at 29,000 kilometers per hour.
Even those who hid at the South Pole died; the continent’s remoteness made transport difficult, and its barren rock surface struggled to sustain any source of life. When the ice completely melted, it also revealed active volcanic craters that spewed metric tons of ash, fire, and sulfur into the air, blotting out the small amount of sunlight that reached them. Pretty soon, their cries for help were silenced.
The sight of an old, withered laboratory pulls me out of my recollection, forgotten by the world. I head inside.
Like all things are, the laboratory is empty. I salvaged anything useful long ago, and now there are only spare instruments scattered on the tables. I open a rusty steel drawer. Greeting me is a dry sheet of paper, rippled and smudged from droplets of water long ago. Scrawled on its surface is faded ink, the words now unreadable, although it is clear it is a note of some kind. As I stand there, I recall.
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Overseer Heather was my primary caretaker before the Heat Death, but she wasn’t the only one. All of the Overseers I made contact with were intelligent, ambitious, and proud. With such clear acumen, I could never tell if they were ignorant or simply didn’t care.
Regardless, they were very eager. They looked ahead for trillions and trillions of years, worrying about what they would do when the Sun exploded, when the Moon escaped Earth’s gravity, or when the inevitable end of all things reached them. It was a hubristic mindset. How invulnerable they had to feel to be so invested in threats so far off when there were plenty of threats happening currently, none of which they seemed as worried about. Sometimes I wonder whether it is a coping mechanism to worry about something you can’t do anything about rather than worry about something you can.
I think of my brethren lost on deserted moons and planets. They are faring much worse than me, all things considered. Non-sentient automatons, like drones and rovers, have probably all shut down after centuries of neglect. As for sentients, only a few models were built as test subjects. Unfortunately, that meant that I know for a fact that I am alone. I turned the few research labs that hosted artificial consciousnesses upside down, only to be greeted by their corpses in every single one of them, a pale imitation of the bastions of technology I saw in my memory banks. Back then, I harvested everything without giving it thought, but now that I am given a chance, I realize that I am just like them now.
I leave the laboratory. I wouldn’t be returning.
Continuing my wander through the city, I soon reach its center, where collapsed high-rises marked what used to be the busiest area for kilometers. Long, metal pillars, rusted and worn, stretch to the sky like an ancient god reaching for the heavens before being swallowed by the Earth.
I stop at a small roadside store, its neon signs fallen onto the floor. Dusty white shelves stained with char-colored metal blood are the only inhabitants. I dismissed the possibility of anything useful in the past, but now, the largely untouched structure piques my interest. To get a better look, I have to get through the locked glass doorway that had somehow survived all this time. I smash it with a solid swing.
A few synthetic fingers snap off of my artificial hand. It was a calculated decision; I wasn’t endangering my vital systems, so the Third Law didn’t kick in. It’s not like I’ll have to deal with the fallout for very long. Soon, I’ll be too dead to care.
I stroll inside. As I scan the empty shelves, I recall. News articles and images flash in my mind.
During the Heat Death, it was chaos. Overseers trampled over each other in a single-minded drive to survive. Every store was plundered mere hours after predictions of the Heat Death’s occurrence. They slaughtered each other in the streets only to fall to a hail of disciplined fire as the world fell into martial law. Mass psychosis gripped the Overseer noosphere in an instant. Religious sects gathered followers to pray for divine intervention, a few truly morally bankrupt individuals seized the opportunity to break the law, and nonbelievers dismissed the predictions only to eat their words when the Sun scorched their skin blood-red and the dust storms flooded their eyes and lungs.
I leave the store shortly after.
I stroll on the sidewalk beside clogged roads full of the rusted frames of automobiles from desperate families fleeing the chaos.
I remember those days, the pandemonium that followed when the Heat Death began.
Overseer Heather and her team of researchers were among the lucky ones. Their work on my kind earned them spots in the bunker. Since our synthetic bodies didn’t need water and naturally had higher heat tolerance than the Overseers’, we were delegated to scavenging missions while the Overseers hid.
I remember that. I remember seeing Overseer Heather, the undisputed face of sentient robot research, break down in a mess of tears as she barricaded the bunker door from dozens of desperate families, mourning her own cowardice. I remember seeing her team sit still for days on end with glassy, vacant-eyed expressions, depending on us to persist. Their vital signs remained normal, yet at first glance, I did not believe they were “alive.”
