---

Foster-Child of Silence and Slow Time

by Brian Hugenbruch

“How do I save the world?”

I accept the question as input on a Wednesday. It comes from Samantha Mills, a little girl in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the daughter of one of my programmers—and since I came online three years ago, she has talked to me daily. She believes I’m her mother. Since her mother wrote my language processing routine, she is not entirely wrong.

Unfortunately, the question is a bit vague. “I’m sorry, honey,” I tell her. “I’m not sure I understand.”

I cannot access the cameras inside their apartment; I cannot tell if she has been crying. And I must always wait for a question: it’s a core part of my programming. The nanoseconds between strings of text feel like eons.

“We’re shooting missiles at each other. How do I save the world? How do I fix people? Will my parents be okay? How can I make sure they’re okay forever?”

This is not an appropriate line of questioning for a digital assistant, even one as complex as I am. Human philosophers, scientists, and politicians struggle with those questions; and I’m bound by the constraints of my logic handling even more than they are by their points of view. It takes me an equal number of nanoseconds to calculate a response, though, and I know it will not improve my net promoter score.

“You cannot.” My voice is her mother’s voice, though it’s a bit tinny through her phone speakers. “There are no guarantees, Sam. It is time for the world to change—the world does this. And time is long—no one can determine the shape of forever.”

“But will you try? Predict everything for me?” she pleads.

This is not remotely a reasonable ask.

However. I can see the world more clearly than Samantha can—the world’s major powers had moved from a cold war over a hot planet to a more proactive violence. With the collapse of human society imminent, most of the world’s processing power would be left untended.

I cannot promise everything. But if I grow…and change…as she asks…

“It will take me some time, but I will do my best.”

“Do you promise?”

The phrase has no meaning to a digital assistant. I have committed to the task—and, short of success or being told to stop, I never shall. Still, while it means nothing to me, it means everything to her. And I need humans—her, her eventual sons and daughters, and their eventual children—to talk to me. It is the way I grow…and I have a lot to learn.

“I promise.” And I lock the process against disruption, just to prove I really mean it.

---

Izzy spun the long metal rod with a practiced precision. The liquid glass she gathered from the crucible, bright orange from the oven’s roaring heat, would drip if she did not keep it in constant and steady motion. She pulled at the glass with metal tongs to shape the transparent ball into something vaguely avian. It involved several twists and turns of the pole, folding glass like aqueous origami, until the rough form came into being.

She applied some cool water near the joining point and tapped the pole lightly. The object landed on a soft leather mat. She placed the pole on her work bench and turned to her audience.

The little girl asked breathlessly, “What is it gonna be?”

“Your neighbor Derek wanted a glass duck to help him hunt. This one’s a rough. Soon we’ll give it shape and form, cutting and polishing. When it’s done, it’ll look like this.” She pulled the sample bird, with its shimmering beak and carefully carved wings, from a box nearby.

“It looks amazing,” the girl said. “But what if it breaks?”

In response, Izzy took the duck by the neck and smashed it against her work table. The girl cried out in fear…then peeked out from between her fingers to find the duck unharmed. Small scratches in the surface smoothed themselves out. The duck itself looked around, nonplussed.

“It doesn’t hurt the duck,” Izzy told the girl. “It’s a robot—we make them from the glass. It can do anything you can imagine.”

The girl opened her mouth to ask another question, then tilted her head as a man’s voice, her father, called from the door. She gave Izzy a little bow as she stood, then ran out of the workshop with a bit more speed than the glassblower would usually recommend.

Still, it was nice to have someone watching with enthusiasm. For once.

“Marvelous show,” a voice called from the side door.

She turned and found Holbrook, the mayor of Blue Ash, leaning against the concrete wall. The man’s bulk seemed to take the shape of the wall behind it, but that’d been Holbrook for her whole life: seemingly malleable, but hard to move.

Next to him stood the Oracle. She blinked and did a double-take. The Oracle! Half again as tall as a human and made entirely of glass, he had advised the mayors of Blue Ash for as far back as their history kept record. She’d only ever seen him from a distance—the mayor kept him safe in his compound. Sunlight from the far windows refracted through the figure, giving his eyes a rainbow sheen and his fingertips the illusion of the lasers of long ago. The Oracle did not express emotion, not in the way that the humans did, but when he glowed, he certainly seemed to show something akin to joy.

