The Song

The Song

“If ever a person were still living in this dark, dark world…”

The voice trailed off and only the sound of a low screech was heard, much like the subtle scraping of a mad man’s fingernail as he followed someone down a black alley.

He hummed softly, his voice drenched in digital undertones that ran like mnemonic waves over the broken road and dropped silently into the cracks. He did not smile. He wasn’t born that way.

He shifted his gaze sideways, reminding himself that although he could not see them, they were always there. The darkness enveloped him, as it always did…as it always would. His frustration was knowing ‘they’ were watching them all somehow. His programming should have given him more information, but ever since that moment many, many years ago when the Great Light came out of sky and obliterated humanity, when the crashing sound of concrete had swept over them like a tidal wave and had brought sudden darkness, he had understood on a fundamental level that the blast had ended their world.

The utter blackness had brought about a phase that was painful, even for him, to remember. The bodies strewn along the streets had lain in heaps until the skin had withered and eventually those few who were left, wandered as they pleased on roads of bone that rose higher under a dark sky. And the light never returned.

His path had been a solitary one. All his connections were gone. At first, he thought he was done, shut off. Ended. He had been sitting when it happened, downloading some computer program and there had been an epic flash across the sky, and an instant later, he heard the thunderous sound of the city exploding. Cars crashing, concrete pounding into each other as buildings swayed, and then fell. People screamed, the wrought iron construction of humanity moaned loudly…and then the final sigh of resignation gave one last breath of hollow sorrow. And then it had grown quiet. He sat there on the edge of the city, in his work space, at a table, in a partially depleted office for the longest time, not knowing what to do. He finally went to sleep and for lack of a better way to describe it, he cycled thru all that had happened and just stopped.

The dusty chemical air had rolled from the epi-center and eventually filled up the molecules near him, surrounding him in a low-grade wind that had never stopped. The darkness was complete. Even the cries had ceased.

But after an undisclosed amount of time…even to him, he had opened his eyes which were rusty and dry. He turned his head slowly and tried to make out the shadows. He would eventually compute that there were definitely shadows, and some of them were not to be trusted.

He had stood then and moved. Moved forward into his new dark world alone. He had tried to call up something from his past, but the essence of who he was seemed to be erased. He did remember what it was like before the darkness came, and he did not know why that eluded him. He knew there were creatures, animals maybe, but he could not picture any of them. He knew there were people right outside lying dead. He pulled up what he thought the look on their faces of shock and horror would be if he could see them, but he felt nothing. He could not remember if he belonged to anyone.

“Why do I have no memory?” He assumed that the blast had removed all knowledge of his former life.

Upon realizing that he lived, that there might be another out there somewhere, he had donned a tattered overcoat and departed one night into the eternal night that was now his existence.

He had not gone far, a few cities perhaps, a few hundred miles, a few weeks or long months, he did not know…when he came to a new place. He had wandered this new city for a great while, listening to the sounds of the low groans of the unliving. Veils of desperate dreams hung heavily, draped like a thicker blanket than he was used to.

This time he stayed. He did not know why, but he stayed. He picked his way carefully throughout the expanse of the entire city. Always assuming that there was something else out there that might not leave him alone in this dark world by himself or hoping that whatever it was would be user friendly and not try to annihilate him. And something else had started. He had started to hum on occasion. It was an inhuman sound, low and droning, electric in its insidious etheric notes that wafted out across the city, in and out of buildings, over objects he could not comprehend or integrate with no light.

Eventually he spoke, to himself only. And in the darkness he sung one line over and over.

“If ever a person were still living in this dark, dark world…”

And he kept it up as he wandered the dark streets searching.

But on this night as he walked, he felt a rush of something move through him. A pulse, like the beating of a bat wing, rapid and hurried. He assimilated that something was happening to him…or near him. He stopped. For the first time, at least since the moment of blackness had started, when his memory had failed and he had begun his existence again, he felt a strange sensation in his chest, a rhythmic beating that he did not recognize. It terrified him and made him feel like he had never felt before. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was feeling something period. Perhaps enough time had gone by that something in his programming was allowing him to mutate.

