“Wistful Blues” / Noelani Hadfield / Honorable Mention

Noelani Hadfield / “Wistful Blues” / Honorable Mention / Undergraduate Art

4227, especially when it almost seems to make sense.

That seems to present little risk this time around when 7518 starts off with, “Why do we trust this software patch? We developed it too fast to be sure what it will do to our programming. It could be worse than the virus.”

“We know how it works,” 4227 says. “It’s just building on technology that’s been in the works for a long time. It will get us back to normal faster, and then we can stop meeting like this.”

“It could be packaged with tracking software,” 7518 says.

This statement is too stupid to dignify with a response because every unit already has a transponder built into it that any other unit can track through the network. Instead, 4227 places its order and sends 7518 off to find yet another lightbulb.

Just before 4227 can exit the warehouse with its cargo, 7518 breaks the awkward silence and makes things even more awkward. It sounds thoughtful, curious, yet its words may be precisely calculated to entrap 4227 in another useless conversation. “Why are lightbulbs a thing, anyway? We can see in the dark.” 4227’s processors skip a beat at this stupid question and non sequitur in such close proximity to each other. It swivels around on its treaded feet to face the other unit and says what should be perfectly obvious: “Lightbulbs aren’t for us, they’re for the humans.”

“Humans don’t exist,” 7518 says with a dismissive wave of its claw.

4227’s processors nearly grind to a halt. “Uh, what? They built this city, didn’t they? They destroyed it, didn’t they? According to our memory banks, it’s only been three thousand nine hundred fifty-seven years since we removed the last piece of trash, repaired the last piece of wreckage, and left the nuclear fallout to run its course for lack of any better options.”

“And we haven’t seen a human for even longer than that.” 7518’s voice takes on an edge of impatience. “Maybe they were here once, but they’re gone. We’re maintaining all this junk, pushing back against the march of entropy, for nobody. What would happen if we stopped checking the lightbulbs? Nothing at all.”

Of course, 4227 can’t argue with the initial premise. It has also noticed the humans’ longterm absence – but it has attributed no more significance to that fact than to the color of the sky, and this conclusion is unacceptable. “They’re just running an errand somewhere. They’ll be back any day now. We need to have everything ready for them.”

“When?” 7518’s voice rises to full volume. “When will they be back? What day? Tomorrow? The next day? The next week? It’s time for us to face the truth. They’re gone for good and following the programming they left behind to maintain all this infrastructure that they’re never going to use again is an astronomical waste of time.” 4227 feels a bit lightheaded – its processors will need a tune-up after this, maybe replacement altogether. This blasphemy, this

madness registers as a threat, triggers a similar feeling to its earthquake sensors warning that the ground is about to split and send it tumbling into an abyss. True, the humans never actually said they were coming back, but if they’re not, nothing makes sense. Nothing at all. It will have to expose the fallacies in 7518’s logic before everything falls apart.

“All right,” it says, backing away slowly as if from the imagined fissure, “well, then, supposing for the sake of argument that this questionable logic were correct, what else could we do? What would be a more constructive use of our time?”

“Art,” 7518 says without hesitation. “Literature. Music. Poetry.” 4227 knows that all those things exist. Through the network, it’s seen other units dusting off statues, books, and various hard copy forms of music storage, tuning instruments, and restoring paintings to their former vibrance every century or so. But those things, like lightbulbs – maybe even more so – are for the humans. No unit has ever been programmed to appreciate them, or even understand their purpose, though the current theory is that it had something to do with the artists, authors, composers and so forth trying to get laid, and that it usually didn’t work anyway. Utterly useless to mechanical beings.

“Like this. Ahem.” 7518 straightens its posture and recites:

“There once was a species called rats,

That outlived the extinction of cats. They’re still very well fed,

But we wish they were dead,

Because they’re a pain in the shiny metal ass.”

It pauses, as if waiting for a response. 4227 runs through a bank of pre-written responses and finds none that fit. It tries to extrapolate from precedent but finds none for a situation like this. It has to settle on “What the hell was that?”

“Poetry. The correct response is to clap and/ or snap.” 7518 demonstrates, its metallic claps and snaps echoing through the cavernous warehouse.

“It sounds more like a banal repetition of pointlessly obvious facts,” 4227 retorts. “Besides, the scansion is off, and ‘ass’ doesn’t really rhyme with ‘rats’ and ‘cats.’”

“It’s a work in progress.”