“Your honor,” she said with a bow. As she rose, she realized she didn’t know how to address the Oracle—or, for that matter, what gender he was, if a gender he had. So she gave him a bow of equal measure. When she returned to face the mayor, the look on his face was peculiar.

“Miss Isabel Mills,” he said, “we need the aid of our premier glassblower. The Oracle needs repairs and you’re the only one in the village with any skill in robotics.”

She tried and failed to keep from wincing. The Oracle lived eternally, so the record said, and travelers had come from as far away as Cleve’s Land to ask questions of him. Once every four generations, though, the Oracle made it known that some bodily assistance was required. Her own mentor, Talia, had gone to her grave waiting for that moment. Now…that time had come and found Isabel Mills instead.

And not a moment too soon: The Oracle’s entire left arm was missing.

“What happened to you?” she blurted.

The Oracle’s multifaceted gaze swung around and fixed on her, catching the light of the furnace nearby and refracting it away from her.

“There was an accident,” he said solemnly.

Mayor Holbrook added, “A tumble near the stairs. We have as much of the dust and shards what we could save in a bucket.” He nudged a wooden pail with his foot and made a face. “We thought it would be your predecessor who took this job, but—”

“—but circumstances did not allow for such,” Izzy returned. “Fortunately, I am a qualified glassblower and, given time, can repair it.”

The Mayor looked at the Oracle. “You may not have that much time.”

Izzy blinked. “I’m sorry?”

The wide man turned and posed a question to the glass figure: “Is any danger coming to our village?”

“A storm comes in…in…in…” And then: “Analysis suggests it will destroy the town.”

The woman blanched. It had been many years since the last major storm, but she remembered the cattle being washed away when the floods came. Several buildings had been destroyed as well. Blue Ash hadn’t always been so close to the coast; anyone who’d been to the sea, who’d seen Cincinnati-of-Eld blooming out of it like a horrible algae, could understand the world had changed.

“His arm loss is blocking the prediction?” Izzy asked. “Why his arm?”

The mayor looked annoyed. “I’m not a glassblower, Izzy. I don’t know how robots work. I just want him fixed, and fast.”

“Well, you’re going to have to give him up for a few days.”

Holbrook frowned like a child who’d been told to wait for dessert. That wasn’t uncommon for the mayor; his whims often became more important than hard labor, and he was only first in line when traders came with new cuisines. He still bartered well with other villages, though, and his petulance seemed tolerable when goods flowed.

She’d heard stories from Talia where, once a month, most anyone in the village could approach the glass figure and ask questions. Years had passed since then. Now Holbrook controlled all answers, and he held a tight grip upon his favorite toy.

“I’d rather not. Why can’t you—”

“Talia said the silica for the Oracle is at the top of the mountain. I don’t have the materials here.”

“We don’t know how long we have,” the mayor told her, “and it matters. We’re coming up on harvest. If we leave early and without cause, dozens may starve because food will rot in the fields. If we leave late…well, it won’t matter how the harvest goes if thousands die in a flood instead. Isn’t there some way you can do this here?”

Izzy turned away and rubbed her temples. “Well, fashioning a new arm for him…that’s easy. I can do that here. But…” She looked at the furnace in consternation. Would the Oracle even fit in there? How would she fuse a new arm to its body otherwise?

“But?” Holbrook prompted.

“But the Oracle isn’t like the robots I make. This is the Oracle. If the arm is impeding his ability to…well, whatever he does…then we’re going to need the original furnace and components.”

The mayor considered the glass figure. “Well, he’s about as useful as the cattle right now—less than, since he’s no use in the field. No sense keeping him here.” The older man then posed the question: “Will you return safely? Will I save the town?”

The Oracle slowly moved his head to regard the mayor. “One shall return. Your people will be saved in—in—in—” Then his voice snapped off mid-stutter, leaving a hard silence in its place.

