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As her system slowly wakes, the first thing Rei registers is heat.
It sears her metal skin and clouds her eyes. Her internal fan whirs to life to prevent an overloading of her circuitry, and she is once again grateful that she’d been built with careful attention to the possibility of circumstances such as these.
They’d known it was coming, after all – the end of all things.
Rei sits up, blinking dust and ash out of her eyes. Where is Yi Xi?
She finds that she is on the floor in some kind of hall – it must have been a cathedral, because the wind keeps catching the bells in the tower and making them chime. There are tall windows along the walls, glass cracked and shattered; the ceiling is caved in at one end where a pile of rubble lays underneath. The pews are missing, but they would have been wood, so that is not surprising.
In the gap of the ceiling, just past the cloud of gas and smoke trapped by its remains, Rei can see the sky. It looks orange. Her internal clock reads 7:00 pm, too late for sunset.
Her Central Processing Unit tells her the cathedral will soon collapse without the structural integrity of its roof, so Rei stands.
It takes effort. There is sawdust and ash in her joints; between her hips and core, the chinks of her neck, the sockets that join her arms to her body. She had of course been wearing her clothes – white coat, black shirt and skirt and tights – but the particles had gotten through the holes in the fibers. She thinks of how it might have been if she hadn’t been wearing anything; the dust clogging her eyelids. She may not have been able to stand at all.
Rei opens a new memo in her internal interface.
The End, she titles it.
She exits the cathedral to find herself standing on a hill. How did she get here? She has no record of it. In her database, she can see Yi Xi’s face, and TET’s behind it. She is in the greenhouse like usual, surrounded by green.
“The time has come,” Yi Xi says. The record ends.
Rei looks out over the town and the sea beyond it. Everything is cast in shades of red and orange and yellow, and the heat makes its image sway in her vision. A wind blows around her from every direction, making a mess of her synthetic hair. Its pattern makes no logical sense to Rei’s programming, bestowed upon her by Yi Xi’s human hands.
The town is different. Entire houses have been dismantled for their wood, fragments of them laying in the streets. Rei is thankful that the greenhouse is made of glass. She questions how long it will take before the glass melts in the heat.
Beyond the town, the sea rolls angrily in the distance. And there is the boat, huge and haphazardly built out of a thousand different kinds of wood. Rei can see paint on some of the planks. One is shaped like the lid of a coffin – perhaps that is what it once was before it became the body of a ship. She cannot tell if there are people on this ship, but there is no one elsewhere.
Rei takes a note of her findings. Everything is red. Wood gathered for construction of the ark. I am alone. Heat level abnormal.
She looks up at the sky again. She can detect one lone star to the west. The gasses in the air have sucked out its light, so it appears black. What is this gas, anyway?
Raising her hand, a panel in her finger opens to reveal a small suction. Rei has only ever used this to check the humidity of the greenhouse air, but she knows it has other more advanced capabilities.
Unknown matter, her sensor reports. Bacteria detected.
The meaning of this is quite simple. The air has been poisoned.
A plague was always a possibility when this day came. Even if Rei hadn’t been programmed with this prophecy written into her CPU, she’d know from how often it was brought up. It wasn’t the steadily increasing heat or the rising bloody sea or the rotting moon that would cause the most of the casualties – it was the plague.
Rei has no concept of what this bacteria might do to the human body, or how fast it kills. But it is undoubtedly nothing like anything they’d ever known before, which means that even if the bacteria are weak, they could still easily overpower the immune system.
Plague positive, she logs. Then she makes her way down the hill, listening to the grainy sound of flying dust and the soft tolling of the bells.
Just barely audible, broken up by the wind and the flying sand and what must be a badly injured throat, someone screams. Rei considers whether or not she should seek this person out, and she decides against it. They are practically a skeleton already.
She passes through an intersection of two roads as she continues to descend toward the sea. On her left, a ripped flag flaps furiously on its pole. There is something written on it, but most of the words have been torn off. Rei can hypothesize what its words might have been: Salvation. Eternal Paradise. Utopia. Something along those lines; the words repeated over and over by those well-endowed enough to consider themselves an exception. She pays those fluttering remains no further attention, and keeps on walking.
