(urth) Short Story 86: The Last Day

[Marc Aramini]

The Last Day

“The Last Day” first appeared in *Speculations* in 1982 and is
collected in *Storeys
from the Old Hotel*.

SUMMARY: The emotional power of the story is found in the ceremony enacted
by the Priest, so I recommend readers definitely read it in lieu of my poor
summary. A robot called The Priest enacts a ritual of worship to an ever
decreasing robotic congregation.  They worship the “Image of Man” in a very
Catholic ceremony before a huge machine comes to wreck the Cathedral.  The
Priest resists and contacts a mobile terminal, which tells him the space is
needed. The Priest implies this destruction will negate the need for any
space.  The huge machine rolls forward to crush the Priest, and the machine
stops it with an energy beam, claiming the right to such power. A New
Priest arrives and watches the Priest perform his final ceremony before
stating that a new cathedral will be erected to worship their own kind, and
the large machine proceeds to destroy the sanctuary and the boy and girl
kept alive within it. The New Priest says, “You see … you believed that the
world would end.  It has not.” The fallen Priest claims that “it has.”

COMMENTARY:

The ceremonies which so resemble the ritualistic worship of the Catholic
Church show that the machines once venerated their creators as divine, but
the influence of this belief dwindled.  Rather than presented as
blasphemous or fallen, the Priest serves a worthy cause – preserving the
last vital remains of man.  Of course the New Priest wants to venerate the
work of the machines instead, and the story is a critique of worshiping the
work of our own hands and human ingenuity (which, of course, would bring
about the machines that here eradicate the last humans).

The message (and the metaphor) is clear: the meaning we imbue life without
a spiritual element is transitory and fleeting – the world is lost when
there is no veneration of something higher.  The Priest speaks of knowledge
which transcends programming:  “Our data … You are only a mobile terminal.  Yet
you have data – yes, even you – beyond that of those you serve.” When the
mobile terminal claims to serve the great ones, The Priest replies, “And I
the small ones who are greater than the great ones – the small ones whom
the great ones serve, though they have forgotten it.”

There is a rather ironic thematic effect, however: The Priest is correct to
worship and preserve Man, which gives him the authority to wield power
above and beyond that of his peers, but the implication is that we would be
imprudent to worship ourselves and declare the spaces of worship useless,
figuratively “destroying” God, as the machine callously crushes the skull
and limbs of the twitching boy.

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

The religious elements at work, creating a parallel between man’s hubris
with the increasing certainty that God does not matter and the actual
murder of the last humans by machines, are clear.  Wolfe’s most obvious
religious works such as “The Detective of Dreams”, his Sun books, and some
scenes in *Pirate Freedom* are rarely so free of ambiguity.  The power of
this story is purely emotional, using the religious ceremonies of
Catholicism and worship in contrast to the final pathetic image of the last
boy crushed under a machine.
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