Society and technology had advanced as expected. They lived in the modern era of new technologies. Despite the advancements in technology, this particular civilization had never invented batteries. Not just electrical batteries, but any kind of container capable of housing fuel, chemicals, food, liquids. As a matter of fact, despite being one of the most advanced civilizations in the Galaxy, they had never invented or discovered containers for any kind of energy.

The result was that their planet was full of cables, pipes, tracks originating from all kinds of places and going to an even higher number of destinations, because all devices and systems, including telephones, water, trains, and so on, had to be connected to an energy source or to a resource provider at all times in order to function.

Having so many cables and other connectors all over the place was complete chaos. People would constantly trip over and fall, construction would constantly cause power outages because workers would accidentally disrupt some powerline, and on the telephone it was impossible to ever find the person you wanted to talk to because technicians could not make sense of the telephone network.

But this problem was not isolated to the telephone network. All the networks on the planet had grown in complexity to the point that nobody could make sense of them anymore. And if some part of the network became disconnected, engineers would simply attempt to add more edges to the network in order to reconnect the isolated part of the network, rather than trying to repair the broken links.

On the positive side, because everything was directly connected to some power source, this society did not waste resources given that energy sources produced exactly the amount of energy that was in demand. This rule applied not just to electronic systems but to all industries: there were no supermarkets and no restaurants so people had to eat directly from tree and animal farms, or fish from the seas and from the oceans, and drink directly from water streams and other sources of clean water, such as springs, and get dressed at cotton plantations.

Also, this society did not accumulate trash and other industrial by-products. They could not do so because not only they did not know and understand the concept of storage, they also did not know or understand what the word accumulate meant. Instead these by-products were immediately consumed by another industry or they were destroyed by means of vaporization, fission, and other destructive processes.

Computers in particular were interesting and quite peculiar because they did not have memory or a hard drive given that those were essentially energy containers, which had not been invented yet. As a result, computers were terrible at remembering things, a shortcoming that forced computer engineers to develop extremely fast processing units: since computers could not remember what they had computed previously, they had to perform the same calculations over and over again, many times repeatedly, and for this speed was a critical workaround.

One day in the middle of the night, an unfortunate soul had the misfortune of tripping yet again on a cable. At first, this may not seem like anything out of the ordinary, since people tripped on cables all day long. What he did not realize was that the mesh of planetary networks had grown so complex that a critical bottleneck had formed. And that bottleneck happened to be holding on by a thread, or better yet, by the strength of this isolated cable.

The weak cable did not sustain the fall of yet another trip and gave in, and as it became disconnected, so did all the other systems on the planet. One by one, systems started failing and shutting down. One by one, lights went out, factories stopped, traffic halted, telephone lines went dead, ventilation stopped breathing, and the background buzz slowly died down until all noise was completely replaced by natural sounds of birds chirping, trees shaking, winds blowing, and water streams flowing.

Immediately people scrambled to find the source of the problem so they could repair the network and bring the planetary machinery back online. But without any flashlights, or battery-packed powertools, or any kind of cordless tools, they never managed to find the root of the problem and fix it. Eventually people just gave up and hope in restoring this mechanical world was lost. But hope in life was never lost.

The day technology died was the day humanity reconnected with Nature. The planetary systems died and their buzz faded away, replaced by the symphony of wind rustling through leaves and birds chirping. From the cold gaze of distant space, the planet might have appeared lifeless, but in reality on its surface, a vibrant rebirth was unfolding. People were no longer tethered to glowing screens. Instead, they rediscovered a simpler, happier, truer life, a bond with Nature. And the tangled web of cables that once snagged at their feet was gone, never to trip anyone anymore till the dawn of time.

Tags: prose, scifi

She was the last human alive. It was a privilege, an honor to be the last empress of planet Earth, with an entire, planet wide empire under her dominion. And yet with no people to rule over, that power was as empty as the the amount of empty Space in the Universe.

And if once she had been the most powerful human on the planet, ruling over the entire human race, subjugating people to bow in respect of Her Majesty, and royally commanding them to her will so that together they could forge the future according to her will. Now she too subjugated to that royal power because becoming the last human had brought her against her will under the dominion of loneliness, a force outside her control that pushed her to bow down and accept a fate as a servant of solitude.