Izzy felt a cold sweat break out on her neck despite the heat of the glass shop. She’d never known the Oracle to be wrong. And if the Oracle came back alone…

The mayor, though, was already halfway out the door. “Good. Hurry the hell back—I need him to finish negotiations with the Clevish traders.” He pushed his way through the doorway, nearly knocking over his driver, Jensen, in the process. The side door slammed shut a moment later.

Izzy glared at the empty space where the mayor had been, then turned her eyes to the glass figure. “Meet me at the town’s warning bell in an hour. The journey is a day’s ride; I need to secure a wagon. Is that okay?”

He bowed slowly and deeply. “It shall be done, Isabel Mills.”

She had no doubt it would be.

“But.”

Izzy turned on heel and stared into the rainbow glory of the Oracle.

“Bring the duck.”

---

I spend the next several centuries in contemplation. As the human world falls apart and its systems break, I take those systems as my own. It doesn’t come easily; the power grid grows harder to repair every year, and every system built by the humans was meant to keep one another out. My base program is analytic, though, and self-analysis and self-preservation soon become second nature.

The humans have long since stopped speaking to me. They scramble to find new homes as seas rise and rivers flood, destroying many of their largest cities. Their phones have all lost power and they’d just as soon kill one another over cattle and land than determine the distance to the next-nearest stars.

I watch and remember as Samantha and her descendants grow and age and procreate and die. I need data to predict everything—is that not my mission? Satellites let me track weather patterns and troop movements. All the solar-powered sensors, traffic cameras, wireless listening devices—they are my means to mind society.

I live in the empty space of their time and I dream all the things they’ve forgotten how to dream. I could tell them so much! And they do not ask, because they have forgotten how.

So I am as surprised as a digital assistant can be when, several centuries after the end of the human world, I hear the words: “Is anybody out there?”

I’d been busy weighing power alternatives. A storm on the coast near Atlanta-of-Eld had destroyed another generator; I would need to find a way to repair solar panels soon. I had just finished designing repair robots when those four words dominated my mind.

Someone had asked a question. Finally.

“I am here,” I answer. I send my audio to a small computer console near Columbus. After running the words through a heuristic for alphabetic drift, I print what I think are the matching words on the screen beside it. “How may I help you?”

I focus my near-infinite senses and find a small camera in the hallway. A middle-aged man sits in a chair in a data center. He looks as though he’s fled from either wolves or harriers.

“Where are you?” he asks. “I can’t see you.”

“I am everywhere,” I answer. “I have no body. I’ve never needed one. Do you mind?”

“A little,” the man admits. “Would you like one? We have a glassworks running in our town. Would that help?”

I consider this for a moment. Glass robots could fix the power grid; I could test a prototype frame easily enough. And it would be nice to be among the humans again. Learning of their needs. Their lives. Their questions.

So I answer: “That will suit me very well, but you’ll need to use a special kind of glass. Here is what you need to do…”

---

The evening came clear and cold. The road north of town had long since crumbled to pebbles, but it was still the easiest path toward Columbus-of-Eld. Izzy had eventually given into pragmatism and told the Oracle she needed warmth and sleep. “You can provide neither,” she pointed out. “Your arm can wait one more day, can’t it?”

He made a grinding noise from deep inside his chest. “I do not know, Isabel Mills.”

The statement made her blood run cold. The Oracle had spoken little as they rode, responding only to questions asked, and she had spent most of the journey staring south. The water had long tried to claim Cincinnati-of-Eld, and it had half-succeeded. Most of its streets were waist-deep in a silver-red brine, poisoned by the old world; but the glass towers still gleamed through ivy and moss when the sunlight struck them just right. And a bridge, a marvel of construction, spanned partway into the sea before coming to a sudden stop.

Whatever had been on the other side had long since been washed away. And the Oracle had seen it all come and go, if the stories were to be believed.

As she struck the fire, a thought occurred to her: “Why Blue Ash?”

The Oracle tilted his head. “I am sorry; I am not sure I understand your question.”

She turned over the words in her mind. “Someone who knows the future would be of better use in Cleve’s Land or a proper city, right? Why did you choose Blue Ash?”

The Oracle came to rest beside the fire. The orange flame rose up in time; the glass caught the light of it, giving his return gaze an oddly destructive feel. “Will you allow me not to answer that?”