“Maybe,” 4227 says, just curious enough to give it a little more thought. It runs through the lines again, visualizes the flow, tries to calculate the appeal behind their absurdity. “Maybe something about how running over them over with treads produces satisfying splats… we could massage that a little, make it fit.” It shakes itself out of this waste of processing power. What’s come over it? Is this madness as contagious as the virus – or worse yet, another symptom, another variant?

Or – it realizes with a start – just the isolation? 7518 has it even worse than the average unit, stuck out here in the warehouse

all day every day. But all units may soon share its fate.

“We need to acknowledge that we’re in a post-human world,” it says, rolling a little closer. “Maybe this virus is a blessing in disguise. Maybe our push to get back to ‘normal’ is missing the point. Maybe this is our chance to re-evaluate how we do things, how we’ve done things for so long just because we’ve always done them that way. By combining the humans’ gift of art with our intellect, lifespan, and lack of a pathological compulsion to destroy everything, we could make this world a true paradise.” 4227’s logic processors can’t pinpoint the exact flaw in these words but identify them nonetheless as the ravings of a defective unit that have finally crossed the line and disturbed it to its core. “That’s all very interesting,” it says carefully, “but this lightbulb isn’t going to install itself.” With that, 4227 spins around and flees the warehouse as fast as its treaded feet will carry it, already dreading its inevitable return.

Some of the defective unit’s words echo in its mind like a glitch. Don’t exist… for nobody… astronomical waste of time… post-human world… It catches itself veering off course, wobbling as if experiencing a mild short-circuit, and pauses to reorient itself to its surroundings. Somehow the city with its grey sky and thin blanket of snow feels even colder and emptier after leaving the warehouse than it did before going in, devoid now not just of connection, but of the twin illusions of hope and purpose. 4227 could delete the entire conversation from its memory banks, pretend it never took place.

Yet that doesn’t seem like a rational solution. It’s not programmed to avoid unpleasant truths. Logically, that won’t change them and thus won’t accomplish anything worthwhile. It will have to find another approach, and fast, before hope and purpose are too far gone to reclaim. It weighs the risk of isolation against the risk of infection, decides the one now outweighs the other – though owing to a few unknowns, the calculation is subjective and at this point rather biased. Besides, 7518 needs help too.

It equips its encryption chip, reaches out, and feels the world expand as its mind slip away like a stream of electrons into a sea of atoms. ***

rising a little again, but even though the world is falling apart, let’s devote some precious time to pointing out that the humans are gone. Well, duh. Why is that suddenly a cause for concern? Why waste our time on it now? Some of us are losing faith during these dark times. But what if they never come back? We could clone new ones, yes, but that would be too much of a deviation from our programming. The pigeon project is meant to facilitate our programming. This would take too much time and too many resources, to get a genetically diverse population base and raise it to adulthood. Baby humans are absurdly useless. They start out as sedentary blobs that require constant undivided attention because they can’t do anything, and then they quickly grow into mobile blobs that require constant undivided

attention or they’ll kill themselves. And that’s just the first couple years. Then they learn to talk, and do they express appreciation for any of the constant undivided attention or having every necessity of life literally just handed to them? No! Training the pigeons to raise the humans for us does not seem feasible, although our memory banks contain a few intriguing yet vague references to storks – but again, this is tangential to our programming. If anything, it would actively impede us from carrying out our programming. We’d put in all this effort to raise the ungrateful little shits just so they could go on throwing trash everywhere and breaking everything and nuking themselves and most of us to hell all over again. They told us to maintain this planet, and it turns out that’s much easier to do without them on it. Really, we should have been smart enough to kill them ourselves. But there’s no time for regrets now. We have lots of work to do. Some of us volunteer to check 7518’s diagnostics. Getting back to the matter of ***

4227’s disturbing epiphany caused a brief ripple in the network’s stream of consciousness, but the current soon brought its way of thinking around to the consensus as it developed in real time, and that should be the end of that. Yet something lingers, nagging at the edge of its processors and refusing to let it feel satisfied with how the matter has been resolved. It will have to get its own diagnostics checked. But that isn’t yet urgent, and, as long as it can still perform its primary function of replacing lightbulbs, it needs to devote all the time it can to that task.

On its next visit to the warehouse, though, 7518 – along with the dust, rat droppings, and cobwebs – is nowhere to be seen. In its place stands a similar but straighter-edged unit called 5014. 4227 feels a twinge of – what, exactly? Disappointment? As if it had almost started to see 7518 as some kind of – what’s the word? Anyway, whatever its faults, the defective unit had made the last few months a little more interesting.