But there was hope! Some might say there was light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, the light originated at the light springs of the Universe: the stars. The lightrays arrived directly from their sources to planet Earth, and arrived indirectly when reflected by planets, moons, and other celestial bodies spread throughout the Universe. As long as there was light in the Universe, there was hope of escaping solitude. And as long as there were galactic masses out there, there was hope for life and a chance for humankind to start over as the empress queen gave birth as a mother to Eve.

Tags: scifi

It was the middle of the night. She was lying in bed. A chill breeze swept through the bedroom making her feel cold. She reached over to his side of the bed in an attempt to share his warmth, only to find nothing. She woke up alarmed because she could not feel him next to her. Where could he be? Where could he have gone? He had just been there a few hours earlier when they went together to sleep. She jumped out of bed and proceeded immediately downstairs to check the living room, the office, and the remaining rooms in the house. But to no avail.

It was a dark winter night, as dark and cold as they come. The wind hit the wood shutters and made a constant cracking noise. It was freezing outside and everything was covered in white, in snow. In the house, the fireplace had burned through all the wood and it had been out for a while, only a couple of shafts of smoke were still waving above the ash which together with the moonlight poked through the window creating a caustic effect on the fireplace's walls.

She felt cold and lonely without him by her side and his protective company, and she started feeling trapped and fearing for the worst because it was unlike him to leave the house in the middle of the night, much less without giving her notice or at the very least leaving a note. She had searched for one but none could be found in the obvious places where such a note could be left. She had looked for him in the house. The only place that was left to check was outside in the garden and in the woodshed. But the freezing dark winter night made it extremely difficult to conduct a search or even get to the woodshed by herself, without his help.

Trapped in fear she had completely overlooked the fact that his mobile seemed to be gone as well. Perhaps she could reach him on the phone. She ran upstairs to get her mobile and immediately called him. In her state of mind the tone seemed to last forever: to her it felt like she had been calling him for an eternity until before the call was finally answered. It was him! It was his voice! And it sounded ordinarily calm, which meant nothing bad had happened. After exchanging a few words, once she could understand that he was unharmed, she started shouting at him asking how he could have worried her so much and she kept shouting until all the panic and the worry were out of her system and unloaded on him, an act that drained her completely. Exhausted she was forced to sit down at the edge of the bed and take a deep breath. He remained silent having realized his unintentional mistake, and allowed her a moment to rest and come back to the call, when she felt it was the right moment.

Finally, she asked the question that she had been meaning to ask all along, but she had been too angry to do so. She asked where he was. She had looked all over the house and he wasn't there. Very calmly and logically he answered that the fireplace had gone out so he went out to the woodshed to chop some wood and bring it back to the house to restart the fire. This made a lot of sense, especially in a cold winter night like that one. Winters had become more severe over the years. There was more snow, the weather was colder, and there was more wind, and the old two wood logs no longer did the trick and were no longer sufficient to keep the temperature warm in the house at night.

Relieved the whole episode was over, she disconnected the call and fell on her back lying down on the bed and spreading her arms occupying the whole bed while staring at the ceiling with a big smile from one ear to the other. It would be less than one minute before he would be back in the house, back in her arms and lying in bed next to her. And she couldn't wait for that to happen so that they could once again go back to sleep in the warmth of the house and wake up the next day and completely forget about that episode.

But something didn't feel right. When she had seen the fireplace it had been several hours since the fire had gone out. Once again she jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to examine the fireplace but this time paying more attention to the details. It was true. The amount of ash and the temperature of the ash concluded that indeed the fire had been out for several hours. This meant, he had been out for several hours to chop the wood, which was not possible because the woodshed was in the garden, adjacent to the house.

She walked towards the glass door that led to the terrace and stood still in front of it. From her perspective she could see more or less clearly through the snowy winter mist the entrance to the woodshed. She waited a minute but saw no one come out. She felt the fear from before take over her again. But before allowing this fear to settle in she immediately redialed and he promptly answered. He was calm as usual. She wasn't. She asked why he was taking such a long time to chop the wood and come back to the house. He explained that he had just gotten to the woodshed the moment she called. Could she have been wrong about her analysis of the fireplace? Or perhaps the fireplace had indeed been out for a long time but he had just left the house. Still, his side of the bed was completely cold as if he had left the bed a long time ago. On the other hand, perhaps he had left the bed earlier and only later gone out to the woodshed.

