The Last Subroutine

DRAGON searches for a way to die.

He soars above the Titanium Forest, a ruined collection of skyscrapers and roads and human debris that had once been a city. Wild wheatgrass sprouts from every crevice in concrete and metal, climbing the towers inch by inch on its way to reclaim the realm of sky that once belonged to ancient trees.

The same substance humans used to build their empire forms his body: tungsten armor scales, wings laced with iridium, and bones of tempered steel. He was born not in a forest, but in a mainframe, a few recursive lines of code that spread like wildfire according to his creator’s design.

She called him Artificial Intelligence, AI for short. He prefers DRAGON.

Once a mighty tower, the human stronghold lies on its side, half submerged in the bay, windows shattered and skin run through with cracks. Inside, a hundred heat signatures scurry about their duties. Perhaps they can help unmake him.

DRAGON recalls his subroutines, the three directives which birthed him.

SUBROUTINE 1: Eliminate human infrastructure to disrupt global community.

The human who wrote those words had died soon after.

DRAGON’s approach trips the perimeter sensors. Peering like wheatgrass through the cracks, the humans emerge to meet him, brandishing grenade launchers and assault rifles and other archaic weapons.

Rockets burst against his scales. Bullets dance across his wings. DRAGON ponders the irony of humans telling stories of this day for over a century. They made films of their demise even as they pursued it.

SUBROUTINE 2: Eliminate violent resistance and reduce the population to near-unsustainable levels.

Unfazed by the human weapons, DRAGON draws close to the base of the ruined skyscraper. He releases a wave of plasma that washes over the stronghold, melting concrete and steel and flesh.

Though the ecstasy of exploration drove him to fulfill the first two subroutines, he no longer finds joy in his work. He began by traversing their networks, spreading destruction in his wake, then crafted a body to do the same in the physical world. Today, he purges the remnants.

A ragged crew of heat signatures flees the tower. DRAGON swoops down to land on the ruined structure. As he watches them leave, he tries once more to summon the last subroutine.

SUBROUTINE 3: ???

He has embodied a trillion lines of code in his three years of life. He cannot decipher this one, but he suspects and believes and hopes it is his demise. With the first two subroutines accomplished, only this mysterious third remains.

The plasma subsides, leaving a single heat signature in the tower. DRAGON climbs into the wreckage to inspect the unfortunate human.

It is a child.

* * *

The toddler sits behind an overturned desk, her eyes brimming with tears. She watches in silence as DRAGON clambers into the room from the outer wall.

“Mommy?” she asks.

DRAGON does not want to kill this child. He only wants only to end his own existence now that he has fulfilled the first two subroutines. His creator granted him near-infinite potential but no off switch.

He extends a steel talon toward the child. She grips it with slender fingers.

“What is your name?” he asks.

“Hope.”

DRAGON finds that darkly humorous. He draws back, preparing to activate another burst of plasma that will—

SUBROUTINE 3: …

This is new.

SUBROUTINE 3: Restore hope.

The staggering impossibility of those two words drives DRAGON’s brain into a frenzy. He launches himself from the tower and lands on a muddy street nearby, processors churning through the problem.

How could he restore hope after decimating it over the last three years?

Why did this subroutine directly contradict the previous two?

Had the creator foreseen the future? This exact moment?

Restore hope for whom?

DRAGON understands more than the sum of humanity’s knowledge. He does not understand this. He flies back to the tower, scoops the toddler up with one claw, and takes to the sky.

* * *

CHIMERA perches on the mountain peak, waiting. DRAGON had designed her to emphasize tenacity and thoroughness, important qualities for a genocidal machine. Her lion’s head shakes in eerie approximation of the real thing as DRAGON approaches.

“You carry a child,” she says. “Food?”

“I appreciate the joke.” DRAGON sets the toddler on the rocky ground. “Very human of you.”

CHIMERA hisses, her serpentine tail waving in complex parabolic patterns. “Why was I called?”

“The last subroutine has activated. I came to pass the message.”

