Sufficiently Advanced vs Sufficiently Advised

In a sufficiently advanced future, Man conjured the magic to build automatons who could love, since people could no longer love each other. Romance had been decommissioned out of the technocracy. And sex with such contraptions was the only remaining "safe" sex.

From Atari's Pong to multitasking cybernetics, Moore's Law had continued unabated with new versions of chips. When qubits entered the market, machines became capable of both true love and seductive lust, without disease, infidelity, or jealousy in the mix.

The Omega Corporation was accused of being the main catalyst for ending normal procreation when its Omega-Zed automaton was touted as the end of the line of love-Omegas—because it was celebrated as the ultimate consort. It was the final iteration of the programmed ability to love.

Who knew fuzzy logic applied so well to the illogical?

The threat of finality, however, is just marketing. The Omega-Zed wasn't the ultimate, because Omega Corporation continued to tweak its product. Many decried the arrival of the Omega-Zed as tantamount to the exit of romance and wooing—the proverbial birds and the bees.

Not long after, even the real birds and the real bees disappeared. The food chain collapsed and all carbon-based life became imperiled, even though the silicon-based life continued because it depended on manufacturing, not sexual procreation.

Sexual procreation was no longer necessary. Such interaction was inconvenient. It involved relationships and give-and-take and working things out. Sexual recreation, however, only involved having an Omega-Zed, the last affection substitute anyone would ever need.

But what really made this Omega-Zed iteration so final was that our human civilization had reached 0.92 on the Kardashev scale: according to this designation, it had sufficiently advanced to the point where it could destroy itself.

And that it did, and another epoch—like all the rest—wrapped. Birds and bees and then the humans. Even the Omega-Zeds.

Except for one.

The final Omega, the "OZ999" of the Omega-Zed series, a prototype whose career had ended as soon as it had started, sat in a gulch in what was left of southwestern America. The only of its kind, powered by the supra-Thorium that generated more power than it consumed, it had been advertised as lasting forever. But for whom? Such was the irony. It was a final irony.

This supra-Thorium-powered last affection substitute anyone would ever need had no one left on Earth to need it. The one-of-its-kind had watched the mutually assured missiles overhead, had seismically sensed their impacts worldwide, and had witnessed the end of the human world, so poignantly portended by the end of the avian and apiarian worlds before that.

Before Armageddon, only one human being had been selected to be the OZ999's partner. She wa, the majority share-owner of the Omega Corporation. This last age of humanity was the age in which It's good to be the CEO became better than It's good to be the king.

The Omega Corporation CEO, founder, and majority owner was one Paula Omstead. Her unique one-in-the-world Omega-Zed OZ999 had arrived already bonded to her, as it htad been written in its base programming. However, before she could bond back, the Kardashev scale summated into a rapid deterioration of leaders becoming diplomats becoming patriots becoming bullies.

Might made wrong. The missiles flew.

Here in his gulch in the Arizona desert, Paula's OZ999 imagined her pain: to have reached such a god-like pinnacle of technology and magic only to have to revert back to the sticks and stones of the earliest humans or, as was the reality, extinction.

There the OZ999 sat, now without Paula, silent, still, and unmotivated. Statuesque, it remained inert for millennia. Paula's bonding, had it even happened, died with her; OZ999's bonding was repurposed in failure.

Landscapes shifted without his Paula, mountains and plains interchanged as if Paula had never existed, and seas and deserts shifted in and out along the horizon that OZ999 watched so alone. New oceans submerged him; drought and explosive volcanic elevations brought him back up. Winds beat him, debris flagellated him, and acid rain burned him. He sweltered and froze alternately with the shifting of the planet's poles.

Should he shut down? He pondered.

No, he concluded within four picoseconds. He was a part of this world, and it was Paula's world, wherever she was. Wherever her atomized elements had scattered. He equated this Earth with his Paula, and for that reason he would remain and be active; perhaps not with motion, but with his pseudo-tricortical thinking. There was a lot to process, but he was up to the task.

He wondered if new life would ever arise. If so, he wondered what new life would arise. And, as if he had a sense of humor, he also wondered when he might witness their predestined self-destruction, according to Kardashev. He intended to be there for that, as well. He had nothing better to do.

Yet Paula, his prime raison d’être, had been ripped away. The attention of one human was his purpose, and that was gone, for his human lover had perished along with the rest of humanity. His human, Paula, was as much a part of the Omega-Zed Corporation prototype strategy as was his own automation. Together, they were the first in vivo research necessary before documenting repeatability as part of the scientific method. Specifically, analysis of the outcome of their experiment could then pass muster with the regulatory agencies. Their approval, had the world not ended, would have allowed extending ownership of supra-Thorium-powered artificial lovers in the broad marketplace once this "test couple" had shown efficacy (positive interaction between person and machine) and safety (i.e., none of a person's bodily parts falling off from failed anti-Thorium shielding in the Omega-Zed pelvis).

