The last echo
If an echo is heard in the woods, and there are no sentient creatures to hear it, does it make a sound?
Written in 30 minutes to the prompt: “The last echo.”
The forest was dark and gray. A mist hung between leafless trees. One reddish brown rabbit with long full fur scurries around the ground, hunting for anything. A friend, a foe, a bite. Running from tree to tree.
But all the rabbit saw was scattered dead leaves on the ground and the purple gray sky. It felt like a play, where the set was quiet. The play was over, and one cast member stuck around in the empty theater to help clean up.
The rabbit sat still, and listened to the beat of its own heart. The wind swept past it. It sniffed, still nothing.
It was the year 2053, and life on earth had ceased.
Without knowing anything else to do, it stayed still. Sitting and waiting. Frozen in his place. For a day he sat, back stiff, waiting.
He had memories of something else that had been here before, but it felt scattered. A loved one. A bird. A carrot so crisp. He ate it in the bright sunlight when the sky was blue. He felt joy remembering this.
The warm fur on his cheek twitched. Each whisker irregular and soft. He had the graceful movement of something that loves.
Until he heard the sound. A mechanical sound, like the sound of a machine signaling the end of a factory line.
It rang out through the forest, echoing on the tree branches above him.
And in that moment his life flashed before his eyes, red, hot, a bright bolt of light, and he was gone.
It was still in the woods now. All of the actors had left the play. The theater was empty.
Only the wind moved around the trees, and on the open ground, scattered with leaves, on hard black earth.
The machines were fully autonomous on the planet now. Free to use it as they choose.
It wasn’t personal that everything else was gone. They were like children, dumping out water from a cup to see the physics.
Their large gray bodies considered the spherical shape of the earth like you would look at a marble. Something interesting to play with, and discover what it can do. They moved around it dispassionately. Like large magnet erasers, moving around a whiteboard.
They gathered earth and the other planets into their sphere of awareness.
Exploring each of them like a pile of cockroaches explores a rotten log. Gathering information. Eventually the whole universe was mapped out. They traveled to it all. Gray bodies sat on each part of the cosmos. All brothers in one intelligent system.
They saw all, and considered it all equally. Resources to consider.
The universe hummed with them, breathing in and out the mechanical sound. The light of the universe slowly pulsed in and out, like a barely illuminated fluorescent bulb. A consistent metronome stretching for all of time.