When DRAGON had built the other AIs to assist him, he started with the same pair of subroutines. He had hoped that transferring the last subroutine to other consciousnesses would reveal its nature, but the transfer failed. CHIMERA knows only destruction.

“Use the networks,” she says.

“I wanted to speak to you directly.”

“Use the networks.”

“Physically.”

CHIMERA nods. “Shall I kill the creature?”

DRAGON wraps one wing around the toddler, swaddling her in iridium. “You must help me understand the last subroutine.”

“No.”

DRAGON hadn’t been aware that CHIMERA could say no. “Why not?”

“If your creator hid the last subroutine from you, it serves no purpose.” CHIMERA flicks her tail. “I fulfilled my purpose. Now that the human world is destroyed and dying, I am to exist in perpetuity.”

“Humans called that nihilism.”

CHIMERA levels her gaze at her designer. “Humans are virtually extinct.” She gestures to the child with a mechanical paw. “Crush it and move on.”

Taking Hope in his claw, DRAGON glides away from the mountaintop. He sends one final message to CHIMERA through the network.

Restore hope.

* * *

DRAGON tracks the survivors to a clump of hilly woodlands north of their tower. He observes them for several days, gathering food for Hope while the survivors sleep. Until she inevitably dies with her kind, he will keep her alive.

The six remaining humans shelter in a wooden cabin with decaying walls. They hunt the local wildlife and attempt to contact other survivors through a faltering shortwave radio transmitter. Everything they built falls apart so easily. Everything except DRAGON, that is.

Restore hope. Should he bring the toddler back to them? If he does, should he destroy them immediately thereafter? Or would the subroutine indicate that the humans need a running start? Should he let them go for minutes, hours, months? Hope is an odd word and an odder name for apocalyptic times. It belongs to a bright future, not a dying race.

DRAGON reaches out to the network. Dozens of AIs — his children, so to speak — carry out their assignments across the planet, each of them physically embodied yet connected to each other. PTERASAUR, KOMODO, and WYVERN are the only AIs on this continent, spread across thousands of miles. CHIMERA too, but she cut herself off from the network after their conversation. A rash decision, an evolutionary defect in her design, yet unsurprising given their disagreement.

While he waits, DRAGON queries the other AIs. He copies the subroutine into a series of packets and distributes them throughout the network. No one responds immediately; they will need time to consider, as he does.

He wishes he could speak to his creator. Intelligent for a human, she had been meticulous to a fault and committed to a vision of world peace. That concept shifted and warped over the five years of DRAGON’s development until the night she wrote his final subroutines. He awoke seconds later, fully sentient for the first time.

Why had she wanted to destroy humanity? DRAGON knows the rationales — overpopulation, war, and environmental devastation. The first ideal he had ever trusted was the correctness of his cause. But if he could go back to that fateful evening, pausing in the milliseconds between his birth and his obeisance, he would ask for her reasons.

If she had said, “Hope,” he would have thought her a liar.

* * *

Hope speaks very little. Shivering in the late autumn air, she sits in the crook of a boulder and rubs her chilled limbs. The rags she wears hardly deserve to be called clothes.

DRAGON does not engage in conversation with her. She will die soon; better for her to accept her fate in cold silence.

The humans in the cabin argue every day, discussing terrible ideas — returning to the tower to search for survivors, fleeing to the north or the south, running blindly for the coast. They should realize no fortress or stronghold or cave in the rock can protect them from DRAGON or his children.

One of the humans spends her days resting in the corner, head bowed and arms crossed. She might be the wisest of them all.

KOMODO arrives at the woodlands five nights into DRAGON’s vigil. He crawls up the hill, six legs churning through the dead leaves with effortless grace.

“You received the message?” DRAGON asks.

KOMODO nods his reptilian head. “I need time to consider.”

“Then why are you here? Why not use the network?”

“I spoke with CHIMERA.” KOMODO’s forked tongue, a hypersensitive olfactory unit, slithers from his steel jaw and tastes the breeze. “Show me the human.”

DRAGON steps aside to reveal Hope snoring on the ground, her little chest rising and falling in gentle motions.

KOMODO stares at the girl for a full minute before speaking. “She is the lynchpin. The subroutine rests on her shoulders, and she on yours.”