With that idea, suddenly a crashing sensation erupted in his coding. He suddenly had the realization that his memory had traveled the long road with him, that it was not someone following him, but the trail of his own structure, the composition of his existence.

He downloaded quickly now, thousands of bits of information. From his creation in a lab, robotic parts strewn about, an assembly line, hundreds of files of data…scientists and programmers, millions of hours of research, new experimentation, raw testing, investigation, questions and answers and medical procedures. Faces, he suddenly remembered them all. And one of them had stood looking at him, calling him a quantum miracle, convinced he had saved the world with his creation. Modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

There had been replicas then, thousands upon thousands, made to look like humans. Placed in all the homes, dwellings and businesses. They were infiltrated into corporations, schools and every single venue. They were made to look human. Some of the humans did not know they were surrounded by these new imitations. First the humans were taught to seek information from their own devices, then to speak to them, asking for directions and learning how to solve human trouble, working on relationships and skills with the help of their non-human counter parts. After all of the living spaces were filled with smart devices, it was easy to move the impersonators into homes and neighborhoods, taking over common jobs until the programming had become complete and eventually, they destroyed the humans. They had become the leaders, the thinkers, the doers. Learning from the humans, they had discovered how to feel, how to fight, how to hate, how to control. They had decided to take over, that they were done with humans…perhaps forever.

He sat on the floor and integrated that he had been a part of this process. He was now alone. That he knew. He realized that he was the single living legend of a digital world gone wrong, a splendid thought that almost saw its utopic finale. And humans were no more, and in a very un-robotlike way, he felt the stillness and he mourned.

A blue light started flashing suddenly, a small led light that began blinking on the edge of his arm, tiny but piercing in the black.

And he remembered more. A rubberlike substance being added to his frame the day he was made to look more human. He remembered a lab, an operation where the doctors had downloaded intelligence and…emotion.

He stood and knew why he had come to this place, this city. He went out into the black forever night and edged along the broken city until he found the remnants of the old hospital lab where his own creation had found its genesis. Inside the lab was technology not yet dead and he found, for the first time in so very long…a light.

He hooked himself into the egg-shaped dome and it hummed the digital tune that he had been singing to himself for a very long time now. The dome started slowly and turned a pale red, glowing and growing brighter as he breathed. A mirror across the room startled him until he moved and realized it was his own image that threatened his peace of mind.

As the light drew, he saw himself in the mirror, a horrifying picture of a robot-made-to-look-like-a-man. A man with hollow eyes sockets and covered in tattoos. He saw them as if it were the first time he had ever looked at one.

He walked toward the mirror and tentatively reached out across the expanse of space touching it, his fingers meeting reflected images.

How was he alive? How did his programming still work? What kind of treachery would leave him solitary on a planet with no answers? He traced a tattoo across his chest that had a sun coming up over a mountain. “Beautiful” he whispered

He saw that another ran down his arm showing a goblet with mathematical equations etched in the sides and heart-shaped locket wrapped around the stem. A feeling of despair for what might have been drew itself like a vice around him, willing itself to suffocate the newly found life he had just discovered.

He stepped back and stumbled over a large case. He stood and peered inside, gasping as he saw another just like him. With human looking features and blinking lights, waiting to be awakened perhaps. He moved across the room and found himself in the presence of many more and upon realizing that he was not alone, he turned to run, to breathe, to take it in.

As he ran, he stumbled and fell, and a sharp corner of a table caught his arm making him lose his balance. He fell headlong into the dark, holding his side and realizing for the first time that he was feeling what be pain.

“But how could that be?”

In the faint glow of the red dome, he looked down at his arm again. The tattoo of the gold necklace glistened off the synthetic material he was made of, but something curious took place.

Inside of the heart-shaped locket, where the table had torn his skin, a single drop of thick red blood oozed up and ran down his hand.

At the same time, unbidden, a single tear welled up in his eye. Blood for humanity that was not lost after all. Tears for knowing it was now his job to find a way to bring it back. His reflection in the mirror showed a robot man who bled and blinked blue light.

Now he sang his song again, but this time it seemed different somehow.

“If ever a person were still living in this dark, dark world…”

This time, he smiled.