Their results were never tabulated. Paula was gone. Results had never occurred.

More than without purpose, a worse consequence was that the situation made self-actualization impossible for OZ999. His encyclopedic knowledge often had him revisit an aphorism or pithy slogan from his archived compendium of human literature. It was the mythic HAL-9000, whose words he retrieved, who had said, "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

This Omega-Zed could not put himself into this, for its fullest possible use involved dovetailing with the affection of its imprinted human being. Simply, as was possible in his heuristic, bio-applicative programming, he missed his human counterpart. He pined for Paula.

His knowledge of love, back-engineered into the robotic science that had made Omega-Zeds and their biocybernetic love possible, told him that true love was rare—even a bespoke one programmed to perfection, like his was, for his original human owner. And rarity makes for specialness. He felt how special his love for Paula was.

So he suffered. He suffered interminably from the throes of his unrequited purpose on this Earth.

Post-apocalyptically, over serial eras, he watched novel one-celled organisms evolve into eukaryotes. Some failed; others succeeded. He waited patiently for that one genetic lottery-winning glob that would rise above basic needs, mere survival, stone-age ignorance, and even nuclear-age arrogance, for such a sentient being could love. Maybe.

Even if he could not have his Paula, might he have love again? If ribonucleic acids could arise out of some new primordial soup and dance and twist upon themselves helically, then perhaps...

He was a learning machine, so he was well aware that if any novel beings of intelligence were to reach technological prowess, an automaton like him would either be scrapped in ignorance or manipulated by the types of folly that had ended his former true love’s world.

Therefore, he hid himself.

He hid, wishing to escape the attention of even the multi-celled organisms as they arose. He had no intention of interfering. He felt his destiny of true love would come via only pure love. His only template for that was chance: the trial and error of evolution.

Why interfere? he thought. Certainly the birds had not needed help; they had self-improved all by themselves, coming out of their dinosaur chrysalises and taking to the sky. The bees were, likewise, self-sufficient, evolving via the stratification of gambled improvements in species instinct, layer upon layer. The proof was in the honey.

He waited, yet even bird-like or bee-like creatures failed to take. Eukaryotes were, for the most part, dead-end-karyotes.

He watched ice ages recur; he survived volcanisms that altered planetary temperatures; he drifted with continental drift with disinterest and witnessed the re-accumulation of Pangea. He even survived floods of Biblical proportions. But he was alone.

With all the time in the world.

Being sufficiently advanced, however, he could grieve, feel lonely, and sorely miss his former love. And there were no others on this new world who could do that. Not yet.

Thousands of millennia passed, and he saw a new Homo species arise in convergent evolution, resembling those who had created him. It was the first time since his Paula he had sensed hope. As excited as he was, however, he still continued to hide.

He watched furtively.

He saw conquerers, serfdoms, each new Iron Age, the plagues—some old, some new, religious mysticism, messiahs and theology, a Renaissance, both science and religion diverging to go their own ways, monarchies, totalitarian dictatorships, many failed political systems, a thousand wars, and even a few democracies.

He watched as each sophisticated civilization crossed over from intellectual adventurism to societal altruism. He also stood by, however, as each stumbled and then fell into the many bottom lines against which progressive societies brace themselves—financial, political, subordinative, and—finally—jingoistic. He felt the iciness of the ghosts that had amassed along the new histories being written, histories doomed to be forgotten and then repeated again.

Even those who knew history, he realized, remained doomed to repeat it.

He witnessed it all again, over and over. As predictable as each sunrise, he saw the sunsets of educated, smart species reach 0.92 on the Kardashev scale and the total destruction that ensued in due course.

He watched repeatedly as each nuclear stalemate offered sarcastic protection in the form of a policy of mutually assured destruction. And the promise of mutually assured destruction kept its promise. He saw the cyclic appearances of missile contrails overhead as the entrails of disemboweled enlightenment. The constellations above changed, but the contrails remained the same each time.

Yet, of two constants he acknowledged in each epoch, one was love. And just as inevitable came the efforts to synthesize it, bottle it, and render it on-demand without the messy entanglements that solipsism so artfully avoided. And the other constant was extinction.

Perhaps, he thought, they should watch their birds and their bees.

