They smiled at Archie in mild derision and boasted that they had no robots; that they needed no metal caricatures of humanity.
What if they had organic duplicates of humanity instead? What if they had humaniform robots; robots so like human beings as to be indistinguishable from them, at least to the eyes and senses of a robot like Archie? What if the people of the future were humaniform robots, all of them, robots that had survived some overwhelming catastrophe that human beings had not?
There were no babies. Archie had seen none. To be sure, population was stable and long-lived on Earth, so there would be few babies in any case. Those few would be taken care of, made much of, be well-guarded, and might not be distributed carelessly through society. But Archie had been on the Moon for two months and population there was growing-and he had still seen no babies.
Perhaps these people of the future were constructed rather than born.
And perhaps this was a good thing. If human beings had died out through their own rages, hatreds, and stupidities, they had at least left behind a worthy successor; a kind of intelligent being that valued the past, preserved it, and moved on into the future, doing their best to fulfill the aspirations of humanity, in building a better, kinder world and in moving out into space perhaps more efficiently than we “real” human beings would have.
How many intelligent beings in the Universe had died out leaving no successor? Perhaps we were the first ever to leave such a legacy.
We had a right to feel proud.
Ought I to tell all this to the world? Or even to the Temporalists? I did not consider that for a moment.
For one thing, they were likely not to believe me. For another, if they did believe me, in their rage at the thought of being replaced by robots of any kind, would they not turn on them and destroy every robot in the world and refuse ever to build others? This would mean that Archie’s vision of the future, and my own vision, would never come to pass. That, however, would not stop the conditions that were to destroy humanity. It would just prevent a replacement; stop another group of beings, made by humans and honoring humans, from carrying human aspirations and dreams through all the Universe.
I did not want that to happen. I wanted to make sure Archie’s vision, and my own improvement of it, would come to pass.
I am writing this, therefore, and I will see to it that it will be hidden, and kept safe, so that it will be opened only two hundred years from now, a little sooner than the time at which Archie will arrive. Let the humaniform robots know that they should treat him well and send him home safely, carrying with him only the information that would cause the Temporalists to decide to interfere with Time no more, so that the future can develop in its own tragic/happy way.
And what makes me so sure I am right? Because I am in a unique position to know that I am.
I have said several times that I am inferior to the Temporalists. At least I am inferior to them in their eyes, though this very inferiority makes me more clear-eyed in certain respects, as I have said before, and gives me a better understanding of robots, as I have also said before.
Because, you see, I, too, am a robot.
I am the first humaniform robot, and it is on me and on those of my kind that are yet to be constructed that the future of humanity depends.