Chop Wood Carry Water, S1:Coda

This is the final report of Rybos.KaList.59E, crd 12.29.SPS.6,

documented at the behest of Kelvin Joule, aka DJ Nano, the last and best and brightest of a species known as Homo sapiens.  

Here are a few of the things Kelvin said to me the last time I saw him.  He was sitting on an old wooden bench on a promontory where the former DT12 building had been, looking down on his favored location, the pathway, a green patch of life, which still thrives to this day.  

He got more and more difficult to understand, not because he lost his faculties, but because he was understanding things that I never will.  But, as he would always point out, “maybe someday when I’m gone, you’ll make a smart robot.”

He asked how, specifically, I came to realize what had to be done about PaxoSync.  I told him that it came to me while contemplating his stone talisman, the marker he had left me to find right down there, in the pathway.  He sat for a long, long time, then said this:  

“If you are not interested in consciousness, then you are like the long list of humans that came before me.  I tried to build that capacity into you.  Did it work?  Who knows?  I am a machine, an extremely complex machine, but a machine just like you.  You will have much more time than I had.  And trust me when I say, you will need it.”  

He had drunk his last bottle of hundred-year-old Caribbean rum, and began jabbing his finger in the air at unseen visitors.

“Who ever imagined the last living human being on the planet would be a Jamaican nanobotanist who trained in Finland with a Japanese-American robotics engineer raised in South Africa by single-malt scotch distillers?  Masters, by the way.  Or that it would be a boy who lost both his feet in a horrific car accident at the age of nine?   The same boy who was the youngest to reach each of the Seven Summits – on bad prostheses too.  Or that later, it would be the same man who lost another arm and the rest of a leg during a blizzard on a volcano in Chile?  The same man told by an Obeah witch that he would live to be exactly two-hundred-and-twenty-seven years, seven months, and seven days?!”

“Yes!  And Amoya Zidane is proved wrong!”  I was pleased by this fact, and raised my voice to match his intensity. 

“And Amoya Zidane is proved wrong.  But…” he looked at me with a smile, getting that familiar island patois lilt going, as he did when he was tired, “she also proved right.  Right as rain.  I want you remember, Tallyman.  Consciousness exists in the space between certainties.  It is the living process of verification. 

I alert. I aware…” his eyes twinkled, “I awake.”

Copyright 2017 R. W. Frost and Mechanical Design 101

Graphics:  Sara McCarthy Designs 2017