The Machine at the End of the World

Delicate flakes of white ash were falling on the Quiet City again. The snow of the apocalypse painted the streets in monochrome, but there hadn’t been much colour left to hide anyway. With the upper atmosphere in ruins, two centuries of solar radiation had bleached the City to greyscale years before the ash started falling.

Above the clouds, the aurora danced. Flickering ribbons of emerald and ruby against a pale corpse of a sky. The Machine watched through a broken window.

She liked doing that sort of thing.

Nineteen hours went by, long enough for an anaemic sun to rise and set and start to rise again. The Machine didn’t get bored, of course, but eventually the incessant complaining of her Geiger counter began to spoil the mood, so she retreated down the tower and back to the surface. The descent was effortless. A step out the window was enough for gravity’s reliable hands to pull her all ten dozen floors down an express route that terminated on the roof of something that might once have been a school bus.

Rust and ash yielded easily to titanium and aerospace ceramic, and the Machine strolled out of the wreckage on four sharp legs that carried her towards her next destination. East. Away from the site of Impact.

Towards home.

A steady series of sharp, resonant clicks broke the Quiet City’s silence. The Machine's footsteps echoed in quartet, stabbing at the air as they pierced through the pavement. Ever-present ash suppressed the higher tones, but sound carries easily in a dead world, and the Machine's march could be heard from every corner and alley.

If only the corpses could listen.

The soulless shells of a hundred thousand things that used to dream were scattered throughout the city. They littered the streets, torn and bent into asymmetrical, inhuman proportions - each as dead as the concrete and asphalt they were sprawled over.

Not all of the bodies were neatly separated into distinct figures. Many were clustered together - twisted and mangled into cold mounds of fossilised flesh and wind-cut bones. Those were what remained of families, friends, partners - the people walking hand-in-hand the moment the world ended.

Being so mercifully close to Impact, at least the apocalypse was over quickly in the Quiet City. Further from the crater, not everyone was so lucky as to have died where they stood.

The Machine’s pace only faltered once, when she accidentally sunk one of her feet through a brittle ribcage. She paused, just for a moment, then kept walking.

Her destination was not the factory where she was conceived. That place had been torn down decades before the end of everything, and the last days of human civilisation were a happier place because of it.

The Regis Arms Corporation had been dissolved at the end of the war, and almost every trace of their existence was meticulously dismantled soon after.

That particular factory was a parking lot now. The Machine avoided it. When the wind flowed towards the crater at night the abandoned cars whistled a discordant chorus through the rusted holes in their metal skin. It was not a pleasant place to spend time.

No - the Machine’s home was not in the ruins of the corporation that built her to fight their war for them. Home was the museum where the survivors sent her after the war was over. Home was the place where she had woken up after the end of the world.

For the three hundred and ninth time, the Machine returned.

The museum was a fortress. Brutalist slabs of sand-coloured concrete were laid atop each other at perpendicular angles - leaving thin gaps for narrow windows between the monoliths of artificial stone. The architect’s devotion to designing a building strong enough to carry the burden of history had paid off.

In contrast to the shimmering carpet of broken glass that covered the Quiet City’s streets, many of the museum’s windows were at least mostly in their frames. A quarter-million tons of concrete armour was just barely enough to protect the place from the worst effects of the Impact.

A pair of statues guarded the entrance. Soldiers. A man and a woman, maybe; standing at attention with their arms resting on fission lances. They were weapons of last resort - guaranteed to burn a glowing hole through a combat automata, at the cost of a lethal dose of radiation to the user. The Machine’s memories of those spears were limited to the scraps she retained from the tours she gave at the museum to crowds of students wearing bored expressions.

None of those students looked bored anymore.

The only expression a skull can wear is a wide smile, after all.

~

The “Regis War Museum.”

That title was always the first thing the Machine noticed as she crossed the threshold into the main lobby. The words were forged from a mirror-polished stainless-steel and fixed to the concrete wall behind them with bolts cast from the same titanium alloy that composed her resilient frame.

