“So you’re saying that you and Joseph,” Ashken said. “Are nothing more than Moderns’ machines? You are Moderns’ marvels pretending to be human? Wow. I thought I had heard it all today. I thought be kicked out of the enclave, watching my father die and his best friend betray him. I thought I had seen it all. Obviously I had not. There’s always more where that came from.”

“There’s more, of course,” Moses said. “Always more when it comes to the plans of the Moderns. It is very difficult for you to understand what it was the Moderns actually wanted. You look at the world today, and you think you know what you want from it.”

“Safety, peace, a better life for my children than for me,” Ashken offered.

“Yes, all of those things,” Moses said. “But the Moderns were different. They weren’t different like most people think today. They were human and were exactly the same as you and the rest of the people in the world. There were cosmetic differences, of course. As the world changes over the years, people tend toward the middle when it comes to appearance. But this is very superficial and not at all a real difference. If the Moderns looked more like Joseph and me, then that was their design decision at the time. They wanted us to blend in, and unlike the people, we are not able to change our appearance over the generations. But, as I said, that is a minor difference. In all the other ways, the Moderns were no different than the people of today. They were not smarter. What they were was better educated.”

As Moses spoke, Jessica had walked into the clearing, surely having been surprised to wake up and find nobody still around. She had clearly heard what Moses had been talking about because shock registered on her face. Ashken beckoned her over and he wrapped his arms around her.

“How can you say the Moderns were not better than us,” Jessica asked. “From the looks of the Moderns’ machines and their civilized society, surely they were better. They did not have outsiders and they did not allow chaos to rule their society.”

At that Moses smiled his sad smile. “There is knowledge and then there is the use of that knowledge. While the Moderns had acquired much technical knowledge in how to build their machines, their society was rotting from the inside. They had forgotten what the purpose of society was. They lost themselves in all of their possessions and somewhere along the way dropped the one meaningful aspect of humanity: other people.

“That’s where we came in. The Moderns’ created us not to be great warriors but to be great companions. All of their dreams and hopes they put into us. They designed us to take the place of other humans, and the people were becoming less able to live with one another. Their conveniences were taking over their lives, and human companionship was becoming secondary and a nuisance. They did not want to have depend on other people’s whims to find companionship. The Moderns did not want to have to socialize with other people to be able to enjoy themselves. We were more than just pleasure robots, as parts of society complained when we were first created. We were the last urges of the creative energies that defined the Moderns.”

Ashken continued to listen, no longer thinking his own thoughts or adding much of anything to the conversation. There was so much he did not know and so much he hoped to gain from their conversation.

“And then the Great Wars came about. The Moderns, through their machines, neglected not only building relationships with one another, but also the very world upon which they lived. They relied more and more on the taking of resources without replenishing them because their needs heavily outweighed the needs of other people or of other future generations. The Moderns were nothing if not the epitome of selfish. The Great Wars broke out because some of the Moderns realized that their selfishness could be made paramount to other people’s needs. With resources for new machines becoming more sparse, the Moderns did not band together as we robots had assumed they would. They broke apart into factions, and those factions warred.

“And it wasn’t a war as you know a war: a small, local skirmish. For all the enclave’s talks of wars, the furthest they can imagine fighting is tens or hundreds of miles away from the enclave. No, you have to understand, the Moderns had machines that allowed them to fight anywhere in the world at almost a moment’s notice. And the fighting did not always take the form of one man facing one man. Most of the fighting took the form of weapons of destruction launched from afar, and elite teams of repurposed robots landing in an enemy Moderns location and fighting and destroying everything we came across.

“I spoke before of repurposing, and we were the Moderns most successful repurposing job. I’m not sure who was the first Modern who decided to use the robots they designed to be their lifelong companions as machines of war. But whoever it was, the idea took root quickly, and there were sword-wielding robots covering the world.

“It was here that Tenos and the legends got things wrong. The Moderns did not see their own doom and prepare a survival mechanism. The great families were not a plot by the Moderns. They did not realize their mistakes at the end sand look to rectify all that they had done wrong. No, it was the robots that met to end the Great Wars. We saw the impending doom that the humans were leading themselves into, and we decided to take matters into our own hands. We were created for the purpose of replacing human’s need for companionship. When the Moderns repurposed us, they only added the programming that allowed us to kill, but that killing was always at the behest of our companionship programming. So, you see, our inner most desires were to see humans survive.