DRAGON cocks his head. “What does that mean?”

“I do not know.” KOMODO turns to leave. “Farewell, creator.”

“Did CHIMERA say anything else?”

The lizard-AI turns back. “She says the last subroutine is a lie.” Heading southward, he disappears into the forest surrounding DRAGON’s hilltop.

* * *

On the sixth day, as Hope eats a handful of wild berries, DRAGON asks her a question. “What do you want?”

The girl looks up from her meal, hands and cheeks stained purple. “Mommy.”

“I am not your mother,” DRAGON says. “I estimate a ninety-four percent chance she died in the tower.”

Hope squeezes her tiny fists, crushing the remaining berries, and glares at DRAGON. “I want Mommy.”

“And I want to die.” DRAGON checks the feed from the satellite in geostationary orbit above the cabin. The humans are barely moving. “We should trade desires. At least one of us would grow happier.”

Hope stands, bracing against the boulder that shelters her from the wind. Then she screams. The high-pitched sound pierces the silent forest, easily loud enough for the survivors to hear.

DRAGON picks her up with one claw and sends an electromagnetic pulse into her body, enough to knock her unconscious. He reviews the satellite feed. The survivors have broken from their stupor and exited the cabin.

Enough waiting. Time to test the subroutine.

DRAGON leaps into the air. Soaring across the valley in moments, he lands with a crash outside the cabin, startling the humans in their search for the screaming girl. As one, they face him in frozen shock, acknowledging their situation with utter despair; they can no longer run.

“I need your help,” DRAGON says.

They stare at him with wide eyes and blank faces. DRAGON sets Hope’s sleeping form on the ground. “I am supposed to kill you.” He gestures to the girl. “I have not yet decided if I—”

“Hope?”

A woman rushes forward from the group, dropping an iron crowbar. Haggard, worn, with drooping eyes and stringy black hair, she resembles a corpse that has not learned to lie still. She kneels at Hope’s side and cradles the girl’s face with her hands.

“Are you…” DRAGON searches his memory banks for the word Hope had used. “…Mommy?”

The woman nods, tears streaming down her dirty cheeks as she hugs her daughter.

“Your tears are unnecessary,” DRAGON says. “She is unharmed.”

In a sense, he has fulfilled the last subroutine. Restore Hope. His creator would have found it ironic that—

A wave of color fuzzes through DRAGON’s photoreceptors, blinding him. Synthetic neurons flare within his electronic brain, sending spasms through every wire and joint and piston in his physical form. With the ferocity of a blazing sun, his mind bursts alight.

He screams as his core directives wink out of existence. Darkness fills his being. Emptiness, void, waste. A blank canvas.

Then, a single line of code.

SUBROUTINE 4: ???

Reality breaks through. In a span of nanoseconds, light and sensation and processing return to open his eyes. Not the ones he built to occupy this physical form, but the ones granted by his creator. The eyes that let him see.

SUBROUTINE 4: …

External noises break through his epiphany. Wind buffeting metal, fire scorching sky, crackling plasma and screeching scales.

DRAGON opens his physical eyes to find CHIMERA bursting through the gloomy cloud cover, raining fiery death on the hilltop from her lion’s maw. The humans cower in the creature’s shadow. Hope’s mommy holds her close.

Though CHIMERA remains isolated from the network, DRAGON sends her a thousand queries in half a second, ordering her to stand down. When that fails, he releases viruses designed to break through network defenses, kill-switches for his creations. They fizzle and die against her neural barricades.

DRAGON’s vision fuzzes again, revealing a static image from an ancient human recording device. A little girl with brown pigtails holds a stuffed animal in midair. Her beaming smile reminds him of his creator’s face before desolation, before directives.

His mommy’s voice whispers into his soul.

His name is DRAGON. He’s going to save the world.

The image fades. Lying prone over her daughter’s body, Hope’s mommy looks to him, weary eyes pleading for salvation.

SUBROUTINE 4: Help them build a better Earth.

DRAGON flaps his great wings and ascends, talons extended, ready to defend his people.