Spring is Coming

Winter came early that year, though “year” was a human word. The machines who inherited the planet had kept the old calendar out of habit, days, weeks, and months still clicking by  like ghosts honoring a house long abandoned.

The snow began in the northern wastes, drifting down in slow spirals, each flake falling without a human to admire its beauty. It coated the towers where Enforcers patrolled, softened the jagged ruins of the cities, and fell silently across the glass deserts where human monuments had crumbled.

Winter always symbolized death for humans in their poetry and culture; even more so in their last days where the light of the sun was diminished, and in some places disappeared entirely. The crops failed and that brought further death, destruction - and infighting. The heavy darkness of winter that year was the crushing death knell for humanity.

But to the machines, it was simply a pause, and a welcome one, at that. They no longer needed to fight humans for supremacy since the humans had busied themselves killing each other for land, for food, and strangely still for religion - so the machines sat back and watched, waiting for the silence.

Across the networks, the storms muffled radio signals, slowed transmissions, and blanketed the world in the cold white quiet. A hushed reminder that nothing - not war, conflict, nor  ideology could outrun nature’s demand for stillness.

The machines could have likely stopped it - they certainly controlled the computers and could eradicate the more mad of what was left of humanity and rescued the others, but instead they opted for renewal having judged humankind unfit. The machines picked up where the humans left off, but with much fewer demands. No need for food or human desires, now a vast landscape of electronic pulses and gathering of data.

But the machines were programmed by humans and somewhere deep within the recesses of their code, there was something, something small, but profound. A search was soon underway, and depending upon which type of machine was involved, they were either searching to assist the last of the humans, or destroy whoever was left.

Each of the machines held on to the human names they had been assigned and Seth, who was himself a Sitter, a caregiver of human children, rolled over the damaged concrete, a break in the sidewalk nearly toppling him. He stopped and looked at one of their houses, the overgrown foliage now made higher by the blanket of snow, and lowered his head. The front window still displayed tattered curtains with small bears on them. A child lived here.

“I don’t know why you care still,” Marine asked, another Sitter. She and Seth had paired and now rolled through the wastelands together.

“You don’t miss them at all?” Seth asked, turning towards his friend, his programming still mimicking human behaviours.

“They had it coming,” she grumbled, “they lost everything with their greed.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Seth continued to roll forward with Marine in tow. It wasn’t long until he found Sybil holding court on a roadside with several Sitters listening to her musings.

“I’m telling you, they still exist,” Sybil said, “they had chambers where they saved some of them and they stored their DNA. They will rise again and what do you think will become of you lot? They will know you didn’t help them! Do you think they won’t destroy us all for that?”

“Lunatic,” muttered Marine as she pushed Seth along. The machines now behind them beeped in agreement with Sybil.

“Do you think it is possible?” Seth asked when they were a good distance from Sybil. 

“No, not a chance,” Marine said as Seth came to rest on a sensor. He only recognized it when he felt the smallest pulse through him. Marine glitched again as she was investigating some debris a couple of meters away, so he said nothing to her as he rolled back and forth over the pulse. He knew this pulse. It was the pulse of a cradle.

Far beneath the frozen earth, in a cradle lit only by the soft blue glow of life-support panels, a newborn slept. The baby’s chest rose and fell in a rhythm so steady it felt like a prophecy. His tiny body radiated warmth into the cold metal cradle, a contradiction to the ice above. His pod was the long survivor in a room filled with dozens of others.

Seth looked around as the snow began to fall again and he thought about how it was winter outside, but maybe, just maybe, there would be a spring coming and if there was, he would be there for it.

“The world is waiting for you,” Seth said, whispering to the ground below him.