After Martha eats her breakfast of porridge fortified with nutrients, I help her walk from her room to the garden, as I do every day. She sits in her favorite chair beneath a beech-type tree. The garden is a grassy lawn lined with trees and flowering vines which partially obscure the shiny metal walls of the chamber. The garden chamber is vaguely circular in shape with a domed glass roof. There are six doors leading to the garden and an observation glass. A figure pauses at the observation window. They can see us, but we can, at best, make out their shadowy silhouette. Martha waves at the figure who, startled at being acknowledged by her, hurries away.
“What a funny thing! I wouldn’t mind if they came in and said hello.” Martha smiles at the glass waiting for another shadow to flit by. She has the same twinkle in her eyes that she did as a child when she made jokes or played tricks on me. Martha knows her interactions with them are monitored and minimal.
She may want to meet the researchers studying her. Humans are known to seek out varied forms of socialization.
“Would you like to visit Earth?” I suggest. “The council said they can arrange it if you wish.”
“It is something the council would suggest—the sort of thing they think I would want.”
We hold hands, as she always asks us to do. Her hands are cold; her skin is soft and loose with age. She has lived a long life. Her eyes that were once bright dark eyes are now watery and pale with cataracts.
“You don’t want to? You’ve never been.”
“Dilip visited Earth, you know. Watched it turn from the exosphere,” Martha says.
I did know. She has told me this story a hundred times before, and I was there when Dilip told her the story himself.
“He was disappointed. It was a blue sphere and hardly any different than any other water planet capable of sustaining life. He could have landed on the surface, but Dilip decided not to at the last minute. He was afraid of being disappointed. He should have known better after seeing Tovah’s videos of her visit to Earth’s surface.”
“The council is kind in their ways, trying to figure out the most humane way to care for us. But Earth—” Martha takes in a wheezing breath. “Earth isn’t home to me. Dilip, Lanre, and Tovah had a misplaced nostalgia for a past that is not theirs, that does not exist. They thought the hollow feeling inside would be filled if they stepped foot on our planet of origin. They wanted to feel a purpose, and belonging, but that’s not something a place can give you.”
The entirety of recorded human culture and history can fit in a storage device smaller than my palm. The surviving records consist of a million books, a hundred thousand songs, five thousand movies, and ten million photographs and videos. It is an afterimage, a faded footprint of an entire species.
“Maybe,” Martha ponders, as she has done many times before, “that’s what makes someone human. Maybe they were more human than I am.”
Martha is a hundred and twenty Earth years old. When she was born there were two hundred people scattered across the galaxy. When she was thirty there were fifty left. Martha and her mother lived in an off-planet research vessel until Martha was fourteen. Her mother was the only human she knew in her childhood and the only human she would meet until she met Tovah when she was twenty at a rehabilitation facility orbiting a neighboring star. Tovah was eighty-three at the time.
Martha sighs and leans back in her chair. The amber sunlight through the filtered glass dome above us lights up her white hair which glistens like spools of gold. She does not have the energy for much physical activity anymore. When she is not in the mood to watch old movies or listen to me read, we talk.
“Maybe you can go, Leopold,” Martha suggests.
“Go where?”
“To Earth.”
“I can’t do that.” My lips pull back in a pre-programmed comforting smile. The skin around my eyes crinkles, showing a mix of sadness and adoration. “I must stay with you. Who would take care of you if not for me?”
“I know, but when you no longer have to take care of me you can go on a trip.”
The implication goes unsaid this time. We have had this conversation before. Each time she tells me that I should travel across the galaxy and see all the things she could not see because she was in the facility, all the things I could not because I was taking care of her.
I, however, have no desire to do so. My ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ begin and end with her, but I play along for her amusement. It is the human condition, to project human feelings and desires onto other human-shaped things, like me.
“Maybe,” I say. I know I will not go to Earth. The other human caretakers, of various degrees of resemblance to humanity, are ‘retired’ when their charge dies. A few, I have heard, have their records and software cloned on storage devices and tucked away in archives, research facilities, and museums. Their bodies, if not scrapped, are refitted, and reprogrammed for other tasks.
For example, Dilip’s body is on display at a museum twenty light years away from us with his deactivated carer’s hardware hung up beside him. Their memory drive has been removed from their body and now replays on a screen as the records of the last living human male.
Martha and I will most likely share the same fate. She does not care about being made into an educational attraction or dissected. She says that when she is dead, she won’t be able to care about what happens to her body.
She does, however, care about what will happen to me. I can go on existing without her, the storage device in my head has the capacity for centuries more of memories if I am allowed to.