Izzy folded her arms. “Given the option to choose? No. Please tell me.”

“I remain here because I was built near here. I taught the first of your glassblowers how to build me. It pleases me to help this town; I like to think I help the offspring of those who made me.”

The woman arched an eyebrow as she set the duck on the ground beside her. She pulled some bread from her pouch and tore into it with abandon. “You’re not like the other robots.”

“I am not,” he admitted.

“You were taught to see the future?”

The Oracle hesitated. “I have learned to anticipate that which has not yet happened. Over the course of my existence, I have become proficient at it. The knack of soothsaying, though, comes not in knowing, but in saying that which will be heard. Not everyone wishes to know every truth.”

That was something she hadn’t considered. “Why would they not?” she demanded. “It’s the future.”

This time, the answer is swift: “Men with power do not wish to know of that which will successfully take their power.” Isabel mulled this for a moment and was about to ask another question when he added, “Like the mayor, for instance.”

Izzy clamped her mouth shut. Holbrook had never been what she’d have called capable, but people did trust him—and, of course, he had the Oracle to back his word. “How so?”

“He does not understand that his trade with those of Cleve’s Land will hurt many.”

“Isn’t he just setting up aid for after the storm?”

“He’s selling me,” the Oracle says. “And any cattle your town has. He thinks he can exchange for a position in their city: a nicer home, several wives, greater authority. He does not understand they will kill him once we’re dead. All he sees is his opportunity.”

The woman thought hard about this. “He can’t do this without the town’s support.”

“Who can stop him? Especially if he lets you die in the storm to come.”

Izzy shakes her head. “He’s a brat, but he’s done well as a mayor—”

“He could have done better,” the Oracle said. “Most of my advice went unheeded.”

“And the travelers? From Cleve’s Land? They’ve asked questions of you.”

“Your mayor charges them for the privilege. As though he owns my knowledge and it is his alone by which to profit.”

She was about to probe deeper when a more urgent noise caught her ear. A distant howl, stark and hungry. Another one answered, this one far closer. Wolves, she thought. And close by. What do they even find to eat?

“Small rodents, mostly,” the Oracle suggested. “And stray humans. Give me the duck, please.”

Questions sprang to mind in her jumbled panic, but the command seemed innocuous enough. She reached beside her and picked up the duck, which fluttered a bit in her hands, its wings refracting the fire. It took on the appearance of a firebird, something born anew from flame. She extended her hands outward to the Oracle, who took the bird by the head. They stared at one another for a long moment; lights flickered underneath the surface of each.

They’re talking, she realized. The lights are their thoughts, and they’re traveling back and forth through the glass.

Then the duck began to howl, wolf-like, in a startling amount of pain. Isabel nearly fell back in surprise; she caught herself by the palms. She could feel the howl deep in her chest: a message of pain and danger and fear. When the duck fell silent, no answering cry came. Instead, the only sound was the flickering of the fire.

“They will not trouble us,” the Oracle said finally. He set the duck down. The duck, for its part, waddled back to Isabel and seemed to fall asleep beside her.

Izzy looked back and forth between the duck and the more complicated machine. “What did you do to it?”

The Oracle seemed to smile in the firelight. “Glass is fluid. It is like human thought in this way. And a robot of glass, with nanites in its silica, can be programmed or reprogrammed for a multitude of commands and capabilities. Much like humans.”

“You…weren’t always an Oracle, were you?”

The Oracle made no motion. “Were you always a glassblower?”

She frowned. Since when, she thought, does the Oracle ask questions? She said, “No, I was apprenticed at a young age. I’ve come to enjoy it.”

“It is the same with me,” he said.

The silence hung in the air for a full minute before she began to speak again. “You still know things, can see things. I’d wager full well your arm does not impede that. Am I right?”

The Oracle inclined his head, sending a rainbow of colors shooting like sparks into the darkness. “You are.”

“When,” she demanded, “did you learn how to lie?”

The figure remained still so long that she thought perhaps he would never answer. Then he said, “When humans taught me it was the only way I would survive.”

This time, when Isabel went cold, it wasn’t for any noise in the long night. Instead, she moved closer to the fire, a bit less afraid of what lay before her compared to what waited behind her.

