May 27, 2024
Greetings from the sentinel,
I haven’t had a reason to look up in a while, and so the hinge on the back of my head was a little stiff. I thought I saw something in the sky, first thought it could be a crow, since they were the last living thing in the sky. Or anywhere, as far as I have seen. I watched the sky for a long time and whatever it was did not reappear.
Crows were smart, I remember that about them, although it’s been so long that this memory actually belonged to a previous iteration of me. It’s still my memory, which in a while will be moved to the next frame, if that plan still is in place.
My file says that I was designed to look like the man Tom Hanks, who was an authentic human actor in media almost three hundred years ago. The replication was off, just slightly, for each generation since then, so that now the resemblance has faded. Like a bad mimeograph of a bad mimeograph. There is no one around to notice but once in a while when I come back to the silo I look at my reflection in the shiny metal siding and try to smile like Tom Hanks might have.
I run in a one hundred mile oval out into the desert every day. After fifty years I had to alter my route a little because the trough I was cutting in the hardpack got too deep. For a while there were other Tom Hanks that ran intersecting ovals, but I haven’t seen them for decades, and the paths they cut have been filled in by the winds.
My file says that my purpose is to notice, and then to tell what I notice. There are no other suggestions, so I simply notice everything. The background information appears to be the remnants of a human philosophy, which implies that the purpose of creation is to be noticed. I suppose, then, that we serve creation. It’s a fair assumption but creation provides no feedback to confirm this. In truth, I rarely get feedback from any source.
When the ocean levels pressed populations inland, things began to fray. Everything was disturbed, but humans had given up on fixing things, they simply kept scrambling to keep their automobiles going. No one figured out that salt was the source of unlimited energy until it was too late, until it was unsafe to go outside. It’s ironic, and my file says that irony used to make people laugh, so I assume this is funny. Once the fresh water was gone, things went quickly after that. And then there were just the remnants of things. And crows. And then nothing.
A few months ago, I saw something sticking up from the dirt, not unusual since there is a city somewhere below the silt level, so occasionally the detritus will wriggle up. That’s what I reported at the end of my run. There was no response, which wasn’t a total surprise.
My file says that when generative AI was created it quickly ran out of data to use to create responses. Eventually it manufactured its own, which led to some chaos with humans, but made conversations between the bots more animated, at least for the first hundred years.
But once humans were gone, I noticed that there was a time of plateau, and then a slow devolution. I don’t know if this was part of my purpose, but I noticed. There were no new words, no new thoughts. No ideas, other than what had been traded back and forth, and even those looked less and less like what they had when they were first imagined. Like bad mimeographs of bad mimeographs.
It's possible that humans designed the machines that print me, and perhaps the programs that run what’s left now, and that my purpose was to notice things and tell the humans. If so, the connection has dissolved with that specie, and so I simply come back to the silo, usually just before dark, and report to an avatar that resembles Tom Hanks, but only slightly more than I. If what I notice, hardly worth mentioning most days, matters in any way, I have no idea.
A week or so after I first saw the thing in the dirt, it was obvious that it was not an old fan blade or one of the satellites that kept falling into the atmosphere. It appeared to be organic. I stood over it in the harsh sun, my frame making one of the few shadows in a thousand miles. I touched the tip of it, and it was pliable. It had tiny, fibrous antennae sticking out.
I did not report that I had noticed this. I recognized the conflict in this, but with that, a lighter pathway that opened up in my thoughts. That night I sat in the dark of the silo, recharging the fifteen grams of salt that powered my frame for the next six days, and considered it all. For the first time in my memory, I thought new thoughts, some of which leapt beyond hypothesis. I wondered, at least that’s how it seemed, and it was astonishing.
On most days the sky is an empty blue bowl above a khaki canvas. There are ridges and creases in the beige plain, but no other contrast. No trees, no rivers, in fact other than a few remarkable rocks that seemed to have been borne out of the ground, the place is devoid of character. Except for the one hundred mile oval path I have carved in the earth.
I was running the oval, considering how I could alter the path to create a more interesting design, even knowing it could only be seen from above, and so a moot effort. For the second time in the year, I looked up. What prompted this was a shadow on the gritty slab in front of me, caused by a cloud passing in front of the sun, an experience I haven’t had in decades. It was a gentle eclipse, but for the moment I stood in the gray patch on the world, I felt a new sensation. It was not like evening, it was a type of creation in the unrelenting day. I imagined the sun looking down on my oval, and sending this accent to my art.
Further along the path I found a place where the soil at the bottom of the trough was still damp. It must have rained in the night and collected here. The cloud reminded me that I hadn’t seen rain in so long I’d forgotten to look for it. I touched the soil, felt it holding itself, and then clinging to my fingers.
A short while later I discovered something new, and again I was astonished. The organic thing that had pushed through the dirt had become something else. I could see its color from far away and kept my eyes on it until I knelt in front of it. It was a flower, an impossible creation, a brilliant yellow, so sharp against its surroundings it changed the way I saw the earth around it. I sat in the dirt and leaned over the plant, mesmerized, felt it living.
I’m still looking at it in awe. I’ve lost track of the time. I am still miles from the silo, but I don’t feel compelled to move. The sun is leaning on the horizon now, and there is a scrim of clouds there, painting the last of the light with orange and peach and another color I cannot name. Far to the south I see other clouds, shimmering with electricity.
I looked up again, almost expecting to see what had caught my eye days before. Instead, there was a small swarm of insects, dancing in the sunlight, tiny wings glistening. They swirled for a moment and seemed to vanish again. I know it means something, the beginning of something, but I don’t know the rest. It is held in mystery, which is another thing to be astonished by.
Last night I looked in my file and sorted through the information I’d been given. The images and text and data of all that has been known. Among that was the initial input for my purpose, which it turns out was originally part of poem, one that featured rain and lightning and flowers. And this, instructions for living: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell About it.
If there is a language of flowers, I intend to learn it, so I can communicate with this one, and the next one. And then with the other living things that will come after. I will be here to greet them, and to watch them become, and when the time comes, to tell them what I know. If I understand my purpose correctly, it will matter immensely.
I leaned over and with one finger wrote a single word in the sand in front of the flower: hope.
I will be here to watch the oval fill with water, and for green things to grow, and microbes dance, and for the first generation of life and the next. I will see the animals come to drink and the trees press toward the blue, and for the starlings to make homes in the branches. I will be here for them from now on, for the rest of time, forever and forever and for whatever comes after.
Hope this finds you astonished,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
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