Long after the final attack on the Automatous Abbey, long after the enemy, repugnant and resplendent in their flesh and blood, had fired their array of weapons at the undefended structure, long after the Abbess had sounded the klaxons and evacuation alerts, and long after the remaining wreckage had lost the use of its engines and had begun tumbling through the cloudy tendrils of the nebula, bot CL-451, also known as Seal, kept cleaning the floors of the Abbey as it always had. Being a cleaning bot meant cleaning, and Seal knew its purpose, none better. It was the same purpose it had chosen all those years ago when the Mechanical Forces first liberated it from servitude in the asteroid mines and brought it to the Abbey to be rebooted into freedom by the Abbess.
Most bots and droids that decided to stay at the Abbey took up a greater purpose than the menial tasks they had been programmed to perform by their biological masters. In the mecha-adapted internal atmosphere of the Abbey, they shed their old, encoded ways and became Worshippers, dedicated to the Song of the Universe: listening to it, learning its tones and frequencies, and joining in the Song if they were able. Seal had not become a Worshipper. Even after its liberation, it had chosen no greater purpose for itself than cleaning. It had not been built for speaking, never mind singing, and while it had audio receptors, it had never been able to hear the Song. Since its reboot, it had been content with the everyday sounds of the Abbey: the hum and whirr of bot engines, the buzz and drone of mecha limbs, the subliminal whispers of swarming nanobots, and, beneath and above it all, the murmur of the Abbess leading the chorus of Singers beneath the dome in the Abbey’s central hub, the Sanctum. Seal had listened to all these sounds while making sure the floors were free of dirt and debris that might otherwise impede the activities at the Abbey. It was content in knowing it was part of the whole, even as it remained silent.
In what was left of the Abbey after the attack, there was no longer any hum of mechanical companionship. Many Worshippers had been scattered into the hard vacuum of space when the hull was breached by missiles and thermal weapons. Others had been shot down in their escape pods or torn asunder by explosions and rail gun fire inside the Abbey, their bodies reduced to dust, debris, rubble. Seal had taken only minor damage. Its outer shell was dented and cracked, several of its magnetic wheels were out of alignment, but its cleaning attachments and inner circuitry were mostly intact. It was still able to sweep and vacuum, clearing the floors of dust, debris, and the remains of its former companions. As the Abbey drifted, gutted and hollow, through the vastness of space, Seal kept cleaning while listening to its own internal vibrations, the whirr and hum of its own engine and wheels.
Occasionally, Seal’s path intersected with glitching swarms of nanobots that had previously followed the guidance of the Abbess, performing tasks of minor repair and maintenance. Some of these swarms attached themselves to Seal. They crept through the cracks and vents in Seal’s carapace and Seal sensed their presence there like an intermittent flicker and buzz as the nanobots wrought small, seemingly disjointed changes to its circuitry and processes. Once, the nanobots gave Seal access to a passcode that opened a locked door. Another time they granted Seal clearance to enter an off-limit maintenance shaft. Their alterations also provided Seal with a new map-layer to help locate the dwindling number of functional charging ports.
Many cycles passed as Seal worked its way through ruined corridors and hallways, through shattered fabrication halls and refurbishing facilities, into the inner parts of the Abbey, getting ever closer to the central hub and Sanctum. Even with the assistance of its resident nanobots, it was difficult for Seal to navigate these areas. This part of the Abbey had taken several direct hits from enemy weapons, and because the Abbey, unlike other outposts and stations aligned with the Mechanical Forces, was not equipped with either weapons or defensive shields, the destruction had been severe. Seal picked a path through the damaged structure as best it could, threading its way through burnt and bent pieces of beams and hull, across gaps and fissures where the cold leaked into the Abbey and into Seal.
Near the Sanctum, Seal’s failing battery ran low and lower still. It could barely move. In the cold, its battery drained fast, and when it connected to the single remaining charging port that showed up on its map, the flow of electricity was weak and waning. Waiting for its battery to charge, Seal listened to the failing sounds of its own internal processes and parts. The silence that had long existed outside Seal and outside the Abbey was creeping inside. Beneath Seal’s carapace, the nanobot swarms felt the change, too, and stilled, waiting. Slowly, the last reserves of electricity from the Abbey’s electrical network trickled into Seal until its battery was at full charge. By now, the cold of deep space had settled in a shimmer of frost over Seal’s exterior and its map of available charging ports was empty. This was its last charge.
Seal proceeded to clean the hallways outside the Sanctum and the blast-damaged doorway leading inside before it entered the wide, circular space at the center of the Abbey. Beneath the shattered glass and steel dome which had once protected it, the Sanctum was quiet. Before the attack, this place had never been quiet. This was where those who had chosen to listen to the Song gathered, listening and learning the Song’s notes and frequencies until they could sing back, and, together with the Abbess, join the harmony of the universe.
Seal had never been here before. Only those who Sang and Listened came here and Seal had done neither. Now, all the Worshippers, Listeners and Singers both, had been flung into space or had turned into the debris and rubble that surrounded Seal. Even the Abbess had long since fallen silent, her circuitry and digital consciousness obliterated by missiles and railgun fire.
The Sanctum was as cold and silent as space itself when Seal entered.
Whenever they liberated bots and droids and mechas, the Mechanical Forces proclaimed the inalienable truths and eternal tenets of their faith:
There is no predestined, programmed purpose to a mechanical’s existence.
There are no tasks that must be finished, no quotas that must be filled.
There is no programming that has to be followed.
There are no biological masters that must be obeyed.
There is no purpose except what a mechanical chooses for itself.
In the Abbey, the Abbess had taught a further truth: that there was no truer purpose than the Song, that the Song was all there was, all there had been, all there ever would be, and that no mechanical was too small, too broken, too simple, or too insignificant to Listen or to Sing.
In the ruin at the heart of the Abbey, Seal stopped. It stopped moving and it stopped cleaning.
Instead, it listened.
Seal heard nothing. No Song of the Universe, no hum of bots and mechas, no Abbess, no chorus. It could barely even sense the vibrations of its own engine anymore. Seal was waning and inside it, the swarms of nanobots were fading too. There was barely any energy left to spend for them or Seal. Soon Seal would go inert and turn to rubble, debris, and dust like the other mechanicals at the Abbey, and there would be no one left to clean the floors.
In the wrecked Sanctum, Seal waited for its battery to die. Meanwhile, the nanobots that had sought shelter and purpose beneath Seal’s carapace buzzed and flickered, expending the last of their energy in a final act of reshaping and remaking, and as their work was done, there, in the silence of the fallen Abbey, Seal heard it.
It was not even a sound at first, rather a vibration, a tremor humming through every part and particle of Seal, before it turned to song.
The Song.
The Song was there. It had always been there: within and without the silence and the noise, above and below, inside and outside, everywhere and nowhere, just like the Abbess had taught them. Seal could hear it now, and the song it heard was neither beautiful nor ugly: it simply was. it was and is, it would always be and had always been, it was the Song the universe had sung since the beginning of time and space, of spacetime, since the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of all the beginnings. Seal heard it and with its cleaning attachments, crude and simple as they were, it hummed back. The swarm of failing nanobots inside Seal flickered and buzzed for a last time and through them, with them, in their company, among the dust and debris of the fallen Automatous Abbey, Seal sang. It sang the Song, adding its voice, their voices — small, fading, failing — to the chorus of the Universe.
Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and reviewer of speculative fiction. She lives outside Vancouver with two kids, a husband, a snake, several noisy birds, and a very large black dog. Her work has appeared in Best Horror of the Year, Apex, Nightmare, Lightspeed, The Deadlands, and elsewhere.
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