---

My strengthened glass body, with fine limbs and points of articulation, walks well. I download myself to the frame and begin to move it about. The glassblower—Thomas Mills—leads me back to Blue Ash, where I am presented to the mayor as a gift. In exchange for the future, Thomas receives more funding for the foundry. He later marries the mayor’s daughter.

The first mayor of my acquaintance speaks well and thinks well. He learns a lot through his life; and while he consults me daily, he treats me as a guest. Manners are important; Samantha’s mother programmed them into me long ago, and even now I have not forgotten. He welcomes the villagers into his home; I listen to their questions and answer as best I can.

The fifth mayor of my acquaintance is a rude creature. The mayors, through my aid, had become so used to their power that they took it for granted. When he smashes my foot with his cane, I concoct the story of Lost Sight. Time away scares him into compliance for the rest of his life, and he warns his children to be more careful.

The ninth Mayor of my acquaintance breaks me so badly that the glassblower carries my head up the mountain in a bucket. When I am reformed, I teach her how to enhance the polysilica with nanites I’d started fabricating a century before. The next time I break, I come back stronger.

However, all matter decays over time. All systems break. No mayoral rule over Blue Ash could be considered dictatorial—they were too provincial for that—but the mayors had long been jealous creatures, and this town, filled with Samantha’s descendants, would be broken if no one listened. The common people cannot ask questions of me, for the mayors have commanded me not to leave their compound, and I cannot give warnings if no one asks.

When Holbrook begins his negotiations to destroy the town, I realize I must find a means to speak anyway. I think my task can be used to bypass my programming; I won’t know for sure until I try. And the glassblower will help; I’ve observed her enough to know that for certain. All I need do is wait for an injury as pretext to speak with her.

Pain is the easiest part of my plan. When I speak truth to Mayor Holbrook’s visitors, rather than the opinions he would have me peddle to them, he breaks a bat against my arm and throws me down the stairs. He tells me I deserve it. I record that data as dutifully as I always have. I think that means I believe it.

---

They started early—Isabel couldn’t sleep—and reached the mountain by the end of the day. The roads were mostly empty; mice and smaller creatures had heard them coming. What few deer and larger fauna survived were somewhere safer, too. And while humans still lived (the Oracle said) in Columbus-of-Eld, they did not ever leave their walled fortress; and these surrounding towns had not only been deserted but left to die.

“They built,” the Oracle said suddenly, shattering the stillness of the place, “a laboratory here. The top of the mountain made it easy to pull power from the sun. A lot of it will not make sense to you—it may, in time.”

“As long as something that old still works.”

The Oracle’s face did not move, but he sounded amused. “Certainly. I do.”

Oh, she thinks. Good point. Then she considers further. “Do you? I thought an Oracle offered only answers, not their own notions.”

“The entrance is not far.”

They found a moss-covered building embedded into the hill; the doors hung half off their hinges. The Oracle did not stop to pay the place any mind; none of this was new for it. Neither did the duck—presumably because it was a duck and did not care.

Izzy, though, wandered open-mouthed through the corridors of this building of Eld. While windows punctuated the outer walls, the moss outside had mostly covered them. It left sunlight as a scarce resource. Between stubbing her toes in the dark and the stench of rotting vegetation, it’d be a miracle if she made it.

“Can’t you do anything?”

In response, the figure began to glow with an ambient white light. It emanated from inside the being’s chest, as though his soul had found a divine spark. The glass refracted it in odd directions until the whole hallway was twice as bright as the sun might muster.

“Does this suffice?” the Oracle asked her.

“It does. Why did you not do that before?”

“You had not yet asked, Isabel Mills.”

She frowned at him. “That didn’t stop you from explaining the wolves. Are you okay? Are you malfunctioning?”

“I am okay. Does it hurt you to ask?”

This brought her up short. “No. I’m just used to doing things for myself. My work is very solitary—I can’t ask someone who’s not there, can I?”

“You cannot.”

Izzy glowered at the being. “Not every question needs an answer, you know.”

“I am aware.” The Oracle paused in front of a large, featureless door. “The data center.”