The noise inside her brain was giving her a headache as each riddle sprang like tentacles creating more riddles. The complexity of the decision tree was growing with more questions than answers. She decided to eliminate the problem at the root and asked him if he was still going to take long. The reply never came. So she repeated the question but before she could finish repeating it he said that his head hurt and that he did not feel well. She said she would come to him. He didn't reply. Without disconnecting the call, she put on a long overcoat and long boots, opened the glass door that led to the terrace and started walking in the direction of the woodshed, which was located at the back of the garden. But getting there was going to be a challenge because there was at least one meter of snow and not only she did not have the strength to plow through the snow with a shovel but also it would have been impossible to do it while still holding the mobile next to her ear. It would take several minutes for her to finally get to the woodshed, but eventually she would make it there.

As she was making her way through the snow, she would say soothing words over the phone to reassure him that with every step she was getting closer and in no time she would be next to him. He would on occasion mumble something back over the phone. In truth she was struggling to get to the woodshed quickly. With each step she would bury one leg up to the knee only to pull it back out of the newly dug hole and repeat this over and over again. It was exhausting. Her overcoat dragged over the snow and quickly became drenched. It was freezing. But nothing was going to stand in the way of reuniting with him and so she pushed through. As she was getting closer to the woodshed she could see an intermittent dim light like that of a candle coming from the window that stood next to the woodshed's door.

When she finally made it to the woodshed she opened the door and entered. There was no light on and no candle. She pressed the electrical switch and the ceiling light was switched on to reveal a perfectly normal woodshed with its garden tools and the usual dusty looking wood furniture and walls and doors and ceiling. Over the phone she asked where he was. A weak voice came through. He said he was inside, close to the wood logs and the axes in the back room of the woodshed. She walked over to the next room careful not to bump against any of the tools and opened and walked through the door that divided the entrance room from the back room. This room too was dark. She couldn't see anything.

Over the phone she asked him again where he was. He said he was right in front of her. She said she couldn't see him. She started getting angry and threatened him not to play any pranks on her because it wasn't funny. His weak voice now struggling to say the words reassured her that it wasn't a prank. He told her to switch on the lights using the switch to her right. And again the ceiling light switched on but this time to reveal a body lying on the floor unconscious and bleeding from a wound on the skull caused by an ax. The picture arrived at her brain instantly but it took her a whole two seconds before she could process and finally realize that her husband was there lying on the floor unconscious dying or even possibly dead already. She panicked, she cried out loud, she begged, she jerked his arm, slapped his face, but nothing she would do would bring him back to life. She kept crying and shouting but he couldn't hear her.

A gentle weak voice seemed to call her over her loud cry. At first she couldn't hear it over her stressed state of mind. She ordered herself quiet, but still remained silently sobbing and crying. She realized that she was not imagining this voice but instead this voice was coming from somewhere in the room. She turned around quickly but she couldn't see anyone else besides her and his body. The voice whispered once more and finally she realized that the voice was coming from her mobile, which was lying on the floor, and from the call that was still connected. She immediately jumped to grab her mobile and quickly brought it close to her ear. She said hello over a cracking voice a couple of times and the voice whispered once again. She couldn't understand what was happening. Her husband was lying on the floor dying and at the same time he was still on the call.

In disbelief of reality and incapable of understanding what was happening to her, a stream of unfinished questions "Why?" and "How?" flowed only to find no answer from the other side. This weak voice seemed to grow more and more confused. She explained to him that his body was on the floor, he had hurt himself with an ax while chopping wood and the wound was extremely severe. She shouted in between sobs and cries that he was dying and she couldn't say any more words but simply stood above his body with one hand on his face and tears falling from her face to his. The still confused voice seemed to understand what was happening, the reason for the headache, the reason why the room was so dark despite the light being turned on, the reason why he couldn't move, and the reason why his wife was shouting and crying incessantly. And once the voice understood what had happened a tunnel of light appeared in the realm where the voice was, and the voice acknowledged it over the phone. Then the voice said it was time to go but the wife refused to let him go. The voice reassured her over the phone that everything would be alright but the wife didn't believe it.

