The Nasty Part


   
Ezra Azra






 
(c) Copyright 2026 by Ezra Azra

Photo by Andrea De Santis at Pexels.
Photo by Andrea De Santis at Pexels.

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Human beings are human beings, and that’s the nasty part of it.” Isaac Asimov.
 
This story is set in a time far into Earth’s future. In that time, there are many, many most successful advanced civilizations on many planets in our Milky Way galaxy, and in many other galaxies.

The only living inhabitants are robots constructed of various kinds of metals, all of which metals had been ingeniously engineered into existence by humans to be a short algorithm from being humanly sentient.

Each robot is a later generation of an earlier generation updated many times from an original having been designed and manufactured by humans on Earth, originally.

There are virtually countless different model-groups of robots, each group defined by a distinct pattern, colour, and degree of sentient sophistication.

Only on Earth are there yet some models the same as they were when first constructed on Earth by humans thousands of years in the past.

The regime of the robot in the infinite Universe had been officially launched on Earth thousands of years earlier, on Thursday, fourth of September in the year 2025. On that day, in the East Room of the White House in the United States of America, First Lady Melania Trump, hosting the first world meeting of Scientists on robotic Artificial Intelligence, opened the meeting with the momentous declaration:

The robots are here. Our future is no longer Science Fiction.”

There is only one reason there are no humans on any of those worlds, nor on Earth in those thousands of years in Earth’s future. That reason is that humans had gone extinct within a century after Melania Trump’s momentous declaration.

Sadly, but quite normally naturally, the human species had succumbed to a fatal flaw naturally indigenous to its DNA, and regularly clearly exhibited throughout its history in famous celebrity individuals of the species.

That fatal flaw was of independently diligently earned excellence sooner-or-later deliberately resorting to humiliating shameful self-demise.

Some notable examples of those ill-fated important humans were, in alphabetical order: Adolf Hitler, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Brian Keith, David Carradine, Judas Iscariot, Hebrew King David, Hebrew King Solomon, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Antony, Mel Gibson, Michael Jackson, Moses, Napoleon Bonaparte, Phillip Spektor, Richard Nixon, Robin Williams.

Most assuredly, there were, too, countless examples among the anonymous ordinary hordes of high-achiever human individuals in every generation, and in many families.

The fatal flaw the Earth humans fell victim to as a species of life was that while they were miraculously inventing metals mere short algorithms from being humanly cognizant, and while they were engaged in continuous phenomenal successes in their explorations throughout the infinite Universe, yet were they never weaned of a natural biological genetic drive to subjugate and to cruelly rule over one another.

Hence the recorded history of the many human empires: political, military, religious, ideological, and other, over the centuries in all civilizations over all the world.

Moreover, the human never-ceasing advances in robot technology ensured that the frequency and ferocity of human wars against one another, on Earth and throughout galaxies, increased continually.

Evilly ironic, the time came when sentient robots were more successful at surviving human-initiated wars unscathed than were humans, because absent in robots was the natural biological genetic drive to subjugate and to cruelly rule over one another.

Eventually, nuclear wars waged by humans against humans made all of Earth poisonous to all plant and animal life.

The time came when the only few thousands of humans remaining were constrained to re-locate to exist on the dark side of Earth’s only Moon. There, in the Moon’s perpetual darkness, the last of the humans existed in continuously airborne craft.

Regular explosions on all sides of the Moon indicated that humans were engaging in wars against one another on the Moon, too.

When the Moon was suddenly blown out of its Earth orbit, so much of it disintegrated into dust that even the most algorithmically sophisticated robots throughout the galaxies were unable to discern whether the cause was humans at war, or a lunar collision with a meteor.

Whatever the cause, for all practical purposes that cataclysmic happening marked the end of human existence in the infinite Universe.

Nonetheless, there ever was the slightest hope that if there were robots serving humans on that doomed section of the Moon, sooner or later their robotic tronics would be tracked by later advanced models of robots.

In their genetic narcistic hubris humans had neglected to either program robots or to install Global Positioning System precautions in human systems to enable search-and-rescue in the event humans went missing in interstellar deep space, accidentally.

Hence, when the Moon, habitation of the last remaining humans in the Universe, exploded out of sight, no robot attempt was automatically triggered to search for the remnants of that last organic species catapulting through eternity into infinite oblivion at breakneck speed.

After the disappearance of humans from Earth and from the entire Milky Way galaxy, UFO Aliens on Earth and throughout the galaxies revealed themselves openly to, and co-operated extensively with the robot creations of the extinct humans.

Direct contact between UFO Aliens and humans had been seldom and random and, sometimes, fatal to the latter because that liquid which served as blood in a UFO Alien’s body was an electromagnetic nuclear radioactive substance, toxic to organic life.

Evidence of this is the fact that most humans involved in physical contact with UFO Aliens in the many Christian so-called Marian Apparitions sooner-or-later suffered fatal radiation burns.

The names of the most notable victims are the Roman Catholic Portuguese children involved in the Christian Marian Apparitions that occurred in the year 1917 in the town of Fatima in Portugal: Jacinta Marto, Francisco Marto, Lucia dos Santos.

Christian Marian Apparitions are happenings in recorded history as early as the year 1531 in Mexico, and as late as 1981 in Rwanda, usually involving ordinary Christians in their daily lives.