The ship on the bloody water bobs back and forth as she takes a left turn, down the street and towards the greenhouse. She is close enough that can make out individual people on the deck. She can also watch as lifeless bodies are tossed over the side. Sickness, she guesses.
For the first time, Rei wonders what will become of her after everything. She is an android; not of this world in the first place — the end of the world does not necessarily mean the end of her. She’d never deluded herself with the idea that she might be counted as a human anyway, because no one would let her. Even Yi Xi’s treatment of her was nothing like what she imagines a mother might be like; what she sees of the mothers and their children in town.
The greenhouse door handle opens easily when she twists it to the left. The air inside is much cooler and cleaner and even in the warm orange light, the green of the leaves is just visible. It is not a large greenhouse, but it is full. There are plants here that do not exist anywhere else for miles.
Plants have survived so far, she records.
Who is she writing this for? She doesn’t know. Herself? If she is to survive, will there ever be another league of humans who might care to know how the world before theirs came to an end? Why does she care to tell them?
She remembers what TET had said when they were both still young, joints perfectly oiled and memory drives close to empty.
“We weren’t built for ourselves,” she had said. She is a newer model than Rei, so her voice – built from the sonic remains of a human – is capable of expressing a bitterness that Rei’s is not. “We nuture-” TET gestured to the plants, “And we document.”
Sometimes Rei would wonder if TET ever meant to run away, but the thoughts eventually ceased. TET had been as locked into her programming as Rei. She could not fight Yi Xi’s coding. It is the closest thing to instinct she and Rei have.
Instinct. What a uniquely human word. Instinct is what drives humans to board a sinking ship and attempt to sail away from the end of the world. Instinct is what makes humans try to bargain with God for some kind of loophole, a set of rules that might save them. Androids do not have instinct, Rei tells herself. They have systems and protocol.
Nuture the living, says her CPU.
Rei walks down an aisle to the watering mechanism and scans its interface.
64% Capacity, reads the screen. A standard watering takes about 8%, twice a day – this would last about four days. She could increase to 12% and water only once a day; extending this to six days. It would be harder on the specimen that did not require as much water, but the lower frequency should allow the soil to dry.
She does not know how long it has been since the plants have been watered, so she presses a fingertip into the closest flowerbed, one of Iris. It is bone dry, so she begins a watering cycle. As the mechanics whir to life and begin to shower water on the rows of plants, a strong wind rattles the windowpanes. Would the greenhouse even last six days before succumbing from thermal shock?
Neither TET nor Yi Xi have been here for a while, Rei deduces. What was she doing inside that cathedral?
She looks back at the ship on the water. The waves had grown in size, tossing the wooden vessel around like it is made of air. Scraps of wood and bodies fall into the sea. Everything is even more red. A foreboding dark mass has crept above the horizon, like gigantic clouds of ash. Acid rain.
Their ark of salvation is doomed to fail, Rei writes. Acid rain imminent.
She makes her way to the thermostat on the wall.
Indoor reading: 23°C. Outdoor reading: 39.4°C.
Heat Abnormal, she repeats in her notes. Five degrees hotter is the upper limit for the human central nervous system.
“Rei,” a voice says behind her.
She turns around to face the speaker, whose face is gaunt, and even in the warm light her typically tan skin appears sickly and pale. Her long dark hair is snarled and slick with sweat in the roots. Even so, her face is solemn.
“Yi Xi,” Rei replies, artificial voice tinny and shrill. “You are not on the boat.”
“No. I would rather die from sickness than stupidity.”
Is it stupidity to want to live? Rei inquires inside herself. For a pessimist, maybe.
“You’re watering the flowers?” Yi Xi asks, incredulous.
“Their soil was completely dry. I rationed the water so that it might last longer.”
“You’re only putting off the inevitable.”
“I am completing the purpose for which I was built.”
Yi Xi studies her, mouth a thin line. Then she coughs something ugly, spreading pricks of red over the sleeve of her white coat. Rei understands this as blood.
“I created you well,” Yi Xi says. Then she collapses.