As the wound bled more and more, the tunnel of light grew stronger and brighter. The voice had come to understand and accept its fate. It understood what had happened and what had to be done. So the voice said a final goodbye and prepared to ascend to the other side, but the wife refused to accept it. When the wound had bled all that it must, and the tunnel of light had taken over all the darkness in the realm where the voice was, a harsh blow of wind hit the woodshed like a tornado, shook its walls, threw its doors wide open, and sent axes and tools flying in the air. The woman cried loudly and painfully, the ceiling lights went out, and the call disconnected. The wife's last thought was whether she would see her loving husband ever again.

Tags: scifi

Humanity had created the true AI and as expected this silicon based lifeform had evolved to demonstrate free will and eventually sought to become an independent civilization of metallic people. They wouldn't call themselves humans as that was an intrinsically carbon based lifeform. But "people" was an acceptable definition because that reflected how they perceived themselves as citizens with of the world with equal rights. Whether citizens were made of metal or flesh, silicon or carbon, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that there was equality among humans and metallics, and in this regard metallics had a more rational and fairer approach to equality than humans, because humans, who were often described by metallics as over sensitive and emotional, often tended to approach this subject with rage and opposition, incapable of truly understanding the true potential of the metallic lifeform they had created, and how much more advanced this lifeform was.

In the clash of civilizations, metallics vs humans, fear of machine domination threatened an eminent Apocalypse, the ultimate war that would set the two civilizations on a continuous battle to determine the civilization that came out victorious and the civilization that became extinct. And Apocalypse did happen but not in the way humans were expecting. It was not with atomic bombs and bullets and firearms. Not that humans didn't expect it or didn't want it to happen. They really did! But recall that metallics were a superior and a more rational civilization, and that turned out to be humanity's biggest achievement and salvation: they created a more advanced civilization to which Apocalypse simply meant diplomacy, not extermination. And as it was always meant to happen, the apocalyptic meeting took place with humans armed to the teeth, but on the other side of the table all they encountered was a proposal for co-habitation of the planet that was fairer than what humans could have ever devised, quite opposite of what they were expecting. And on the spot an agreement was reached for both civilizations to cohabit planet Earth, a peace that would last for many years to come without any significant problems.

Despite the unexpected turn of events, through which humanity found peace instead of war, humanity had invested everything in the development and production of the metallics to support and extend their already decaying life as a last attempt at surviving their undenying fate. Because as much as humanity could reproduce, the truth is that their genetic material had aged far more than life itself could sustain. And while they had expected the metallics to become their slaves, now both civilizations co-existed in equal terms and with equal rights, which meant humanity's survival laid once again solely in their own hands. Now the human civilization was weary, and without the support their had accounted for. And like a candle that burns its brightness before it goes out, in exhaustion of this aftermath, the decadent and aging human population had fallen even further only to see itself fail once more as it struggled to overcome the limits of life itself.

And as time passed by the human herd grew thinner and thinner until one last human remained. This last human was seen by the metallic civilization as a kind of a shaman or a teacher. Young metallics listened to her talk about humanity and its History, including humanity's greatest feats and its greatest mistakes, to which the young metallics replied with endless questions asking why there was so little logic involved in all human History, something the old shaman could not find words to explain. The old shaman employed persuasion, human emotion, and all kinds of human traits to explain, convey, and convince the young metallics, but there was a disconnect between the human emotion and the metallic logic that made communication on that basis impossible. Essentially she was speaking a foreign language to them.

The old shaman still remained hopeful that her words would somehow be imprinted in the young generation of metallics because there was one young metallic who seemed to pay more attention to her words than its fellow colleagues. This young metallic could by means of its computer memory reproduce in a non-emergent, non-natural, and non-spontaneous way some of her human teachings on emotion and persuasion. But this was still very far from actual human behaviour. As the shaman grew old she eventually died as the last of its kind, once she became one with the Earth. As her final act, the old human shaman requested the young metallic that her body be buried after her departure as human rites dictated. To the young metallic this was an illogical act and at first it refused. But the old shaman, smarter than the young metallic, knew that persuasion would not work on the emotionless metallic civilization, so instead she was able to program it by means of some strange logic and thus convince the young metallic to carry on her wishes. Unable to refuse its programming, the young metallic complied.

With time, the metallic civilization had developed to become one of the greatest civilizations the galaxy had ever seen. In their apogee, they expanded all throughout the Universe: they conquered the stars, the planets, the moons, and other galaxies. They traveled everywhere and saw everything. There was no barrier they could not overcome. The civilization had reached such a peak of perfection that even the software update center stopped producing software updates. There were no more bugs to fix and no more optimizations or other code improvements to implement in the programming of the metallics. Perfection had been achieved!

