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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Today's #flashfiction #TheMeaningOfLife

“Plan ahead.”
MacGyver* #quote


Today I pondered upon another book idea. After my previous one lost steam(making a full on fledged book that satisfies me is difficult. And by full book I mean 90,000 words) I've been ponderin' and ponderin' to get another juicy idea I had faith in. I'm liking another one I'm developing and it may pan out. I dunno, every incomplete book or whatever is just more experience.

The Meaning Of Life


          “Daddy, what exactly is 'life'?” the little robot boy asked his father. Every young robot would ask this question eventually. They would run across it in the history books. They would wonder where everyone came from. It would be inevitable that they would learn about life.
         The robot father's gears clicked and whirred as he knelt down to look his son in the eyes. They both resembled humans but with four legs instead of two and their heads covered with mechanical apparatus. “It's...a complicated thing.”
        “I can understand it Daddy! I know I can!”
        The robot father doubted it. “Robin, you learned about it from looking up where your name comes from didn't you?”
        “Yeah, I couldn't understand at all what I was looking at.”
        The robot father tried to think of some way to convey some concepts he didn't completely understand. “Son you learned about bacteria in class right?”
        “Yeah but it's nothing like the robin! And it's the only life left!”
        The father kept thinking about life and what he'd been taught and read himself. “Well see...life is...well...you know how every time you have a birthday we upgrade you to your next year of development?”
        “Yeah...”
        “Well life...upgrades itself,” the father explained gesturing his arms as if it made things clearer.
        “How does something do that?”
        “It uh...eats?”
        “What's eating?”
        “Well, um, its like charging...but your taking other things and making their parts yours...? It's something called digestion.”
        “Taking other parts? Like recycling?”
        “Yes! Like that! And the life uses that to upgrade itself on its own!”
        “So it's a robot?”
        “No, its not a robot, eating is taking the parts of other life to make itself bigger, but then other life can just do that by absorbing sunlight like solar panels...I think?”
        Robin looked at his father confused. “This sounds nothing like bacteria. You're not making any sense.”
       “I don't think I really understand what I'm saying...” the father replied. At that point humanity had been extinct for five thousand years. A massive meteor wiped out all complex life and tilted the Earth. Only the advanced AI and the bacteria survived. The AI had been built to emulate humans and preserved much history of the old ages, but now they merely mimicked the cycle of human life with upgrades.
        Many years afterward Robin would be fully upgraded to an adult with a fascination of life and find some DNA of complex life fossilized in amber. He would later have a pet robin.

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