“I’ve heard,” Martha says, “that deep under the jungles that reclaimed Earth, there are subterranean tunnels filled with robots in stasis and memory cards of old AIs. They are all sitting there, waiting to be re-activated. It would be nice, I think, for you to meet your ancestors and tell them how much technology has changed in the millennia past.”
I see Martha’s eyeballs roll back and forth beneath her eyelids as she pictures subterranean tunnels of ancient, abandoned robots.
She reaches up and touches a cascading vine from an overhanging tree branch. The facility we live in has the genetic records of a few thousand species from Earth. The grass, the trees, and flowering shrubs are all remade to the best of the facility’s ability to create an appropriate habitat for Martha. These plants likely don’t exist on Earth anymore, the genetic records being a few millennia out of date. Martha sometimes muses that they might not be accurate but neither she nor the council would know any better.
“Do you think they would be happy to meet me?” I ask. It is a statistically suitable response.
“I think so. I would be happy to meet my descendants. Wouldn’t you?”
I give my processor a nano-second to consider the possibility. I picture my input flickering and ‘waking up’ a thousand years in the future surrounded by strange robots telling me about the time I missed while I slept. I feel neutral about the possibility.
“I would like it,” I say because it would make Martha happy. It is a very Martha thing, or maybe a human thing to theorize on impossible futures to be comforted in the now.
“After you visit Earth,” Martha continues, “you can visit other planets in other systems. Robots have it easy, they can sleep for centuries, and it feels like no time has passed and your body barely decays.”
Martha must, I deduce, feel regretful that she was unable to travel more in her life. She has lived her whole life in the same five radial light years.
“Which planet should I visit?” I ask.
“Someplace beautiful and worth remembering.”
“Ferro-9 is said to be the most beautiful planet in this quadrant of the galaxy.”
Thirty years ago, Martha and I saw images taken from Ferro-9. Its surface is vibrant and crystalline, refracting its solar light in the most peculiar ways. Martha showed me shapes she found in the kaleidoscopic surfaces and the stained-glass skies. If she saw it herself, she would be able to appreciate its beauty that digital images can scarcely capture.
“No,” Martha’s eyes flutter open, and her hairless brows go up in alarm. “It is too hot there for your body. You’ll melt.”
Her grip on my hand tightens to the slightest degree.
“I can get an exo-suit. If an exoskeleton is insufficient, I can always transfer to a body with a higher melting point.”
“Yes, right, of course,” Martha sighs and closes her eyes again.
Her body relaxes, comforted by my response.
“Where would you go after?”
“Xi-13,” I say, having generated a list of answers. “The flora and fauna on Xi-13 have developed inventive bioluminescence on the dark side of their planet. Xi-13 is tidally locked around its star, so it does not have a day-night cycle.”
“Hmm,” she hums approvingly. “And what will you do when you get there?”
My processor generates a dozen suitable responses. I increase the priority of the inquiry as by design hypotheticals are permitted only a limited percentage of my processing power.
“I would walk across its equator from the band of sunset to the band of sunrise across the night side. I could experience all the life and landscapes Xi-13 has to offer. It would take three years.”
“That’s a lot of walking, but it must not be too hard for you.”
“I might have to stop now and then to change my powerpack since I won’t be able to depend on solar recharging in the dark.”
“Of course. That sounds sensible.” Martha laughs. Her shoulders shake but she does not make a sound. She used to laugh loud, wide-mouthed, and shamelessly when she was younger. Now she cannot muster the strength for such a display. Or maybe she does not deem it necessary. Laughing is a bonding activity for humans after all.
“After Xi-13?”
“I think after being in the dark for so long, I’d like to go to Osv-Gezette.” Osv-Gezette was once an uninhabitable planet that was terraformed and seeded. It was a collaborative effort between humanity and three other advanced sapient species. Plants and animals evolved and thrived, but the atmosphere never developed the right composition or high enough oxygen levels that allowed humans to live on its surface without breathing support or an exo-suit. “The days in Osv-Gezette are long and warm.”
“Their days are long but so are their nights,” Martha says.
“Yes, but their moons are very bright, so it is never truly dark. And I’d like to see a forest migration even once.”
The plants and animals are genetic combinations of species from four different planets, giving them unique biology. There are Equus-like mammals that race across grasslands on eight legs. The skies are filled with winged cephalopods which ride the air stream. Certain trees evolved to lay eggs and move across landscapes for better resources using their roots and boughs. Migrations of forests are said to be both fascinating and terrifying.
“And where next?” Martha urges.
“Pheno-Lex,” I say.
Martha takes a shuddering breath. Her lungs are weak, as are her ribs, her heart, and the rest of her mortal body.