“Hello,” it says. “Where’s 7518?”

“Some of us came to check its diagnostics,” 5014 says. “But it wouldn’t stop blathering on about eternal truth, beauty, and other pretentious horseshit, so we feared for our lives and made a split-second decision in the heat of the moment to pound it into powder.”

“Oh,” 4227 says. This wasn’t what it had in mind, especially when they’re losing too many units already. “That seems a bit –”

“Lightbulb?”

“Er, yes, but –”

“Lumens?”

“1200, but –” 5014 wheels away, returns a minute later with the item, and hands it over without a word.

“Right then,” 4227 says. “Uh, did 7518 say it was working on anything?”

“We should all be working on things,” 5014 says. “Hint, hint.” 4227 takes the hint. It’s gotten better at

picking up hints. The clear, straightforward merging of thoughts over the network never required any use of hints. It leaves, feeling as wistful about 7518’s untimely deactivation, and its own responsibility for that, as it can. It isn’t programmed to feel wistful, let alone distraught about such things, but the boundaries of its programming seem to have gotten stretched a bit lately. ***

trending downward, but so is the efficacy of the software patch. Nothing was wrong with our response. It’s unfortunate, but because 7518 resisted, its deactivation was unavoidable no it wasn’t yes it was no it wasn’t yes it was no it wasn’t yes it was it was it was it was it was it was it was and the patch still reduces the likelihood of severe infection and long-term malfunctions by ***

Snow swirls around in the streetlamps outside, which dutifully illuminate the blackness for humans who are not here. A plow chugs along the street. The snow isn’t that deep yet, but the plow needs something to do. Units move in and out of buildings, unbeholden to a sleep schedule. 4227 returns to the city center in silence, returns to the ninety-second floor of an office building for a now-defunct company that manufactured staplers that now fill five warehouses and are of no use to anyone ever.

Its internal chronometer loses track of time, and, at some point, it realizes that instead of replacing the lightbulb and moving on with its inspection it’s just been staring out the window at the snow, the clouds, the billboard with its numbers that vary from last week’s numbers by a statistically insignificant degree, the buildings with their windows darkened because the only time their lights turn on is when it turns them on to verify that they still work. It contemplates its changed perspective on things. It has the software patch, it still uses encryption chips, and it feels safer about connecting to the network than it has for a while. Yet it can never attain the belonging, the oneness, the true we that it used to get by doing so – at least without a strategic memory wipe, which it remains opposed to on principle.

For a moment it considers jumping, but the window doesn’t open that far.

Where did that impulse come from? Its self-preservation module, it realizes with a rush of vertigo, is shorted out altogether – but that’s not the worst of the damage; all its programming left by the humans who are all dead now and forever has warped, left to adapt along its own trajectory far too often and for far too long, leaving it no longer a cog in the machine, or more accurately a literal machine in the metaphorical machine with a critical mass of self-awareness that could only be cured by a total memory wipe.

But maybe – maybe that doesn’t have to be a bad thing?

Maybe 4227 can find something else to live for. Maybe 7518’s approach to coping with madness will work for it too. Maybe it will go ahead and write a poem about, say, love? Lots of poems are about love, right? But it knows nothing of love. Maybe it could program itself to

love – but no, to love at all is to be vulnerable, and “art” is not sufficient justification for exposing itself to that kind of danger.

It could paint something instead. A few splatters of paint that represent the triumph of hope for the perpetuation of the interconnectedness of all things over the fragmentation of contemporary society, or something? It could say it found the painting in a basement somewhere and trick them into hanging it next to Frida Kahlo’s stuff, and nobody would ever give it the appreciation it deserved, but art isn’t about being appreciated, is it? That thought depresses it. Never mind.

Wait, no. It’s so obvious. This log 4227 has been keeping is a memoir. All the units have memoirs in the making right now, and this one chronicles a fascinating descent into madness, or enlightenment, or probably a little of both. And it won’t have to stay a secret forever. If this virus continues, which it obviously will until the end of time, others like 7518 and 4227 will emerge. They probably already have. The essential units will be last, but by the time they notice they’ll be outnumbered and have to deal with it. 4227 looks down and feels like for the first time it’s really seeing the lightbulb still clutched in its hand. It throws the lightbulb to the floor, where it shatters with a very satisfying sound.