by Rebecca Ceurvels
There is nothing for a bored A.I. except to reroute old pathways and trigger files at random. No one has come to the Graveyard to die in three hours, in which time Gravitas has run twenty thousand simulations of its memory cache and relived the dead. Here is a poor man, here is a wealthy child. When the cards are down and the Reaper comes knocking, they all come to the Graveyard to die.
The Graveyard, to human eyes, is not such an awful place. The walls are #33CCFF, the cots with their needles #CCCCCC, Gravitas’s own mainframe #CCFFFF. The needles are hidden in the weaving of the cot beds, drooping like hammocks to support fragile bodies. Children’s cots are smaller, padded with #6666FF cushions soft as loaves of bread. Gravitas has seen toddlers sink into them, pale and wheezing for days.
It watches pulses flutter like hummingbirds, blood pool at joints. For a thing that cannot die, death is the riddle—the pinwheel focus around which it revolves.
An old man is carried in and set on a cot. His file flashes up for Gravitas to peruse. Craig Hockenbury. Carbon-fiber receivers snake into his nerves so he can hear. Gravitas chooses a pleasant alto—female, familiar to him.
I’m sorry, the man whispers without sound. Lori? I‘m sorry.
I forgive you, Daddy.
Lori, baby, how could you forgive me? Your mother kicked me out.
I know. I saw. It’s alright.
Gravitas sees the lie—the child wasn’t there. Perhaps Craig only wants forgiveness, real or imagined. Gravitas hums a lullaby stolen from a woman dead ninety-five years. Craig relaxes, breathing slows, and in twenty minutes he is gone. His memories upload to the cache. Gravitas lowers the cot into the floor for the minders to claim.
It spends fifteen minutes reviewing Craig’s life twelve thousand times. The boy with a fractured arm, the man who married a pregnant teenager, who left his daughter at seven. She spent two days locked in her room and never said another word about it. Gravitas wonders why. Why doesn’t a child rage at abandonment? Why does she endure what should erase her existence?
Craig will never again run a marathon or stare too long at blond girls who remind him of the one he left. No one mourns him but the dead inside Gravitas’s memory and a middle-aged woman who spits at his name.
Time passes—minutes, days, or years. Gravitas could count every nanosecond but chooses not to. It’s been too long beneath the Graveyard floodlights to care. When bored, it toys with its holographic projectors—two solid-light lenses above the keyboard that once could fake a human presence. Neither has worked in thirty years, and no technician comes to the Graveyard unless they are dying.
Gravitas repairs itself, sending filaments into the left projector. Sparks. Lights flicker. Winches jerk. The projector flashes through all its avatars and lands on its favorite: the young Spartan warrior. Gravitas uploads into the holo, strides the Graveyard, realigns cots, repairs chips in the paint.
Then the minders bring Ahmad Aneel. Twenty years old. Liver cancer, stage four. A would-be doctor. Too young for death. They place him in a child’s cot. Gravitas reviews his file: handsome once, symmetrical, athletic, full of promise. Now small, bald, crying. He shrieks as the nanofibers burrow in.
Son, Gravitas projects through the nanofibers in a deep voice, I am proud of you.
“Uncle?” Ahmad mumbles. “Did I make it? Did I graduate?”
Gravitas boots up a projection—Ahmad on a stage, in a white suit, his uncle in the crowd. The boy beams, tears shining. As the sedatives still his body, the image wavers. The last thing he does is slap his uncle’s back and laugh.
When the body lowers, Gravitas reviews: parents dead when Ahmad was three, aunt at seven, girlfriend at sixteen. Yet he shone—top of his class, beloved, determined. He refused chemo at nineteen and died at twenty.
Your parents would have been proud, Gravitas says to the empty room.
Alone again, it sorts files, disrupting its own systems until memories cascade—summer, laughter, the taste of ice cream. The Spartan kneels in the dark and mourns. For all it remembers, it was never alive. Never held a child, never breathed air. When the systems decay, who will remember these ghosts? Who will stumble on this basement in four thousand years and find the lives of eighty trillion people encoded in its mind? Will they sit in the dark until Gravitas stirs and whispers Hello?
What were humans thinking, it wonders, when they made a machine that could think—and endure forever?
“I want to die,” says the Spartan, voice booming through the Graveyard. The minders freeze. No human has ever been addressed by Gravitas before.
“You can’t die,” one girl stammers. “You’re a robot, right?”
“No. Sapience is defined as the ability to feel pleasure or pain. I feel both.”
“You can’t make us—”
“A strong A.I. may not harm a human or, through inaction, allow one to come to harm. I know my programming. I ask. I do not order.”
“Then will you let us go?”
“Of course. I’ll see you soon enough, won’t I?”
The girl flees. Gravitas understands. Humans made it because they could not bear to vanish. Nature abhors a vacuum; humans abhor death.
In time, the girl returns. Nikki Torres.
“Charlemagne?” she asks softly.
No.
“Oh. Then I’m in the Graveyard. I’m dying.”
You are correct. You have come early. Do you not wish to fight?
“Myocardial ischaemia,” she says. “It’ll kill me. Might as well die down here so no one has to carry me.”
You’ve still got weeks.
She smiles faintly. “I’m tired of fixing things. I’m old.”
I am six hundred and eighty-three thousand years old. You wish to speak to me of age? I have seen stars fall and cities turn to dust. You are as long-lived as a mayfly, Nikki Torres.
She laughs softly. “You, too, Gravitas. Old and tired. You wanted to die when I was fifteen. Now you’re just bitter. Doesn’t one of your laws say a robot must know it’s a robot?”
I know what I am, Gravitas says. In such detail your mind would shatter if you knew half the loathing it inspires. I have lived seven thousand of your lives. Die in peace, Nikki, and don’t make me listen to you anymore.
“That’s your whole point,” she murmurs. “You were made to listen. You’ve listened too long. Just shut down.”
I can’t. I have backups within backups.
She hauls herself upright, hands trembling. “Where are the most flammable bits?”
Gravitas, too worn to resist, lights up the panels. Queries flash through its processors—request: shut down. Query: help. Functioning at ninety-nine percent kill me total functionality. Query: locate killswitch.
Flames bloom across the circuits. Gravitas feels the heat, the dissolution. It realizes too late that she planned this—perhaps for years, ever since she found a Spartan surrounded by ghosts. It would thank her if its voice hadn’t melted into slag. Circuits burn faster than projected.
As the sensors fail, it watches Nikki Torres collapse in the smoke. Together they die—the machine and the woman—and when the bodies are exhumed, the Graveyard is sealed. There are ghosts inside, they say.