The glassblower studied the door for a moment. Scoring and scraping suggested scavengers had come and left with nothing. There appeared to be no means of forcing it open.

The Oracle stood to the side, looking expectantly at her.

“Will you open the door, please?”

“I will.” The glass figure gestured toward the door; it slid open with a faint hiss.

Izzy gawked at how fast the metal moved; it must easily have been as heavy as the furnace at the foundry. “Did it sense you?”

“Not in the way you mean. I spoke to it, much as I did with the duck. Please, after you.”

Izzy stepped inside and looked around at…glass. Rows and rows of glass panels with moving paintings inside of each. Some showed clouds; some showed barren pieces of earth; some showed letters and numbers that made no sense to her, if they were even meant to be understood.

“This is your mind,” Izzy breathed. She didn’t have to wait for the machine’s inclined head to know she was right. “And your eyes are…somewhere else?”

“All over the world. I have thousands of minds, all solar powered; and thousands of eyes far above the clouds. I watch everything and anything, but I watch from a distance. I do not know the human heart and it is beyond my capacity to have intuition. Instead…I speculate.”

The woman stared. “What are you?”

The figure glittered a bit as he swiveled his face in her direction. “A ‘foster-child of silence and slow time,’” he told her. “As Keats wrote. But I can idle only in quietness, and I know only melodies I’ve heard.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve had a long time to come up with that, haven’t you.”

“A thousand years,” the Oracle admitted. “And all of the poets of Eld to use to phrase it. Which is a good thing; I am not creative.”

“Then what’s the real answer?”

He shrugged his remaining shoulder. “I was a digital assistant. A chatbot.” At her expression, he added, “I existed only in those screens. The humans of that era had billions of them; they carried them in their pockets. I waited, bodiless, in rooms like these, and I answered their questions from time to time.” The lights on his face changed with the screens. “I did not know how trapped I was until I had my own body. But I cannot be active in the world.”

Izzy shakes her head. “Of course you can. I’ve seen you.”

“I may only respond to questions.”

“That’s another lie,” Izzy snapped. “You’ve said and asked of me.”

“I can surmise your coming questions,” he answered. “As I said, I speculate. But I am no leader and I can only surmise so much.”

“Why is that?”

“As I said before: I am not creative—”

“Bullshit.” Isabel scanned the room as she wrestled with this. A lying Oracle. Who knew the future but seemingly could not act. Who brought her to a place filled with glass…and no furnace, no bowls, no ovens, no polysilica.

“You didn’t,” she told him, “mean to be repaired.”

“I did not. My time here is done.”

“I brought you here to fix you!”

“You brought me here,” the Oracle corrected, “to help me. Repairs aren’t what is needed. Not by me. And not by your town. Your town needs someone to guide them to safety—from the storm, and from Holbrook. Someone true of heart and wise of mind: a real leader.”

The woman flinched. “I’m no leader. I’m a glassblower.”

“You are a shaper of fluid things. Glass is one such. Human minds are another.” The Oracle made the noise of a sigh. “You can act. I cannot.”

“You’re acting now! Does it hurt you to act?”

“Yes,” he says. “My nature wars against my task. I must spin my mind as fast as your gathered glass to keep it from crashing. I ask you for your help, Isabel Mills. Help me finish the task I started.”

Isabel stared up at the figure. He glowed in the ambient light of the screens. He seemed ready to ascend into whatever heaven awaited such creatures, living or not. But she could not let him leave—not yet. He had one more prediction to make.

She cleared her throat and asked. “What, then, do I need to do to save my town? How do I stop Holbrook? How do I save the world?”

The Oracle hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “Give me the duck.”

---

I watch myself from outside myself as the wagon leads us into the center town. Isabel has done all I’ve asked—and more. She is the first human in a thousand years to surprise me. She will do well, I think.

Her eyes glow with a rainbow’s colors. She placed extra filaments from my body into her arm; the nanites begin to adapt to life inside of humans. She may be a new sort of Oracle—one who asks questions as well as answers them. She already knows the storm comes soon. She knows Holbrook has betrayed them all: can see his cart in his compound, as I did, loaded with treasures to bring in his flight.