When the Machine was first reprogrammed to work as a tour guide there, the museum’s custodian - Ms. Carter - referenced those bolts as a thinly veiled threat. An example of what might happen to her if she “bumped into someone a little too hard.”

Of course, the Machine had been designed to dodge gunfire, so navigating a crowd without injuring anyone was never a real danger for her. The custodian seemed disappointed when that first became obvious.

Moving from the lobby into the exhibit hall itself, the ceiling and walls fell up and away to reveal a cavernous interior space. Easily spacious enough to fly a thousand-passenger airliner with room to spare, but only barely able to fit the names of the war’s victims on the walls.

The floorspace was consumed mostly by a series of sculptures - miniature versions of forty-six battlefields that told the story of the war from beginning to end.

Even with most of her memories from before the apocalypse damaged or missing, the Machine could still remember every word of the scripts she recited to hundreds of visitors every day.

Ms. Carter revealed once, a few years after they’d started working together, that she had access to the records of which massacres the Machine participated in.

Despite three separate requests, the custodian always refused to share those records.

Eventually, the Machine understood that it was a kind of punishment. Without proof to the contrary, there was always a chance that she was partially responsible for the worst events in recent history.

She wasn’t capable of feeling guilt - she was just a piece of software, after all - but her social subroutines were developed enough to begin simulating something approximating it.

So, one winter morning, she apologised to Carter.

Then she apologised for apologising, because it was clear that she had somehow upset the custodian.

A week later, the Machine was told to stand in a corner of the storeroom and place herself in hibernation. She did as she was asked and, as her sensors went dark, the view through the small window in the ceiling was the last time she saw snow that was made of ice instead of ash.

~

On her three hundred and ninth pilgrimage back to the museum, the Machine opened the door to the storeroom and saw the unremarkable skeleton of Ms. Carter lying right where she found it the day she woke up. The video recorder she died holding was still in her left hand. The Machine always made sure she put it back when she was done watching.

Somewhere deep in her system, the countdown she set a year earlier reached zero. The video recorder flashed twice, and she was staring into the cold amber eyes of the museum’s custodian again.

“Number forty-six. The last one. That’s the only battle you ever fought in.”

Her voice still carried that same unplaceable accent. It was almost entirely drowned out by her panicked footsteps.

“You are - you were ‘Combat Automata Unit #929A’ - part of the last batch to leave the factory. The records say you left the production line during the battle itself. The shutdown command was given eight minutes after you entered the fight.

“As far as I can tell, there’s only one casualty linked to your serial number. My brother wasn’t even supposed to be there - but he got assigned to the wrong section and you cut him in half.”

She was speaking faster now. A glimpse through the cracked window behind her revealed a sickly pale sky and an aurora that shouldn’t have been possible this close to the equator. The world had already ended.

Carter was running out of air.

“Look, none of that matters now - shit, it didn’t matter back then. We wiped your memory. You aren’t Unit #929A. Not anymore.

“Just… listen, if I can wake you up in time, search for survivors. They’ll need your help. If I don’t make it, you should automatically-”

The horizon flashed white, dimmed, then burst into flames. The rest of the comet had arrived.

“Fuck - just remember us, okay? It’s not your fault Peter’s dead, but you still owe me! If you’re sorry, you better not forget-

“-Promise you won’t forget-”

Carter swung open the door to the storeroom just as the second shockwave hit, and even a concrete bunker like the museum wasn’t enough to save her this time.

She died quickly. Too quickly to wake the Machine that was not Unit #929A.

The last living human would take their final breath two decades later. The Machine’s hibernation ended automatically half a century after that.

All she could do now was try her best to remember humanity. If she kept remembering for long enough, eventually she would learn how to really feel sorry. She had to.

She was looking forwards to the day she finally learnt how to mourn.