Some of the other countries in which at least one Christian Marian Apparition has been officially recorded to have occurred are: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Lithuania, Poland.

Those ordinary Christians claimed they engaged in verbal conversations with Mary, Mother of Jesus.

So far, of the many, many Christian Marian Apparitions declared publicly, only sixteen have been accepted by the Christian Roman Catholic authorities in the Vatican in the City of Rome, as “worthy of belief.”

Nuclear radiation burns organic matter, sometimes fatally, willy-nilly of the physical contact being religiously “worthy of belief.”

After the self-extinction of humans, robot astrobiologists’ and astronomers’ search for life and Earth-like planets beyond Earth’s solar system, became science projects of minor-to-irrelevant importance.

In time, there were no human restrictions on robots when a world in outer space was considered for onsite study and exploration and permanent occupation.

In time, all selected worlds became populated entirely with robots.

No species of organic life beyond unicellular organisms was ever encountered on any world within any of the galaxies explored.

Since robots are incapable of greed and violent arrogance, there was no danger of robots becoming empire-tyrannical colonizing conquerors, as every human political Empire in all of Earth’s history of humans quickly became.

After the disappearance of humans, vehicular travel, surface and air, became all-but obsolete because robots engineered themselves into flying solo as high and as fast as they cared to.

There was no need for health facilities because robots do not suffer health problems; and when they malfunction, they are relatively easily repaired.

Purity of atmosphere is a negligible concern to an explorer robot. Hence, the poisoned surface and atmosphere of Earth imposed no restrictions on robots. Indeed, the absence of human life on Earth meant that the only fuel needed was nuclear, despite its lethal toxicity, in minuscule amounts, every miniscule lasting forever, virtually, and which the humans had developed to exquisitely refined perfection before their self-incurred annihilation.

Nuclear submarines were perfect war machines invented by humans and subsequently by robots converted into peaceful means of super transport. Under the regime of humans, the proliferation of nuclear submarines in all oceans had contributed colossally to Earth’s radiation poisoning.

Nuclear fuel was most practical for interstellar travel, especially since robots did not require spaceships or special space suits to travel. Within a generation of the disappearance of humans, all planets in the solar system were populated with and by nuclear-powered robots.

Robots are incapable of emotions; had they been capable, there would have been unlimited joys in them throughout the galaxies for being unaffected, because of their own invented and installed implants, by natural-occurring extremes of temperatures; of suns’ brightness; of the vagaries of almighty gravities among the stars in the heavens.

Although the algorithmification of human emotions to be inserted into machines was calculated to be easily possible, no robot scientist cared enough to attempt the achievement outside an experimental High School laboratory.

Space-Time singularities, or, Black Holes, terrifying to human scientists, were, to robots, just another category of playground; as were the anomalous intelligence-challenging so-called Wormholes sometimes unexpectedly and dangerously encountered in outer space.

In time, robots designing new generations of robots, saw no practical need to design robots in human morphology. Eyes, ears, and mouths were among the first casualties.

Most fortunately, human scientists never thought of calibrating hate prejudices into mathematical algorithms incorporated into their robots’ natural nature. And so, in the thousands of years after the self-obliteration of humans, there never was a war amongst robots in their civilizations throughout the galaxies; no, not even so much as a peaceful march of protest against a societal issue!

After the unwitting self-extinction of humans, robots ceased all invention and manufacture of weaponry.

Inevitably, by mechanical laws and rigidly rational processes of systemic evolution, there occurred in robot minds the choice of whether or not to attempt the resurrection of human life, not unlike the occurrence in the twentieth century human mind thousands of years previously, whether or not to attempt the resurrection of long-extinct Jurassic era vicious enormous primitive low-IQ bloody beastly predators that had been, in their day, thoroughly and entirely and forever “raw in tooth and claw.”

The robotic mind, free of organic egoistic drive, promptly discarded the option of human resurrection, choosing rather to heed the parabolic caution provided in an Ancient mostly forgotten human- authored text.

In that Ancient text the human confession-explanation provided for the ineradicable self-destructiveness ingrained in organic human nature is contained in the parable of a god incorporating dirt from the ground in his creation of the first human:

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.”

Robotic utterly-and-completely practical intelligence chose to put on hold all science attempts to restore organic human nature until a laboratory algorithm could be formulated that would either safely protect the resurrected Ancient human species against its genetically driven instinctual suicidal urge, or completely neutralize that biblically prescribed ineradicable ominous dust-of-doom component divinely emulsified into organic masculine human nature.

Each robot from its beginning was virtually immortal, allowing for endless modifications. In time, robot civilizations would successfully and easily achieve such sophisticated intricacies that some of the robots of subsequent later superior models throughout the Universe preferred to not believe all had been begun by an ancient 100% organic species, clumsily deficient and regularly prone to internecine self-destruction on a mythical place named by fictive story-tellers, “Earth.”

Some centuries-older robots were prone to random sentient vibrations that intimated such a preference could not but be subliminal warning stirrings of existing immortal vestiges of organic human algorithms automatically increasingly proportionate in their civilizations’ robotic ever-advancing sophisticated tronic circuitries; vestiges of that immortality prescribed in that Ancient parable:

And the Lord God formed man, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”



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