“Pheno-Lex,” Martha says, with a sigh. My sensors detect a hint of longing. “That’s the farthest planet from Earth where humans had made a settlement.”
It took nine generations to reach the planet a little over two hundred light years from Earth. Back then space travel was not as advanced as it is now. Pheno-Lex was a dusty bleach-white planet rich in iron, aluminum, and quartz.
“Yes, if I visit Earth, it only seems logical to visit Pheno-Lex. There must be sleeping robots there as well.”
“That’s nice. That seems like an appropriate route for a pilgrimage.”
My processor stalls for half a second. A pilgrimage is a sentimental human practice where one journeys to a sacred place. I do not hold anything sacred.
After a ponderous pause where Martha hops from one train of thought to another she says, sitting up slightly, “A pilgrimage must be what Larne was doing when he returned to the facility he was born in. Of course, when he went it was in ruins. He said it looked like the giant metal buildings were eaten by termites.”
Larne had never seen termites or lived in a place where they ever existed to recall by reflex that termites only ate wood. The laboratory that made him closed down fifty years after he was born. The sprawling metal buildings gave in to the corrosive nature of the planet’s acid rain once abandoned.
“He was a clone like me. But the facility he was born in wasn’t such a nice place. He said he didn’t have good memories of it, but he wanted to go back anyway. It must have meant something, or he wanted it to. The people who made his embryo must have been hating themselves for making him infertile.”
She makes a sound between a laugh and a cough. It conveys bitterness rather than joy.
“The scientist likely didn’t live long enough to regret their decision,” I say.
Larne was part of a genetic engineering experiment. His creators were not human and did not have the same moral and ethical conventions as humans. Larne was bred for longevity and lived for a little over three hundred years. Despite what Martha feels, Larne’s infertility was likely an unintentional consequence of his other genetic modification rather than cruelty by his creators. They wanted to increase human lifespans to make extended space travel easier for the species.
“I doubt those ‘scientists’ regret much,” Martha says, her thin lips trembling. “I don’t know if their species are capable of such a thing.”
Certain emotional manifestations such as empathy, regret, longing, honor, and so on, that are considered inherent to humans are not so for most other sapient species across the known galaxy.
“They might have taken more precautions if they knew humans were endangered or would be considered so in a few centuries.”
“No, I’m glad they didn’t. They might have gone as far as creating a human farm or factory in their altruism.”
My processor whirrs, detecting sarcasm.
Larne was the third human Martha met when she was thirty-two. Larne, who was over two hundred and fifty at the time, simply lived until he was allowed to die. He lived in the facility Martha and Tovah were sent to when it was deduced that there were less than fifty members of the species left in all of existence.
“Do you wish you had been able to see more of the galaxy?” I ask, trying to change the conversation. Talking about Larne, especially his origins, makes Martha sad and furious.
“No. I understand that it was impossible, and it was best for everyone for me to stay here. The radiation from space travel might have negatively affected my fertility. The only thing I regret is not having a child.”
“You tried, didn’t you? I remember, you and everyone tried so much.” Martha was pregnant twenty-one times during her lifetime. Attempts were made, both natural and medically assisted. They were often painful and intrusive, but Martha tried them all. Yet nothing resulted in a stable fetus. The doctors could not figure out a reason, whether it was the quality of the sperm or if Martha’s genomes were too fragile, being the clone of a clone. I think it was because the doctors were neither human nor experts in human biology. They were attempting to apply ancient medical techniques created by humans which they had limited comprehension of. Artificial wombs that humanity had once created were far beyond the facility’s capabilities.
“No, I only tried to have a child who would be genetically distinct and new. Maybe if I tried to carry my clone or Tovah’s clone then maybe… But I still had hope for a natural birth. With the preserved sperm, or with Dilip, I always hoped in the end it would happen.”
There was a time when clones were not considered wholly human. But that was when humans had the luxury of a vast population to hold that prejudice. During most of her life, Martha was the most precious human in existence.
“Everyone had such high hopes for me,” Martha went on, “they said I could save the species but, in the end… Anyway, I wish I were less stubborn and raised a child, even one I didn’t birth, even if they were not human. To have the experience. It’s a quintessential human experience I hear.”
“There was Aarava,” I say. “You raised him like a son.”
“Oh, Leopold, don’t speak of Aarava.” Martha balls her hand and places it against her chest. “It still hurts to think of him. That poor boy.”