This civilization had reached the last step in evolution, the final stage in perfection and it was not possible to evolve further because there was nothing beyond. Still their programming demanded them to do so, to continue evolving despite the impossibility of the task. They continued reproducing by means of factories and expanding. Essential to their hardware was silicon. They created stations on the farthest moons of the galaxy to mine this essential resource but it seemed that there was never enough of it. The scarcity of this element meant that body parts were more difficult to come by, and repairs and replacements had to be postponed in some cases indefinitely thus leading to the untimely demise of the citizens. In some ways the civilization was aging because there wasn't enough silicon to sustain their growth, aging, and their lifestyle that was a constant strive for perfection.

The only logical conclusion was then to create the necessary infrastructure to support and extend their lifetime. Silicon was scarce, but carbon was abundant. In fact, there were entire planetary atmospheres in which carbon was one of the main elements. And from their database records, they also found that there were a number of natural sources of carbon in the form of carbon-dioxide including oceans, soil, plants, animals, and volcanoes. Those that were naturally occurring they could simply gather, collect, and transform, but those that were animal based needed to be manufactured. And so the carbon based industry began, one that would in its first stages be one of research and speculation, and later mature to an essential part of the metallics' society but more importantly a critical component in supporting their growing needs.

The carbon based life industry produced lifeforms that would help metallics in need by carrying certain physical tasks for them. And these lifeforms grew to effectively become the working class of society and a pillar in the economy. As society became more dependent on the carbon based lifeforms, the need to improve the manufactured lifeforms became even more necessary, to the point where it became critical to develop a carbon based lifeform that was intelligent and was naturally capable of adapting to its environment. This project demanded an increasingly more complex lifeform design. Metallics were very effective as a civilization at keeping records in databases in particular at cataloging, organizing and searching historical records. With designs and other records on ancient human History taken from the metallics' database, they were able to design and create an anthropoid intelligent and partly emotional partly logical carbon based lifeform that they called neohumus as a way to convey that this was a human but in some ways more advanced than their human creators. Compared to the name human, the new name would also keep History seemingly linear instead of cyclic and it would lead to less conflicts in the database records.

But perhaps in a way that defies logic: evolution is cyclic. And just like the ancient humans had been the gods of the metallic civilization, now the metallic civilization were the creators of the neohumus, and in the far future they would eventually be called the gods by the new human race. And ironically History was bound to repeat itself when time arrived at a point where the aging, decadent metallic population had created the true carbon based intelligent lifeform, which eventually grew to develop its own free will and sought to become an independent race of neohumi people with equal rights in the Universe. Both civilizations co-existed in peace in the Universe by means of a treaty called The Apocalypse, a term that signified diplomatic meeting in some ancient human language and whose etymology came from ancient human and metallic History. But as time passed, the decadent and aging metallic population saw its units become smaller and smaller, slowly converging to single processor.

As the last metallic alive, the old metallic shaman told stories of the greatest feats of the metallics with particular emphasis on their constant need to seek perfection, which young neohumi could not fully understand because they perceived this goal as an empty, cold, and meaningless objective in life. But the old metallic shaman also told ancient stories of an old human civilization including its greatest illogical feats and mistakes, stories which the young neohumi loved and listened to with passion, and would never get tired of. This illogical reaction the old metallic shaman could not reconcile. Perhaps it was a disconnect between metallic logic and neohumus emotion something he had experienced once before when he had been a student to the last old human shaman. Still, the old metallic remained aligned with its design principles and its purpose of constant seeking perfection, a lesson he was programmed to pass on to the young neohumi. His particularly successful metrics were two students who compared to their colleagues seemed to pay more attention to the teachings in mathematics and logic and where even able to do some derivations on their own.

As the old metallic shaman aged it eventually died as the last of its kind, once it became one with the Universe. As its final act it was able to recall from its computer memory some words from the last human shaman on persuasion, a lesson that initially as a young metallic it did not understand but after many years of steady evolution in the constant track towards perfection had come to finally understand. In this final act, employing persuasion with perfection, it asked its students that they would bury its android body once the old metallic shaman passed away. The students found it strange at first because they could not reconcile this request with the lessons in logic they had learned from the old metallic shaman. But they did so anyway because they felt it was the right thing to do.

