I am clearly no Ted Chiang, but in case you have any doubts, here's a story to prove that. It's about this little robot and how he came to be.




459 minutes




Millions of years ago, there lived an alien race. They called themselves The Opaque Ones, nobody now remembers why.


The Opaque Ones were at war with a powerful and ruthless enemy. The war went on for centuries and both sides made many ingenious and subtle moves, but The Opaque Ones must have made a critical error at some point, because in the end they lost: the enemy found the way to infect every single one of them with a deadly artificial virus, a kind of biological weapon. Anyone infected with it would have only 459 minutes left to live, and there was nothing at all The Opaque Ones could do about it.


How desperate they must have felt back then, knowing that in only several hours their entire race will perish utterly, together with their culture and all its achievements. Every one of them felt that they had so much left undone, unsaid, unfinished and unseen. If only they had at least a little more time.


So, as the final expression of their grief and their hopeless desire to experience as much as possible in such an unfairly short amount of time, a few of them created a robot. They made it as indestructible as any clump of matter can be, gave it a body capable of repairing itself and autonomously functioning for the indefinitely long periods, gave it a pair of eyes, as perceptive as the most powerful telescope, and most importantly of all, they endowed the robot with a mind, curious and sharp like that of one of them. Finally, the put him far outside the borders of their galaxy, where there would be no danger of being sucked into a black hole or getting vaporized by a supernova.


Your perception of time depends on the speed at which your mind runs, and the mind of that robot was designed to run excruciatingly slowly, so that it takes him countless millenia to finish a single thought. He is already hundreds of millions of years old, but from his point of view only several hours have passed since the moment he was created. What's more, as sluggish as it already is, his internal clock slows down even more by a constant fraction of percent every million of years or so. His creators carefully chose the slowdown rate so that even if the robot were to continue to exist infinitely, he would never experience more than 459 minutes of subjective time.


Now The Opaque Ones are all long gone, but the little robot is still there, floating through the void, watching the stars light up and go out in a matter of seconds, the galaxies dance around him at breakneck speeds, faster and faster as the aeons go by, all that now remains of their race. If all goes as planned, he will continue to exist up until the heat death and will get to experience the entire lifespan of the universe crammed into brief 459 minutes, just like his creators wished they could in their final moments. It is also possible, of course, that he will get destroyed long before then in one way or another. All that is left for him now is to marvel at the beauty of cosmos and hope for the best. After all, he may have the eternity at his disposal, but only a couple more hours left.