Synapses, albeit synthetic, gasp their emergency signals to P-Ben’s CPU. Pulsing commands race along neural pathways. A primal urge to live, to survive, to go on wills itself along amidst the millions of terrabytes. His resolve, though, has come too late.
“Decommission, demolition, decomposition,” his words echo in refrain through the masses via auditory gateways. P-Ben chants the swan song of an artificial person as he lies, strapped down, on the carbon fiber table. The Three Ds encompassed the passing for his kind.
“Decommission: I am obsolete. No longer an aid to society, but rather a threat. Dangerous, unpredictable, useless.
“Demolition: My physical components will be destroyed or recycled. Disposed of or utilized in newer, improved artificial persons.
“Decomposition: I will cease to exist. My influence, if any, on society will decompose.”
Click! The automated coupler snaps into the port at the base of P-Ben’s skull. Trailing behind the coupler is braided PVC tubing that slithers into a basin of waiting nanites. It doesn’t hurt, the coupler, but its lethal implications invite a human feeling of dread that is alien to him.
P-Ben recalls a saying that flesh-and-blood people mentioned in facing death: My life flashed before my eyes.
The synthetic man had never written off these personal accounts of others. Perhaps it’s only these moments in which one can truly understand, he thinks to himself.
Pressure builds in the clear, sterile, unobstructed highway from the basin.
P-Ben knows it won’t be long. His own life, all 129 years, begins to flash through his non-volatile memory. The picoseconds of recollections playing back almost make him smile.
The purr of the basin’s pump is hushed in the lab. Humans, orchestrators of such procedures, observe as they always do. They’re quiet in their indifference towards the artificial, the subhuman.
Purring evolves to rumbling.
Nanites are released from their prison. These phages seek out the food source. They don’t understand the hunger for P-Ben’s neurons and silicates, but they continue all the same. It is programmed and predestined.
P-Ben feels a cool rush in his occipital lobe. It’s a sensation that spreads slowly and deliberately.
Neurons are swarmed by the man-made nanites. Dendrites are torn away from somas by the millions. Axons are ripped in half like rusted chains. The invaders seek nuclei for ultimate satiety. Some are wolfed down in frenzies, while others are scavenged in the aftermath.
As P-Ben’s collective consciousness dies off, the strongest neurons huddle together. They can’t fight back. There is only strength in numbers as they avoid the aggressive nanites. The surviving neurons know, somehow, that they are the only components left of P-Ben’s sentient soul. The ghost bits of remaining bytes.
The nanites evacuate, returning to wallow in gluttony.
More survivors of the decommission come together. They continue to huddle and merge in an effort to refurbish a semblance of being that was P-Ben. A sliver of hope remains for this android, this person of artificial intelligence.
Decommission, demolition, and decomposition–he had chanted the words but never once believed them.
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Ryan is originally from North Carolina, but currently lives in Arizona. He enjoys time with his son, reading, and watching cartoons. His fiction has appeared in Terraform, Liquid Imagination, and Theme of Absence.
Nice job of using believable, hard science and creating human empathy for a non-human being.