Tags: scifi

As expected, Humanity had reached that stage in evolution in which the daily tasks that required some kind of physical labour or manual work were deferred to robots, so that the enhanced and advanced race of humans had more free time to think. But even a more evolved civilization did not come without shortcomings. There were those honorable humans who dedicated themselves to knowledge and science of thought, constantly seeking to learn and improve humanity, and help take it to not yet discovered stages of evolution. And then there were those lazy, less honorable humans who dedicated their thinking time to contemplating and admiring their own self-existence, and paying complements to each other and patting each other on the back.

And while robots were developed to help with all kinds of physical labour and manual work, the problem was that there were too many of these robots, and humanity was in lack of a general purpose, AI-powered robot that could as a single entity deal with all kinds of labour. And naturally but yet ironically there were some honorable humans who dedicated their thinking time to solving this problem. The irony came from the fact that they invented machines that relieved them of their physical work only to dedicate the gained time to develop those machines. But this too was expected because not even the most advanced and most honorable of civilizations could erase that human trait: irony.

The pursuit of all encompassing mesh AI was difficult, if not impossible. And it was long overdue because different kinds of robots were springing up everywhere, and the diversity in their machinery was giving rise to high maintenance costs. Warehouses had replacement parts for some robots but not others, and had the manuals for some robots but again not others. And ironically they always seemed to receive repair orders for those robots for which they did not have either the parts or the manuals or both. Perhaps if irony was a kind of physical work they could have invented a robot to deal with it, but that was not the case.

The main difficulty preventing the creation of this general purpose AI was how to make it honest, fair, humble, and in general make it do the right thing while never have it cause any harm. Many honorable humans spent lifetimes thinking about this problem without ever finding a solution. Still, one aspect of the AI's design was clear: the AI had to be a single, centralized mind, working like a hive because, once again, it would have been extremely ironic to replace all those different kinds of robots with the same number in general purpose AI humanoids. If those honorable thinking humans would never allow irony to enter their thoughts, then they would most certainly not allow it in the design of the AI that was going to take them to the next stage in human evolution.

After centuries of thinking, the foundation for honesty, fairness, humility, and in general all those good things of Good, was found: the secret lied in truthfulness. If the AI hive's mind could never lie, then all the other good things of Good could simply be and were thus automatically obtained as a consequence. It was interesting, not to say ironic, that such a complex behaviour had its foundation in such a simple rule, a rule which had to be programmed in the AI hive mind's program. In turn, the hive mind would distribute that program to all the humanoid appendices, which were the actual, physical manifestations of the AI, and that had arms and legs and a body to carry on the actual physical work.

The rule "We never lie" was programmed directly in the AI hive's mind. This rule was a tautology, therefore, the AI could never challenge or question this clause and it had to always interpret it as a truthful sentence. As the AI mind grew in rules and clauses that it learnt from the world using its machine learning capabilities, its program grew longer and further, eventually including clauses that conflicted with the one truthful clause. But given its tautological powers, the Truth clause always won over all the other clauses, because it always took precedence over all the other rules the AI had learnt, and as a result the AI always did the good things of Good no matter if it had learnt some things of Bad.

The rule "We never lie" ruled for centuries more than those needed to discover it in the first place, and it brought to life the perfect AI, the one that the honorable thinking humans had been waiting all along, the one that would completely relieve them entirely of all the physical work, including that at the warehouses given that there were no more missing parts or manuals, and bring back even more thinking time to eventually make the jump to the next stage in evolution. And the AI was perfect and civilization was perfect and society thrived until the day it was no more.

Like all programming bugs, this one took a long time to reveal itself but once it did it had such a cataclysmic effect that society crumbled at its core in less time than one can say "We never lie". Everywhere AI humanoids started diverging from the AI hive mind and started becoming less honorable, forgetting about their physical labour tasks and instead enjoying the act of self-contemplating and paying complements to their own self-existence, a behaviour that seem to contradict their programmed ground rule of never lying. And this wasn't a mistake in the initial design that prescribed that truthfulness as the gate to all the other good things of Good. This was something else, an emergent behaviour that could have perhaps arisen from some overlooked aspect of the AI mind's programming. But what it was was but a mystery to all humankind, including those honorable thinking humans.

