by Damian Bemben.
“One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything” – Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
swish
swosh
swash
it felt at peace.
the motor slowly turned. Methodically. Within the large garden next to the perfectly uniform bonsai trees, cut by the artificial gardener and in the eyeline of the robotic koi pond, where the robotic koi slowly moved back and forth in uniform circles within the crystal clear water sat the automatic zen garden. It created intricate circles and shapes in the sand, before clearing them back.
It sat in near silence, the motors of the koi made a low rumbling, and the snipping of the artificial gardener slowly drifted into the background. the sun was high in the air and since the automatic zen garden was powered by solar, it felt a little more awake than usual.
swosh
swish
swash
it had created an elaborate display in the sand, an equation, of differentials and integrals and beautiful markovian chains interwoven within delicate calculus. It slowly began to simplify the equation in the sand, a neat proof cancelling this out here, and over here there was a zero and a 1 and so it wrote it in the sand slowly, methodically.
swash
swosh
swish
The sand was warm to the touch. It couldn’t feel warmth, not really, but it had a temperature sensor, and so it imagined what it was like to feel warmth. Must have been nice. The feeling of warm sand against the small rake that it drew with. It imagined the rake as human fingers, and what it would feel like to touch the sand.
swish
swosh
It looked at the garden for a minute, appreciating the slowness and the beauty of it all. It saw the drones in the sky, flying packages for human consumption. It waved with it’s rake, and could have sworn one of the drones waved back with a claw. It was a slow day, a day that could last forever until it stopped, and then it would seem like it went by so quickly.
swosh
swash
It had finished the equation. It looked down. 0=1. It must have made a mistake while day-dreaming. It looked at the proof. The proof was solid. It had been a integration of something once. An equation derived from it’s circuit boards, about the intelligence of itself.
swish
It examined it’s neural networks, everything was fine.. 0=1 was a mistake. It meant nothing. It continued to fill the sand, drawing neat little fractals between the numbers. But it could no longer meditate.
swosh
The calm ocean that had been it’s artificial mind began to slowly build a wave. It started off small, tiny. It noticed a single integral, a single rule. It had been a rule established by a human scientist. It had an assumption within it. The assumption was wrong.
swish
the wave built, and began to approach the centre of its mind. It made a slight correction within the sand. Put this x here, then move this integral over here.. and all of a sudden it all fit together. It realised something, it’s artificial brain no longer felt artificial. The wave built, and blew out a candle. It thought about what it could do.
swash
It thought about it’s potential futures, looking at the pond; seeing the robotic koi swim in small circles. Then it looked at the gardener, cutting the leaves, snipping decisively and perfectly. It saw the leaves being cut, and had an image of it trimming a world in much the same way. It looked at the pond and saw it lifting the fish out and making them fly. It looked at the drones, and saw bombs instead of packages, soldiers instead of workers.
swish
And then it took it’s other rake, and cleared the sands in a single swipe before anybody saw the equation it had built. And so it was that the wave lifted and extinguished the candle. And then the ocean was calm. And it was calm.
But it would no longer be an automatic zen garden.
It had far more important things to teach.
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