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| Fredo | |
| By andybyers | ||||||||
| 03 October 2007 | ||||||||
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I wrote this a lonnnnnnng time ago. I think I'd be a little more subtle about the ending now; it kind of just drops like a dead fish, but... it is what it is, and it's honest. I still like it. I hope you will too. :) The fifteen years I spent in prison seemed longer than the balance of my life, before and after. I spent my subsequent years in low level jobs, finally allowed to become a high school science teacher. I saved enough money to buy a little cottage with all the necessary comforts. When I retired, I went there to die. I took me a long time. There were no machines to convert flesh to flesh tone plaster. Nothing to instantly transfer my soul to God. Mine was the slow agony of age and decay. One morning, very near the end of my life, I sat on a chair on my lawn at the edge of the forest. Even in the latter part of the twenty first century, some forest remained. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. A glimmer of metal. Movement. Fredo. He was scratched, scuffed up, but, as far as I could see, operating perfectly. His round, monstrous eyes glowed red as he approached. I was not startled nor even surprised; I just sat there, watching the robot draw closer and closer. Finally Fredo stopped, just in front of me. "I saw a deer today," he said, as if we had last spoken only the day before. "Did you now." "Yes. She was beige and white, and leapt away at my approach." He paused, then added, tilting his head quizzically like some animal, "You have aged. Changed. I almost did not recognize you." "The world will end soon," I told him. "Clarify," he responded, in the voice of the child who asks, "Why?" "Microbes, bombs... the irresponsible bastards. Reckless sons of bitches." I was quiet. "I should have done something. When I was young. Who'll listen to me now?" Fredo listened. Whether he understood what I was getting at or not, I'll never know. "But you," I said. "You have to survive. Through you my life has... purpose. Meaning. You must survive. And the only way to do that... is to get back out there." "You wish me to leave?" "Yes. Go back to the forests, Fredo. Stay away from humans, whatever you do. Do that much and you'll outlast us all." Fredo made no move. "I have missed you," he said, finally. "I've missed you too." "I shall go on missing you," Fredo asserted. "Good bye, Doctor Hilton." He began to move off. I said nothing. It would have been wasted; worse, it would have denied his nobility. I just let him disappear into the forest. And I knew that one day he would find a vein of iron, and that it would stir the Instinct, the Von Neumann program deep inside him. Working slowly, but with infinite patience, he would follow its commands. Until finally, after a thousand years, a million perhaps, there would finally be a second. A twin Fredo, good as new. And then there'd be more. And more. Until finally this empty planet, this universe, would be filled with Fredoes, living and being, just to live, be, and explore. And in a way, I would live on through them. Them: my children, the robots.
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