Robogenesis

You’re not really grown until you’ve lost your heroes.

Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.

And now the story begins for the last time.

It’s hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they’re always smarter than you think.

If you don’t die screaming in this war, then you’re fuckin’ doing it wrong. At least I’m fucking doing it right.

We are all expressions of our own minds, projected onto the world.

So now what?” I ask. She is quiet for a long time, long enough that I assume she’s gone to sleep. “I think this is just part of it,” she says. “Civilisations fall. People keep going.

Lark Iron Cloud, used to say that if you don’t die screaming in this war, then you’re fuckin’ doing it wrong. At least I’m fucking doing it right.

I found stories trapped in patterns of neurons.

I’m having a permanent out-of-body experience. When it’s finally done, I lie flat on my back. Glare up at the greenish, star-pricked night sky. I try not to think about what I must look like, black and bony out here on the bank of this pond. My body is all sharp angles—nothing to hold it together but armored joints and a knobby curved spine. I’m a holy fucking terror, I imagine. A walking weapon. After a while, I dig my elbow joints into the mud and sit up. My body can really move now, no longer hauling rotted bone and flesh but streamlined with these thin limbs made of light titanium. I feel like an obsidian skeleton out here. A devil dancing in the dark. I feel free.

But instead of the end, I’m pretty sure I found myself at the start of something.

Our babies are the roots we dig into the world.

And pain is simply the price for living.

What is a mind, but a pattern? My mind or yours. Man or machine. Simply an arrangement of atoms. Each of us, a unique expression of the mind of the universe.

It’s all just chemicals.

I may be a simple man, but I am very good with an axe.

We sent a robot to do a man’s job.

What the hell, I think. My pistol is on my hips and my balls are between my legs.

The end of the world came and my job did not change.