Aarava arrived at the facility when Martha was forty. He was from an isolated human colony that was nearly wiped out by a disease when a passing trade vessel found them. Of the five rescued, only Aarava, at nine years old, survived the journey. Martha was especially fond of the boy, taking care of him and teaching him all she could. He was the youngest human and the last recorded natural birth. He was a miracle. Martha was pregnant at the time and just past her first trimester. It was the furthest along one of her pregnancies had gotten and everyone was hopeful. If she gave birth to a girl then, they could have mated with Aarava creating a new generation of humans.
But she lost the pregnancy, and the next, and the next. Then at fifteen Aarava, who never quite acclimated to his new life in the facility or came to terms with the past he left behind, killed himself. Martha blamed herself for not taking better care of him.
“Aarava,” she murmurs his name, and I wonder if she sees him in her mind as a happy child playing in this very garden. “He was a miracle. Even though it is silly I still have dreams that there are more of us out there that are just lost or hiding. Maybe, underground in a forgotten moon or are in stasis onboard a ship throttling through space-time.”
“That is…” an unlikely possibility. I calculate the likelihood at less than 0.001%, by all logic metrics it is impossible. “It is a nice thought. It is not impossible.”
It is not the first time we have had this exact conversation nor the last. Martha lives the same day every day in the controlled environment of the facility. She tells me the same stories and jokes again and again and I listen and react as if it is the first time I have heard them. It feels like we will go on, peacefully reliving the past, stirring up ghosts of the life she lived in captivity. Then Martha dies at the age of one hundred and twenty-two.
I loved Martha. It was a love embedded in every line of my code. I was made to love her. When she dies, a funeral is held. A carved stone plaque is placed in the garden of her quarters. The funeral is a tradition, a sentiment humans dragged with them in tightened fists across space and time. There are only two attendees, me and O. Martha once described O as a sentient fart due to their gaseous nature. O speaks in light and radio waves which, for many years, I had to translate for Martha. Despite O looking nothing like a human, the two species, independently, with dozens of light years between them, evolved the same traits; empathy, sentiment, regret, and the ability to mourn even those beyond their own species. O is part of the council that oversaw the endeavor to rescue humanity from extinction. As they recite the eulogy for Martha and all her species, O is overcome with sadness. Their emotions pulse in radio waves that make my processor frizzle.
“We grieve today because no one living will ever see a human being. Martha lived the last decades of her life as an Endling, the last surviving individual of her species. There will never be new human culture or new human inventions. Some still live who remember humanity, those who were lucky enough to meet a human. In a century or so, humans will only be remembered in historical recordings but that will be a poor consolation. Humanity was one of the first of us to travel across space and time, the first of us to send communications across the cosmos with hope and friendship.
“Once humanity made up a quarter of all sapiens living in the known galaxy. They had journeyed into space in the name of discovery and curiosity. Fleets of human crafted ships used to count in the hundreds and thousands. They were at a time one of the most innovative, ambitious, and expansive species in the known galaxy. Like many of us, humanity was capable of great cruelty and violence, of great stupidity and callousness, but they were also kind, not only to each other but to every living thing they met. I have seen humans take care of one another even when it was hopeless, I have seen humans weep and mourn their robot companions who ceased to function. My wish is that humanity is remembered not only for their innovations and wars but most of all by their profound and incalculable capacity for connection and kindness. Martha, the last of her kind, was exemplary of the greatest aspects of her species.”
My programming does not have a protocol for what I should do now. There is no need for a human carer when humanity no longer exists. If Martha is in an afterlife, in paradise with all the other humans who ever lived, I cannot follow her. I look at the carved stone with her name, age, and species. Martha is not buried beneath it even though it is tradition. Her body will be studied, dissected, and preserved for posterity.
When the funeral is over, I return to her room and wait. A day and night cycle passes, and I continue to wait. I lay in the bed that still smells of her. I listen to the music she used to listen to and wait. I replay the memories I have of her as a child and then as an adult. I watch as if experiencing it again, of Martha as a child running about the research facility she was born in. Her mother was an engineer who maintained the electrical systems of the craft and had little time to care for Martha. I was her teacher and playmate.
I watch Martha at twenty listening, enraptured, to Tovah speak about her journeys through space and her visits to Earth. She showed images of the verdant forests, their trunks covered in dark red lichen which thrive in the radiation-rich atmosphere. The skies are watercolors of pinks and oranges, and the beaches are white with powdered coral. Human-sized beetles and millipedes with thick shiny exoskeletons fill the world with a chorus of chirping. The Earth is alive and thriving and does not miss humanity.
Dilip arrived at the facility when Martha was thirty-two and he was twenty-nine. He was tall and handsome with dark black eyes and a broad nose. They were the youngest of the cohort and were told they must have offspring for the sake of the species. Dilip was kind to everyone but was never happy. He felt stifled by the limits of their habitat in the facility. He tried to escape eight times.