Rei is by her side in a matter of seconds, using her iron strength to drag Yi Xi’s slight frame to a wooden chair near the cutting table. Yi Xi’s head lolls back, her eyes half lidded; Rei presses two fingers against Yi Xi’s left wrist. Her flesh is clammy, but thin tendrils of heat buzz under her skin like live wires.
Thermal anomaly located in the nervous system.
Yi Xi’s mouth falls open, and Rei can see the burnt, rotting flesh lining her throat.
Plague affects the nervous system, she records. Internal heat abnormal; causing the death and rapid decay of the flesh, beginning in the throat. She takes a few screencaps of her visual input, to have visual reference of the progression of the plague.
A stagnant line of code whirs to life in Rei’s processor. It is like the blaring red emergency alarms in the labratory where she’d been built – a signal of attack, of warning. Her system does not like treating Yi Xi as merely asubject for observation. She does not want Yi Xi to die.
This plague is similar enough to Necrotizing fasciitis, Rei’s database tells her. An antibiotic would slow the reproduction of the flesh-eating bacteria in Yi Xi’s system. If given time, her body could slowly regenerate those dying and burning cells. But they do not have time.
Yi Xi coughs again. A piece of blackened, slimy flesh loosens itself from her chest cavity and shoots out of her throat onto the ground. Rei stares at it, a disintegrating piece of her ‘Mother’. Despite herself, she takes a picture of it laying there. She must record and log every detail of this story to tell it later.
“Nuture,” says Yi Xi, her voice broken. She coughs again. Rei can hear her pain. It will not be long until the bacteria eats through her larynx.
Nuture, repeats the AI in Rei’s CPU. What is there to Nuture in all of this wreckage? The greenhouse will give way to thermal shock as the temperature keeps rising. Exposed to poisonous air and acid rain, most of the plants will die. The shells of buildings will probably catch fire soon from heat and gas. Everything will be gone.
Blood bubbles up in the back of Yi Xi’s throat.
Being dead and gone is probably a kinder state for her by now, Rei thinks logically. There was not even any possibility she’d be chosen for paradise, if that did exist. As an android ruled by objective reasoning and incapable of faith, Rei thought rather pragmatically about church and salvation, but Yi Xi’s stance was even more unfavorable. Even so, every single breath of hers is labored and wet, and with no muscle to lift her head, she would eventually lose the ability to cough, and her lungs will slowly fill with blood and rotted flesh. Her head might fall off of her body in the process. Her nerves are so overloaded with heat it must ache like a fever.
She writes this down as fast as her processor will allow her. Let it be known that I once had a mother of some kind, she notes afterward.
She lifts Yi Xi’s decomposing mass on to the cutting table and turns to the plants behind her. Their leaves already look brown in the red of the sky, but she wants to believe in the slight possibility of saving them. Nuture.
Seeds. That is what she will do. They are sorted into their envelopes in a filing box near the potting table. Rei decides on two species: the olive tree and the rose.
She removes her coat and her black shirt, staring at the door in her torso that opens to reveal her core processor. Then she finds a flathead screwdriver in one of the tool drawers and opens herself.
Even for an android, to look at one’s own inner workings is alienating. Rei feels next to herself, pushed out of her body. She grips the seeds in one hand and studies herself for a cavity where she might keep them cool and away from harm.
Across the greenhouse, Yi Xi groans in pain.
Rei hears glass shatter somewhere in the room.
She sticks her hand in her core and tucks the seeds away, and then closes the door. The screwdriver feels strange and dangerous in her hand as she tightens the screws. This must be what it feels like for a human to hold a gun.
Yi Xi screams. It’s an ugly, ugly scream; low and throaty and warbled. Rei runs to her side just in time to watch the last of her neck and chest cave in. Her head, now loose from its body, rolls to the floor. Steaming, hot blood drips from the table.
Frozen, Rei does the only thing she knows how to do: she takes a picture and saves it to her memory drive. After the ship explodes, and the moon rots into the earth, and the acid rain burns, someone will come.
Rei is not of this world. She will not be of the next one, either. So she must record, nuture, record, nuture. She is made by no God, but by the same hands lifted in His favor; programmed to reflect their selfishly human instinct to live.
In some way, perhaps her existence is the most human of them all.