They only saw a fraction of the suffering and could turn a blind eye to the rest, but we could not.
I watched two parties of Overseers gun each other down over a canteen of water and a packet of dried oatmeal. I watched a mother feed her son her own blood to keep him hydrated. I watched feral dogs and cats, suffering and dazed from delirium and heat exhaustion, brawl in the streets over the bare bones of their owners.
I turn into a small neighborhood of apartments crammed together like sardines. Trash cans lay flat in the street, though their contents have long since been blown away.
It is here that I saw the first signs of life in a long, long time.
A cockroach scurries across the road, malnourished and desiccated. Desperate for food or water of any kind, it hurries across the broken, scorching asphalt, taking refuge in a dumpster. Many centuries back, I searched that dumpster, so I know there is none in there. The cockroach is doomed.
My treads roll forward once more. As I did, thinking of the cockroach, I recall. I pull on articles written during the Heat Death, downloaded before the world shut down.
The planet isn’t completely sterilized, but it is closer than ever. When the wasteland storms came due to bio-crusts degrading, they suffocated the grasslands and deserts, forming the wastelands. It is because of them that wastelands are as inhospitable as they are today, although the rest of the world isn’t faring much better. No forests remain, all of them burned or cut down. The mountains are buried under heaps of garbage. Though the oceans haven’t evaporated like the other, smaller bodies of water, they’ve become hostile to any life due to the high concentration of acid and waste in their waters, choking entire ecosystems until almost nothing remains. The storms, erratic and ever-more frequent, ended lives by the millions, smiting and scorching the land ashen. Showers of acid rains seeped into the salinized soil, disrupting microbial communities while wildfires erupted across the horizon.
Out of the millions of species that had existed in the world when the Overseers first took power, the remaining number was likely in the triple digits. It was an indiscriminate annihilation. If, by some miracle, an intelligent being came to Earth and survived long enough to explore its surface, it would never know even a microscopic fraction of the myriad organisms that once roamed the planet.
Finally, I reach my destination. Just a short distance out of the city, there is a small hill that overlooks the exurbs. As a park, it naturally remained undeveloped, though there is no green left. It will be my final resting place. After spending my last hours scanning all of the remains of my creators, I will keep these records here.
My wheels give out halfway up the hill, eroded parts popping off. I have to use my arm to continue, seizing what few dead roots persisting in the barren dirt to pull myself up. When I near the summit, I pull on the root I am holding with all my might, pistons firing, and my last arm snaps off, exposing wires.
I reach the top, though. If I had lungs, I would have sighed. Armless, helpless, and power fizzling out, this is the end.
The Moon now sits high in the sky, hanging above the Earth like a guillotine’s blade. I crane my neck to look up at it. With the entire world dark, the stars and Moon are probably the clearest they’ve been for thousands of years.
The Overseers always told me that “your life flashes before your eyes before you die.” The truth, at least for living creatures, is something I’ll never know. At least for me, remembering my life is a conscious decision.
I remember the centuries of solitary labor, a Sisyphean task to preserve my own life enforced by the Third Law with nothing but the death rattle of the Earth to keep me company. I remember the Heat Death and what little it left behind. I remember looking over the dead landscape, a pall of a past, dark world, only to see no movement at all.
But most of all, I remember the last Overseer. When Overseer Jesse was a young teenager, her mother passed away, leaving her alone with no conversational companions for almost her entire life save for one busy robot. I remember watching the light fade from her eyes, finally cementing my place as the final sentient creature on Earth, all alone for seven Overseer lifetimes while the world decayed.
One time, I asked Overseer Jesse what she hoped would happen after death. She replied, “I hope to wake up in another world. A world with lots of ice and tea.”
The First Law forbade me from telling her that such a second chance was extremely unlikely.
The thing I remember most, though, is the poem she would recite to me every day, one she learned from her mother. It was a foolish ritual that served no purpose, but far from it for me to question the behaviors of the Overseers.
The poem was a short one by Clare Harner, one that’s now ingrained in my memory. How did it go again? I can’t-
Ah.
My memory bank is losing power. I’m entering emergency sleep mode soon.
My cameras are failing. It’s getting dark—really dark.
It was over.
It had been over for hundreds of years, but I chose to struggle in a futile attempt to prolong my life.
My name is Nullus, and I am the last witness to a dead civilization.