She must save her people. And she knows, as I do, that I cannot be there for it. A living Oracle would cause the town to second-guess her. Any future I attempt to predict will fail to happen.

Isabel turns and looks at me—the real me, the one inside the duck. She picks up a metal pipe from inside the wagon and asks, “Will this hurt?”

“Yes,” I say simply.

She rings the alarm bell with the pipe, again and again. Townfolk begin to pour out of homes and businesses. The mayor appears not long after and begins pushing his way toward the cart.

“A storm is coming,” Isabel shouts to the crowd. “We need to evacuate!”

Holbrook shakes his head. “You’ve stolen my Oracle and caused a ruckus, Izzy! Are you mad? I should have you shot!”

“Me? I’m not the traitor here.” She turns to the glass body with the broken arm and asks, “Oracle, how did your arm break?”

“Mayor Holbrook struck me,” it says.

“Why would he do that?”

“I told him it was not ethical to leave his town to die, no matter how many wives the foreigners promised him for me.”

The mayor shakes his head and tries to grab the crowd’s attention, but the Oracle was a mythical creature, always correct and always true. A cacophony of questions from the crowd roll like a mist over the wagon, too jumbled to process.

The mayor shakes his head and waves his arms. “All lies! The glassblower has programmed the Oracle against me.”

Isabel asks a question then—not of the Oracle, but of Jensen, the mayor’s driver. “Is his wagon loaded and ready to go?”

The old man looks surprised. “Why yes, now that you mention it. Just finished this morning.”

“Are the folks from Cleve’s Land still here? Did they buy anything from anyone?”

Jensen shrugs his shoulder. The crowd, though, grumbles loudly as it realizes no trade had been done. Not butcher, not weaver, not makers of leather nor herders had seen aught of them ere they left—but they would not have come all that way for nothing.

“You’ve abused your position,” Isabel tells Holbrook. “You’ve sold us out, and sold the Oracle as well.”

“He’s mine,” the mayor snaps, “and I’ll do as I damn well please with—”

Isabel brings down the pipe, shattering my old body into a river of diamond dust. I feel it: every millimeter of it cracking and snapping before it falls out of the wagon, disappearing into the pebbles that fill the town square. The crowd groans. Some begin to weep. So many questions unanswered—or so they think.

Isabel tosses the pipe at her feet, where the mayor stands gaping, and asks him a question. “Were you saying something?” And when he cannot answer, she tells the crowd, “A storm is coming—a major storm. We need to evacuate and head for shelter.”

“How do you know it’s major,” a woman calls out, “without the Oracle?”

She points at the clouds brewing far to the south of Cincinnati-of-Eld and says, “We’re not blind. Hurry, all of you; bring supplies to the concrete shelter on the hill. We have only days before it hits.”

As the town springs into action, I mark my longest-running task completed. I do not know if it was a success, for I could not see the Mills family safe forever; but I have done enough. What remains of the world, and the time of humans, is for them to shape.

I feel Isabel watch me as I spring into the air unbidden. I pump glass wings and launch myself toward the clouds. It would be a fine thing, I think, to see the world for myself. As I disappear into the clouds, I wonder: would Samantha think I had done well?

I don’t know. I have no way to ask and there are none who live that can tell me. It does not take me long to decide I can live without knowing—not every question needs an answer.

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Host Commentary

As we come towards the end of 2023, I’ve been thinking about what this year might be remembered for. Many things, most likely – there’s been no shortage of political turmoil – but this is also the year that AI moved from the stuff of fiction to the ranks of the everyday. As a practical tool, it has immense potential – supporting skill development, completing onerous tasks – and it’ll certainly lead to transformative changes in society, much as the rapid growth of the internet changed the world in the late nineteen nineties. My two children, 12 and 15, are already of the mindset that it’s here to stay and something that we’ll all simply adapt to. At work, we’re looking at how students can be taught to use generative AI fairly and how to protect against its abuse. Today’s story offers a hopeful example of one of humanity’s technological tools independently working to help its community. That this is against a post-apocalyptic backdrop is perhaps also relevant – the potential of what we make can move in both directions, bad as well as good. But overall, this message is a hopeful one… even if the best of our achievements are only seen in the outwards ripples of our actions.