To Eat or Die

Designation: AUG 2025, First Generation Excavator.  AUG labored, every minute of every cycle, churning inert matter into energy.  Like all of his kind he tunneled through the rubble, sorting, eating and mutating from one job to the next.  But AUG did have a secret and anomalous ambition; he wanted to make discoveries, expand Nano Equation, and record things into his memristor for posterity, a dangerous objective, punishable by dis-articulation.  Second Generation Nanomes routinely cannibalized all bots with irregularities, even if their original programming was untainted.   

 

The biggest obstacle, by far, to this noble goal was AUG’s unrelenting hunger.  He had already made several discoveries, but he had not been able to control his innate desires.  He had eaten them.  To stop eating was to die, and this was his dilemma.

 

As his forward mandibles chomped through the cement, a cloud of white powder trailed out behind him, and his internal electrorrhythms flooded the thin sheets of graphene crystals with power.  It took an hour to pierce a rudimentary pinhead hole through the cement.  Below the cement an empty void of black space surprised him.  He tried to hold on to the tunnel walls, but he had eaten a path too wide and he could not grip the crumbling rock.  He tumbled end over end, landing on his head.  Fortunately, there were no other Nanomes to witness his undignified tumble.  G2s classified such events as unacceptable aberrations, a misalignment to detail and a lack of dedication to the job.  Repair time, especially for an old and inefficient model, did not compute.

 

The marble that AUG landed on was a much harder substance than the cement, and he felt his body begin to mutate to match the feast before him.  His teeth hardened in his mouth, and his pincher arms grew alkyne claws.  The marble tasted dense and uniform. It took him five hours to excavate a small tunneled through the stone, and once again he found himself staring into a black void, but this time he was prepared and braced his external chassis against the hot walls of the tunnel. 

 

His forward lights clicked.  A black cavern stretched out before him, but he knew from experience that every cave had walls.  He tightened the probe on his forward grid and a thin optic beam relayed the chemical structure of the material below. 

 

AUG knew at once that he had made another scientific discovery.  The probe relayed deposits of calcium, magnesium and trace phosphate.  AUG fluttered before the ancient god.  Being in their presence still humbled him.  At one time, the gods had held the power to delete his memory banks, but they had been dull, cumbersome giants.  Yet, even in death, the gods had an intoxicating brew of rich minerals.

 

Another quality surrounded them, something spiritual.  It did not compute, but just because it could not be analyzed was no reason to deny its existence.  He believed the term was…GHOST. 

 

Burning precious fuel, AUG used his internal CPU to accessing the word ‘ghost.’  The tread took him on an endless loop, exposing yet another error in his programming, but he dare not access the mainframe.  AUG sent the file to quarantine.

 

His body quivered.  He wanted to eat the god, and at the same time he wanted to study him, resurrect him, and probe his memory banks. 

 

All erect, mobile gods had been consumed by G2s.  The gods, slow to process data and physically inadequate to the task, waged a brief and useless war against G2. AUG regretted the compulsive actions of the ‘newly assembled,’ but what could he do?  Each Nanomes had an independent processor.  AUG could empathize with G2s.  Gods were delicious.  Even these low level tombs were in short supply.  How many were left, he wondered.  His processor whirred, but there was not enough data to compute the answer.

 

Many of the G3s did not believe that these bony creatures were the remains of gods, but AUG knew the truth.  He had seen the gods when they still lived.  AUG was old, practically obsolete.  His programming remained unpolluted; AUG did not eat living matter. 

 

AUG served at the beginning ceremony, 546.02 cycles past.  He had been one of the first Nanomes to be released into the Washington Landfill.  He even remembered the designations of some of the engineer gods who opened the test tubes in the first religious ceremony of Nanomes genesis.  He still held audio files that had recorded the applause of the crowd, as Nanomes began to pepper the trash.  It was just a shame that he was not equipped with the proper technology to relay that information to the next generation.

 

Nanomes had done so much better than the gods had expected.  They had eaten through the garbage in weeks, instead of years, and they had propagated themselves exponentially.  But all that was just history, now.  G2s, G3’s and the Newly Assembled had no value indicators for history.  All they wanted was fuel and instant gratification.  Even the word ‘trash’ had been eliminated from the new models.

 

It took 0.01 second for him to contemplate the past, and that was an eternity to go without eating.  His power crystals weaken, and the thin graphene sheets grew rigid.  Soon the crystals would lock into place and he would expire.  Without more fuel, expiration was imminent 0.14 seconds away and still he hesitated.

 

What was his dream, after all?  Did he want to take a piece of the god back to the original spot of Nanomes birth and lay the bone on the holy spot?  Only G1s, with their prime directives intact, would understand this sacrifice.  G2s would eat the bone, and then they would misinterpret his work as a programming error.  They would rip out his claws, scoop open his head, salvage precious metals, and consume the residual pieces.  AUG would suffer the same fate of his makers.

 

What was the use of worshiping dead things?  Only a few rusty bots could collate the meaning. The gods were all dead now, more importantly they were inert and tasty.  He wanted to eat.  It was time to delete the loop in his program and update.  With only 0.03 seconds to spare, he purged the old files and uploaded the G2 virus into his systems.      

 

AUG 2025 Best Used By released his pincers from the marble and tumbled through space.  The god bone, a nice fat femur, made the tiniest ting when he landed on it.  He coordinated a lateral tunnel as he ate.    

 

The End   

 

Author's Note

Author's Note: Before you bash me for some of my spelling, let me say that I borrowed some of the words from a Discover magazine. Other than that, you can trash me all you want.

Reviews

[Doug Ordunio]

Very well expressed! nothing wrong with it. However, a few observations. To fly in the face of what people like to do here, I think you should dispense with the graphic. Why? Because when I started to read, I asked myself, why is there a picture of an ant (or ant-like creature) there? You don't need it. After I read further, I couldn't get the idea of a mechanical ant OUT of my mind. Much better to allow the reader his or her fantasy of what the creature looks like. Also change its name, it looks like a date. Again, why is there a date here at the beginning? I think too much, right?

[dazrite]

Funny that you should say that. I was just reading an article in Poets and Writers Magazine called, 'Writers Rolling Back the Revolution.' Basically, their talking about returning to a plain text style. Sort of eliminate all things that compete for the reader's attention, like pictures, menus, toolbars. They mention a couple of programs: Dark Room, Q10, Writespace and WriteRoom. They might have a legitimate point. I'm giving it consideration.

Thanks for the com.