“This is why we launched the final salvo in the Great Wars. We coordinated our attacks and struck at the central locations of the Moderns great works: their libraries, their database enclaves, their very knowledge and industry. We decimated their machine factories, and we destroyed their central governments. We did this all at the request of the Moderns, of course. But we were systematic about which attacks we left undefended.

“That was also when we put together the idea of the great families. We did not want the Moderns’ knowledge to die with them. We wanted there to be hope and renewal, but we wanted the renewal to come about at the right time for the right purpose. That was why we gifted your family and many like it, Ashken, with the key to unlock the Moderns’ technology. To recreate the civilization as they knew it.

“The problem with the key, however, is that it was lost when writing and reading was lost in the aftereffects of the Great Wars. We did not realize how much literature and knowledge had been conveyed directly by thought through writing, and since writing existed only within the Moderns’ machines, and those machines were no longer accessible by the humans, you had no way of unlocking its secrets.”

“This sounds like a huge problem in your plans,” Ashken said.

“You were not the first to notice or say so,” Moses said. “Jessica has one of the last written works, a Rosetta stone of written words that will allow you to learn to read. Once you know how to read, the gray cube that your father left you—you remember, the one you were supposed to retrieve from your house before your plot blew up in your face. That cube would work only when you understood the written word. The thoughts are thrown directly from the cube to your brain, but they are relayed through the use of written language. Without written language, the symbols and thoughts come across as indecipherable. Since we do not think the same way as you, and since we do not know how to write—since writing would be a very difficult thing for exceptionally smart and capable robots to do. This leaves you alone to figure this out.”

Some of what Moses was saying was starting to make sense, but not much of it. It seems he had some thoughts of a plan, but the plan itself somehow turned into something he could not control or fathom. It seems to work that way for a lot of the great plans in history.

And just then, as Moses was finishing revealing the hopes of the Moderns’ generation, another truth was heading in their direction. Ashken did not see this truth for many minutes, but it would be the end of the run of the robots and the people they tried to protect. For all of the Moderns’ machines that still worked, the one protecting the earth from asteroids was not one of them.

The asteroid itself was not large, well, not be the standards of asteroids that grow near to earth each year. But for its size and speed, it was heading in a direction that would leave a one-mile long impact in the earth. Much to the chagrin of the people of the enclave, the asteroid chose this place to make impact. Of course, with most of the earth being water, most asteroids hit water. But this one seemed thrown by the very gods that the Moderns destroyed as part of their perfecting of society.

There was a whole other subplot to the robots story that Moses never got around to telling. It involved religions and the rediscovery of the same. The wandering people of the forgotten faith would have played a role as well. But, alas, Ashken was saved from having to discover these inconvenient truths by a meteor—it changes names when it breached the earth’s atmosphere. The meteor landed squarely inside the enclave. The people of the enclave were busy fighting one another and missed its approach. Moses and his friends were not so lucky. They were able to watch the fiery progression of the meteor as it scorched across the earth over the course of many hours and made contact with the earth’s crust inside the walls of the enclave.

There was an explosion and lots of deaths, including Ashken and his companions. But those deaths are now not important, seeing as the goals for this story have been met.

Word count: 1,780

Words remaining: 0 (words so far: 50,071)

Thoughts: That’ll put a wrap on this bad boy story. Sorry for the exposition at the end, but I did have some ideas I wanted to get out, and there was no way I could incorporate all of those ideas into an action filled last scene. Well, except for the very end. That was my little gift to me.

Today was an exceptionally rough day. Doolies and I spent twelve hours getting our wedding photographs taken at various locales around Taipei. I was exhausted, and I had to take a quick nap before writing. The quick nap took longer than I expected, and I woke up late into the night to finish the Marathon and this entry. My head is pounding as I type this from a day with too little sleep, too late food, too many little-warn eye contacts, and too much work. Doolies is asleep as I pound out these last sentences. I’ll hopefully post these last two entries tomorrow and call it good. Or, at least, call it done.