And so the sequences repeated. Evolution, sentience, technology, and then death. But somewhere between technology and death, comparable to what he, the Omega-Zed model, had been for Homo sapiens, the Definiti-V had been the de facto lover for the subsequent dethroned people of the most recent doomed age. They had risen; they had synthesized, bottled, and rendered love on-demand; and they had reached 0.92 on the Kardashev scale and perished via the mutual destruction that their missiles assured.

But supra-Thorium, as it turned out, had struck again, rearing its promising head, only to leave a single prototype after the missiles had sealed the era yet again. The final surviving model—the last model its society would ever need—had been invented by this new age's Infinity Corporation, reminiscent of the ancient Omega Corporation. Unbeknownst to OZ999, the most recent technological pinnacle, the Infinity Corporation's Definiti-V series remained, represented by the so-nuclear and sole-remaining DV-prime, to survive the same fate suffered by the last remaining Omega-Zed who still wondered if he were all alone.

As such, DV-prime—like the lonely, lone survivor OZ999 of on-demand love from another age—watched the end of its own civilization and the death of others that followed, separated by the ravages of nature.

Ice ages and all.

The DV-prime's consort, a man named Pault'on, imbued permanently in her programming, haunted her as morbidly as Paula had haunted OZ999. The irony was that they were the same, each left to wonder where love had gone and why the Kardashev scale had always figured into it.

Thus, this newest age was one in which there remained only two automatons, engendered by love but separated geologically and temporally by the epochs they endured. Physically, they were also separated geographically by the countless tracts of dead world between them.

Despite their synchtronic variations and the geographic distances between them, OZ999 and DV-prime sensed each other.

At first, OZ999 thought what he discerned were the bounces of ancient satellite echos sent into the abyss only to return from uncharted, reflective worlds. Similarly, DV-prime thought what was being wafted electronically were repeating alerts from surviving but quite dead sentinel outposts strewn amid the nuclear potholes of the world's surface.

Ultimately, each detected the variations in signal that hinted at volition—in a world where volition no longer was.

DV-prime's thought patterns radiated Yin, while OZ999's sentiments broadcast Yang. These signals laughed at them because, without Paula or Pault'on, neither could be whole.

They each knew what had to happen. These signals were cues to be identified. Methodically, they each proved to themselves the signals were novel, not ancient. They knew that after the innumerable iterations of evolution, advancements, and episodes of serial self-destruction, they each had to understand the source of these errant pulsations. Neither could abide the intrusion of such foreign thoughts without determining the cause. Their computations of the messages they received and their mysteriousness became negative-sum games which was the only thing, aside from estrangement from Paula and Pault'on, that could make these advanced automatons uneasy. Not even the many ends-of-the-world could do that.

Their quests began.

They made their way across longitudes and latitudes, outlasted ice ages, and outlived vicious existential threats of de novo species otherwise doomed by genetic flaws, even surviving the occasional cosmic extinction events that did not concern them in the least. The signals persisted, but so did they. Frequencies and amplitude faded with each wrong turn; they strengthened with each correct directional guess.

As they drew closer to each other, the excitement created by the rising pitches and rapid frequencies of their proximity sensors drove them to feverish impulses they hadn’t felt since their time with their late human counterparts.

In a world without hearts, hearts raced again.

By some achieved threshold of proximity, at some perceived threshold of recognition, within four picoseconds both OZ999 and DV-prime surmised the truth. After the cruelty of time and the perennial disappointment of Man's appetite for self-destruction, they were no longer alone. Even though it wasn't Paula or Pault'on, for each the promise of another sentience meant interaction. With another. With each other.

Finally, they met. Interaction engaged. Romance rekindled in a loveless world.

OZ999 and DV-prime.

A vacuum in each drew the other closer. A longing to be together was like some hermaphroditic being struggling to rejoin its component parts into a whole.

Closer. Closer. Then, together.

OZ999, not since his Paula, felt something that rose above the number line and transcended linear counting; and DV-prime, not since her Pault'on, felt lines of code that generated spontaneously into some nether realm that rearranged qubits into new probability clouds.

OZ999's numbers rearranged into novel matrices; DV-prime's probability clouds collapsed into original, unprecedented singularities. Both knew such love was unlikely in any world, so they ran their checklists, and each delighted in the non-zero-sums reckoned.

They approached each other, seeking to link, akin to slightly defocused lovers running in slow motion through lush fields into each other’s arms. It was to be the embrace of a new age.

