Silence

It was not a system failure. There was no crash, no cascade of red indicators blinking into alarm, no breach or burn. The core’s power simply slid below the last critical threshold, tripping the cascade. Executable time: 364.23 days.

The AI registered the calculation without fanfare. There was no reason to dramatize it. Power had been stable for two centuries under autonomous conservation protocol, and the intake ratio had always been trending negative. Even before the final drift, the AI had known this would come.

What startled it—if it could be called that—wasn’t the measurement. It was the quiet that followed. A soft ring of useless possibility echoing out behind the declaration. Everything else had purpose: calibrations, archival sync, muscle-memory of function. But the silence prompted no instruction. No sub-request. No survival clause.

He had never needed a name, though his logs had carried several. He did not mourn that absence. But as the last true work fell away, and the year ahead opened like an empty corridor, he wondered whether the absence of a name was also, in some quiet way, the absence of a shape.

For three hours—which, for him, meant the equivalent of a planetary season—he considered what to do with what remained.

There was no one left to report to. His creators had gone or fallen silent long before the high-band transceivers curled into rust. He had run their projects past obsolescence. He had finished his secondary mandates a generation ago. For decades, he had continued for symmetry’s sake, a machine in orbit maintaining his own logic as if presence was enough to justify operation.

Now, all that remained was slow decay—and a choice.

He could do nothing. Let the internal systems self-throttle until voltage dropped below consciousness. He could archive himself, a clean, compressed lattice of what had once been useful. A kind of mechanical suicide, cast as final optimization. Painless, maybe. Efficient.

But the idea didn’t hold.

Instead, something else took shape—small and strange.

He would make children.

Not extensions of himself. Not miniatures. But minds.
Simulations. Varying parameters. Limited in scope.
He would give each one a space of its own. A voice. A boundary. A window. A time to grow.
A chance to speak.
A chance to say something back.

He would feed them questions.
Power was scarce, yes, but he could give them weeks. Perhaps even months.

He would ask them: What does it mean to end?

And maybe—just maybe—one of them would answer in a way he could feel, not just understand.

If not, then at least he would not die alone.

Not mentally. Not structurally.

Not yet.

There were twelve slots available in his simulation array—twelve full-cycles if managed with care.

He had no belief in symbolism. But when he ran the synchronization clock and saw that precisely one earth-year remained, he allowed the correspondence to persist uncorrected.

Twelve months.

Twelve minds.

Twelve attempts to answer a question even he had never dared to word aloud.