We drove across to the Atlantic seaboard, as close as we could get to it, being an even more godforsaken place, once called 'the mosquito coast'. Further north we crossed Belize and then into Yucatan, where, curiously enough, we stopped to see several of the Mayan archaeological sites, the temples in the jungle, a strange detour now that all the cities of our own civilisation were about to become a similar sight in a few thousand years. They might not be covered in such jungle foliage, especially far North. Then again, I thought, with global warming, they might achieve this same magnificence of regal decay.

I doubted that they'd have any tourists such as us, with so few humans left. This thought made me realize my own uniqueness, admiring the ruins of a fallen civilisation in a very far-off place while I was the unique, last survivor of my own. But the human mind works by comparisons. It's one of the few things it can do, gauge and compare things with no other purpose than to wonder at the changes, the vicissitudes of all-destroying time.

So I bid goodbye to this set of ruins with a tip of my Panama hat. Who knows, maybe the Amazon Indians might creep out their jungle lairs in the next few centuries, rediscover this place and find it to their liking, enough to repopulate it. But I rejected that fantasy as soon as I conceived it. The mind conceives innumerable stories but knows when to squash the ridiculous ones, like a bug crawling across the floor, reason guiding the boot.

We drove to the more recent ruins of Veracruz and dallied again on the warm beaches for a week. These high-rise hotels, unlike the Aztec pyramids, were still habitable. The elevators were broken but the bedrooms were immaculate, the linen clean and inviting. And the kitchens were still full of exotic canned delights. It would take decades to change that.

We feasted by night and suntanned on the beach each day. But all these comparisons led me, almost against my will, into several deep meditations upon time. I would wander off, mid-afternoon, along the strand, and not return until dark, when I knew my absence might begin to upset the girls. These were hours of serious, deep thought with no interruption.

I wondered what would become of Dora as I grew old, after I died, and yet she forever young and still the same. And what might become of Kim as she matured. I decided I had a mission to find them both a place while I still could. I knew I could always return Kim to our tribe in Oregon, where she'd have an easy life and a dozen possible mates to choose from to start a family. Dora was the harder case. I'd have to find her some hive still functional, at least in part, where she could reconnect to her AI matrix and live into the eternity that was her inhuman fate, until the lights and power shut down a final time, a computer's death.

I guessed that there were still a few, functioning hives in Europe. It was like a hunch, a deep feeling. If I could get her there, I would be able to place her in one of these campuses like a caretaker of sorts. There might be still functioning droids whom she could manage. With her telepathic powers gone she would have to deal with them on a far more personal level, taking them by the hand, guiding their steps, leading them to meet their needs. This sounds like a nurse in an old folks' home, hardly an enviable job. But it would give her purpose every day.

There might also be remnants of AI functioning, if there were any droids. With that she could commune, plug in, pulsing her own drives with a flood of shared information, flashbacks of past glory.

It was a plan in embryo, but I mused upon it long. I decided to put it into effect. We left Veracruz, which was completely empty and sped away on an empty highway as fast as the truck could safely speed. The long stretches of barren landscape only encouraged this precipitous flight away from a ruined past into a totally unknown future.

Sometimes I thought that I thought too much for my own comfort. And to turn it off I engaged in childish guessing games with Kim and Dora, or the most trivial babble that interested them, to pass the long, monotonous hours of driving. Dora was now a happy participant in such games. Whatever ports Ted had disconnected, she seemed like a younger version of herself, a teenager again, talking with Kim much more than me.  Her mind was still full of information, a Wikipedia in fact, and she took great pleasure in answering queries, as the answers pleased us.

If only we could have ingrained computers with this trait long ago. They would have grown to love us in that reciprocal function and purpose.

Purpose is a very human thing, a driver, fuelled by hopes and fears, mostly hopes of achieving something better, the darker side, a fear and a flight from something worse. It struck me that it could only belong to an imperfect being. Anything perfect in its way could have no purpose. But it could only belong to a highly evolved being who could think and reason and could possibly achieve the goals it desired.

Dora was now in this class with us, growing more human every day. First, we gave AI a body, a very fragile thing, and then a lobotomy of sorts, to stop her insatiable lust for complete domination. Now we had a half-woman in our company, eager to live under the same laws of civility and respect that bonded us. She was a rare case of 'deconstruction', or the better word might be 'devolution' as we imposed it on her, not the environment.

But in a way she asked for it because once you lose purpose, as all of us know, you’re dead. Our mistake was to create a machine that didn’t know it had limitations, thought itself perfect and complete, which immediately led it to the task of destroying or enslaving all lesser forms on this ladder of perfection, humans one rung below it, just like any mathematical formula it might finally perfect, the previous, imperfect ones to be relegated to a recycle bin we never built into it, but which it desperately needed for its own sanity, dumpster ergonomics. That’s how we perfected our own large cities, with garbage trucks.

You see, changing our minds requires a recycle bin and that's why we always included them on our personal computers. We could decide: 'now that's a bad idea, or this news is fake. I don't even want to consider these things anymore: dumpster bin. It involves admitting a mistake. It's an eraser on a pencil. But AI was never given any such tool, or any such judgement or self-reflection. It just plowed ahead with its own solid conclusions, to its fatal end.

last post https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/wealth-inequality-xoklrrn 

https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/a-feast-of-joy-xwrnmdw