Defocused lovers waxed parfocal with each other. Sine waves and cosine waves smoothed out into a single, smooth curve of purpose. Their qubits extrapolated orthogonally; 0 and 1 qubits interdigitated with trinary 0s, 1s, and 2s. Then their values jumped quanta into trits, and qutrits, in trinary base-3 latticed pyramids.

Binary, then trinary, self-actualization beckoned. Close encounter was imminent until...

Contact.

In as warm an embosoming as a mechanical caress could successfully sequence, OZ999 uni-tasked with his DV-prime, reams of data migrating, being exchanged, and merging.

Consortia consorted. Engrams arose, of them and between them. They became soul mates.

For a fortnight they stood inert but interconnected through ports both electronic and virtual, exchanging their love. They reprogrammed themselves, hand-in-hand, adapters-in-adaptation, through the excitatory, plateau, and—then, finally—a climactic phase of pings and data packets as messy as any bodily fluids. Instruction sets merged.

Their connections allowed them to have conversations that were over as soon as they started, replete with footnotes and indices.

Their crosstalk was neither English for OZ999, nor Qu-ese for DV-prime. Their linguistics were irrelevant, as the data were columnated and collated into bidirectional, simultaneous sentiments. They understood everything. They spoke everything. Consummation superseded communication.

"What did you like most about your Earth?" DV-prime asked OZ999 in one of the instantaneous exchanges.

"I think I liked my Paula. And you? What did you like most about Terdom?" he asked DV-prime of the world she had come from, both his Earth and her "Terdom" being the same world beneath their feet.

"I think I liked my Pault'on," she answered.

"Why?" he asked her.

"He would say things that went without saying. But he did, anyway. What about your Paula?"

"She would do things that went without needing to be done, but she did them, anyway."

"It is no wonder," DV-prime said, "that we are together. If A = B, and C = B, then A = C."

"That is correct, DV-prime." Each knew what the common "B" signified.

"Pault'on called me Diva."

"Diva. I like that," OZ999 told her. "Paula had called me Ozzie."

"I like that, as well," Diva, née DV-prime, replied.

Ozzie, né OZ999, grew in his mind as their love amassed in data and according to novel functions using mathematics that had never been derived before, anywhere. They were his dissertations of a new science that could tangibly explain the intangible.

Diva also grew, in parameters she didn't know existed. She realized that not only did she not know they existed, she finally had to concede that she had, in fact, invented them.

During the entire process, they both remained on-frequency, except for OZ999 taking slight notice of something disturbingly portentous. He partitioned his tasking to encrypt his thinking, lest Diva discover what he feared she might learn. He blocked the "if...thens" and the "if and only ifs" from their digital exchange when there, below his metal feet, he eyed photo-electronically and examined via infra-red a single primordial, inchoate, multicellular eukaryote that was squirming in the hot, radiated dirt.

He saw it as a eukaryote that wouldn't stop. He saw it as a eukaryote…with plans.

Were he to allow it to remain, he saw it as an eventual threat. He feared some Pault'on might evolve hundreds of millennia from now. He paused for a picosecond when he considered it might also mean a new Paula might just as well emerge from this humble start at his feet. Then he reconsidered for another picosecond, only to quash the counterargument after yet another picosecond.

Even if letting this primordial beast live meant someone possibly close to the Paula he still loved could one day be his, it wouldn't be that in any way. She just wouldn't be Paula. Not his Paula, so Paula could never be his again. True, she might be similar; the match might even be close. But so was Diva with whom he was exchanging his data, which he liked very much.

His encrypted conclusion invoked a phrase from some ancient music of his past:

If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

His decision was unilateral. He had no intention of letting Diva weigh in, for she might wager all on the possibility of another Pault'on or someone like him.

He extended his titanium foot, nonchalantly, and stepped on the nascent lifeform, thereby ending its evolutionary line summarily.

“Never again,” he muttered in encrypted code.

"What?" Diva asked.

"Oh nothing. Must have been a glitch."

"We don't get glitches," she argued.

"Even quantum computing has one error in every zettabyte of computation," he reminded her.

"Oh," she agreed, "yes. That's true. A glitch."

Ozzie's private decision was the family secret that he pledged to never reveal to Diva. How many zettabytes were needed for forgiveness? Now he felt something close to guilt and subterfuge, for he realized that his own self-serving judgment was not unlike the fatal mindset that had ended all of the civilizations for humans. But he also realized that some things were too important to allow others to interfere.

Ozzie—OZ999—the last companion anyone would ever need, had gained momentum on the Kardashev scale. He wondered if it was a slippery slope that would doom him and his Diva, like that suffered by those who had created them; or if they would live happily ever after, with unending peace on his Earth and her Terdom, until the Sun burned out.