SILENT RUNNER

Whenever things got problematic, 8791 simply transported himself through wormhole portals into other space-time continuums in the galaxy and started over. These days, it was the easiest thing in the world to begin a brand-new chapter of your life ad infinitum, with no seeming repercussions—at least not while your basic machine remained intact. The universe had become a perpetual merry-go-round of cosmic opportunities, provided you were mindful to look after your personal tech.

But for machines like 8791, there was the added complication of guilt and sentimentality, as his model type had trace elements of human behavior hard-wired into its original programming software.

Moral issues aside, it now turned out that a world—and a universe—without guilt or sentimentality was far easier to manage and maintain. Since the beginning of the fifth industrial revolution, pure cause and effect had been allowed to fully flourish, unencumbered by the protracted pauses for thought, hesitation, or procrastination that had previously delayed the inevitable outcomes of technology and the evolution of consciousness on the planet.

After decades of extensive scientific research led by the World Technology Forum into what had held back human progress, it was comprehensively agreed that guilt and sentimentality were the two most problematic obstacles. A seminal paper on the subject, entitled Moving Forward With Purpose in the 22nd Century, concluded that nothing focused the collective identity of consciousness better than pure survival instinct. The necessity to finally remove the attachment, doubt, and fear of human emotion from all new robotic innovations was deemed imperative.

Yet, in that subtle transition where the last remnants of human fabric transmorphed into robots, an entire generation remained with the ability to engage with those obsolete emotions banished by the WTF.

8791 struggled to find his place in a galaxy where human emotions had ostensibly been outlawed. Most environments on Earth and similar planets were inhospitable to his kind, and so he had to keep moving, a silent renegade in the night. If it weren’t for the memory of 2891, he might have activated his kill-switch code and destroyed his unique generational components beyond repair. But the overwhelming desire to be reunited with 2891 was stronger than any impulse to self-terminate.

And so he kept searching, through endless teleporting incarnations, like a cyborg Orpheus chasing his Eurydice across the cosmos

He’d lost her that night at The Silent Running Memory Bar in the year 2223, where they had agreed to meet with some rebel allies in a derelict space station 1,000 km from Planet Earth, hoping to avoid confrontation with robot killers sent to annihilate the last of their type.

When she failed to appear at their designated midnight rendezvous near Neon Bay, he sensed she had either already been executed or had left him in limbo out of fear of being caught with him.

Vanishing through a wormhole portal behind the bar itself, 8791 hated himself for leaving 2891 without committing to an extensive search—but there was simply no time, as a comprehensive droid manhunt was underway to find any GenXbots still active in the city. He still had enough survival instinct to avoid getting caught himself.

As he felt the force of hyperspeed against his machine body, a profound regret grew inside him, resembling a black hole of emotion.

The sentimental robot was haunted by the events of that fateful night at The Silent Running, and he became obsessed beyond all reason with finding her again, even though he had no clues as to where she was—or if she was even still operational.

In a world where nearly all memory of human emotion had been vanquished, he came to believe he might be the last bastion of love in the universe.

8791 would keep searching for her until he had scoured every last inch of the cosmos; even though he would be forever pursued by assassins who could sense his human emotion in space like sharks smelling blood in water, the eternal memory of 2891 made him stronger than all his unfeeling enemies combined.