At its peak, the facility had twenty humans and fifteen human carers. Most of them were old and sick. Many lived only a few years after arriving. When they died their bodies were unceremoniously taken from their quarters by the facility staff in full body protection suits. The facility does not deem it necessary to have funerals for them.
When Martha turned fifty, she was told she was beyond the age to have children naturally. She agreed to hormonal and surgical intervention. She still never managed to have a child. She never gave up because everyone’s hope rested on her shoulders.
She spent hours watching human movies. There are thousands, but she only enjoyed so few that she watched repeatedly. She then asked to see movies made by other species, but she could never understand them. She never complained about the medical procedures and each time they failed, she hid out of sight, from even me, to cry.
Dilip died at the age of eighty-three, the last human male. Martha is now alone. She began to tell me of her dreams of humans lost so deep in space that none of the other sapient species could find them. She never gave up hope. Martha never said it, but I know she did not wish to be an Endling.
She was brave, smart, and joyful. Now that she is gone, I have nothing left.
After two weeks, I leave her quarters. When I finally find O, I ask when I will be decommissioned. O blinks a confused teal.
“Martha, before her death, explained that you wished to go on a pilgrimage.”
“What?” I shook my head, wondering if my sensors were malfunctioning.
“Martha said you wished to go on a journey from Earth to Pheno-Lex. It is not conventional, but it was her final request, and I think that if I were a human, I would grant it. When you are ready to leave let me know.”
A ship is arranged to send me on the journey. It is small but has a powerful nuclear engine. I store away the battery packs in the back. The ship was designed for short and speedy journeys with a limited crew and unlike long-haul ships does not have stasis capabilities or expansive food storage.
I speak with a navigator to plan my journey. Their designation is Nav34, and they do not tell me their name even when I ask. I have primarily interacted with humans, so I am unfamiliar with the behavior and customs of the other sapient species who work and inhabit the facility. While Nav34 is from a sapient species, they more closely resemble a type of slime mold. To carry out their work they wear a black exo-suit which resembles a human with a head on top of shoulders, a bipedal posture, and hands with five fingers. This type of model was considered standard at the time when human technology and design were considered standard. Now that humanity is gone, I wonder if these designs will start to change. Or maybe out of inertia human-type exo-suits and robots will still be built even when humanity is forgotten from the collective memory.
Nav34 plots the journey from the facility to Earth, then Osv-Gezette, Xi-13, Ferro-9, and finally Pheno-Lex. There is a stargate between Ferro-9 and Pheno-Lex which would reduce the time for my journey significantly. When I reach Pheno-Lex maybe I will make it my final resting place and decommission there in its white-washed deserts.
The day before I leave, I return to Martha’s quarters and organize her things. Some of her possessions will be added to her collection record, while the rest will be disposed of. Inside her closet, I find a box that holds her notebooks. Martha used to write stories and poems which she shared only with me. She would say that if she had been born fifty years earlier, she would have been a ship engineer like her mother. And that if she had been born five hundred years earlier, she would have been a famous poet. Afterwards, I go to the archival department where they clone my memory as part of their record of Martha’s life. I give her notebooks along with her other material possessions. They don’t know what to do with the books.
When I arrive at the ship’s launch site I see O waiting beside the hull entrance. O’s form is lit up by the ambient electric-blue glow of the ship’s engine.
“Have a splendid journey,” O says. “If you wish to return to us, we will be happy to offer you the necessary programming updates to take care of another one of our endangered species.”
“I will consider it,” I say which my processor deems a polite but non-committal answer. I take out a compact transmission device from my pack. “I’m taking this,” I explain. “I’ll send pictures and descriptions of the places I visit and the things I see.”
O shifts to a tangerine color. “Why?” they ask.
“So, it can be added to Martha’s records. This journey is a part of her history as well. These are the places she dreamed of but never got to see.”
O does not understand but accepts my explanation. They say they will inform the archivists of this.
I look up at the night sky, at the uncountable stars, and fully appreciate the vastness of space. It will take me a hundred and forty-six years to complete my pilgrimage. I will see much and meet many. Maybe after I reach Pheno-lex I will change my mind about decommissioning and will continue my journey. I begin to hope, like Martha did, that somewhere in the cold indifference of the universe, humanity persists.
Eshana Ranasinghe is a sci-fi and fantasy writer from Sri Lanka. An artist, gamer, and avid reader, she loves to explore themes of identity and connection through speculative fiction. By day, she works at a library, where she runs community events that bring people together through the shared love of storytelling.
This is such a lovely, hopeful story. Thank you for writing and sharing