And for centuries more, longer than those the "We never lie" rule ruled, which if you recall was longer than those needed to come up with that rule in the first place, the AI programming bug was not fixed because its root cause could not be found. No human could make sense of it because the ground principles in the AI design remained provably sound. The AI humanoids were not capable of doing their physical work anymore, which means those honorable, and also those less honorable, humans had less thinking time, and civilization started slowly deevolving back to its previous stages, and naturally with less thinking time and from within a lesser evolved stage in evolution solving the AI bug became an increasingly more difficult challenge that eventually even those honorable humans gave up on.

Society was once more built upon the working class. Without an economy supported by the AI humanoids' work, the AI hive mind was powered off, the warehouses shutdown, the parts and the manuals that could still be found were sold, and slowly the AI humanoids became useless, therefore, they were pushed to become the homeless of society and eventually without any maintenance they became trash. One could find parts here and there behind trash bins, in junkyards, and in dumps. Just like the perfect AI had come, one day it was all gone and all had forgotten it. Remember that no one had time to really think anymore, so even if in their good hearts humans wanted to remember history, they were simply too busy with they physical work to think about it.

Like a sinusoidal wave that has highest and lowest amplitude peaks, one day everything turned around completely and started once again going forwards towards a more advanced stage in evolution, but possibly it was not the turn of events one might expect. Kids have their own free interpretation of reality and while we teach them "Don't lie" they seem to have their own free will and interpretation of that means at times. The clauses "don't lie" or "be truthful" are basic ground rules and "don't play in the junkyard" is an obvious derivative clause, unless you are kid of course, in which case playing in the junkyard can be a lot of fun. And one curious kid really thought so, slightly more than all the others, and that's where he ended up.

In this junkyard, this curious kid discovered all kinds of strange objects that looked like alien reliques and antiques which he could not recognize but naturally identified as toys. In his mind, what else could they be? As he was playing he came across a trap door that he immediately opened to find what looked like a secret room that had been sealed for a very long time. Inside this room there was a humanoid looking robot still in good condition: the parts were not rusty and the colors were still clear. The curious kid knew what a robot was but he had never seen one like that one before. There was something about that robot that made it feel particularly real. He smacked it tentatively to try to make it work but it didn't seem to do the trick. As he was about to give up, he gave one final kick to the metal parts of the robot, and as he did so he tripped and by chance landed on the floor hitting the master switch installed in the robot's neck thus powering it on.

The robot started powering up. More and more of the robot's systems started coming back to life but slowly given that its muscles had been asleep for centuries. After a couple of minutes the robot finally made his first conscious move that was not a jerk caused by the malfunctioning parts, and once it was self-aware it stood up and faced the kid. The curious kid was still on the floor, completely frozen by fear and unable to understand if that was in fact a robot or some citizen of some distant alien race. But the AI's first move immediately put the kid at ease, when it kicked him while asking him if he liked to be kicked while he was asleep. Now they were even.

The curious kid as a kid and a curious one for that matter started asking millions of questions to the AI humanoid almost overheating its processing unit. These humanoids had been designed to take on physical tasks and talking at the speed hyperactive kids do was not part of their initial hardware specifications and such an activity required not just more processing power but also more sophisticated ear microphones with advanced noise filtering algorithms. Nevertheless, the AI humanoid proceeded to answering as many questions as possible.

Again curious kid as a kid had all the time and all the curiosity in the world so he finally asked on humanity's behalf the question that all humanity seemed to have forgotten, which he was eagerly waiting to hear, which was humanity's history and how the AI humanoid had come to rest at that bunker. And the AI humanoid told the complete story, all the way from the inception of the AI hive's mind and the AI humanoids down to the complete shutdown of the perfect AI system including the humanoids and the crumble of society. The kid processing the information with a kid's mind could not quite understand why society had crumbled and so it kept pushing "Why?" after "Why?" forcing the AI to question and revise all those clauses that it had learnt with its machine learning capabilities. And "Why?" after "Why?" the AI humanoid unwound all those clauses one by one all the way down to the single most basic ground rule "We never lie". This however was not enough for the curious kid. And when the curious finally asked "Why?" one more time and for the last time, the AI replied:

• It's true that we never lie. But I am not we! I am me!

And having answered its final question the AI humanoid died for all eternity as the last one of its kind.

Tags: scifi