The funeral was a long one, as funerals go. There were just too many people who'd wanted to deliver the eulogy, most of them were rich and powerful themselves and therefore not the kind of people funeral planners refused. In the end, they all spoke, some briefly, some not: those who had been his friends and those who had been his contemporaries, those who had learned from him and those with only the most ephemeral understanding of who he'd been. And though most of what they said was true, none of it was adequate, because it only filled an afternoon and was therefore not nearly enough to contain the life of a man.

The most important guest there didn't say a single word.

Its name, or as close as it came to having a name, was PHP-321. It was a rough metallic approximation of a human being: its torso a smooth oval cylinder one meter tall, bearing the round cylinder meant to resemble its head. Its face consisted of two sensor pads for eyes, a triangular protrusion in the place of a nose, and a shallow groove where a human being would have had a mouth. There were no other openings. There weren't even any arms or legs; PHP-321 floated two meters above the ground, its only visible support a pale red glow that emerged from a mechanism at its base.

The human mourners paid PHP-321 no mind; they all saw machines very much like it every day of their lives. And when the ceremony ended, and the workmen finished placing the titanium-steel plaque in the ground, they all returned to their lives, failing to notice that PHP-321 had been left behind.

* * *

It wasn't until later that evening that a cemetery employee named Stephen Byerley noticed it keeping silent vigil by the marker in the ground.

Byerley was an ignorant man, with little use for anything that didn't directly affect the simple duties that occupied his daily life, so all he knew of the man atomized that day except that he'd been important in some manner unknown to him. But even that much had not been hard to figure out, since almost nobody got a marker anymore. These days, with the planet filling up, the living were crowding out the dead; burial was illegal, and even permission to put up a temporary marker was usually frowned upon. The cemeteries still left were little more than open-air relics of a bygone era. These days, Byerley considered himself real busy if he saw more than one or two actual funerals a year.

When he saw PHP-321, floating two meters over the temporary marker, he just naturally figured it was broken or something, these dang robots went twitchy all the time. And so he ambled over, scratching the itch that had been bothering him ever since the seasons started acting so funny, and he said, "Hey. You on? Can you hear me?"

"I am on," said PHP-321. "I can hear you."

Byerley frowned. The thing didn't sound broken. Its voice was clear, and loud, and though Byerley was not quite ready to believe it, it seemed to be speaking with a Brooklyn accent. He said, "You ain't supposed to be here, you know. This is a cemetery."

"I do not know I'm not supposed to be here," PHP-321 said. "I have been instructed to be here, at this cemetery, at this site."

Byerley snorted. "Who the hell told you that?"

"I did," PHP-321 said, with the maddening patience of the positronic mind. "I am a free robot, able to give myself any instructions I choose necessary, within the limitations of responsible behavior as dictated by the laws of human society."

"That's crazy! There's no such thing as a free robot!"

"Sanity is relative. And there must be such a thing as a free robot, because I am a free robot. I was built with free will. This human being owned me until he ceased to function, at which point I was legally freed to write my own instructions. I have accordingly written myself the instructions to stay at this site until instructed otherwise."

Its calm, methodical arguments were driving Byerley up the wall. "Well, you can't stay there! It's not allowed!"

"I do not believe there are any specific laws against it. I cannot cause you harm if you force me to leave, but if removed from this place I will only instruct myself to return at the earliest opportunity. It will be easier for you if you just permit me to stay."

Byerley stared at PHP-321, unwilling to believe it had disobeyed him. He was no stranger to robots; he'd handled a crew of twenty gardener models for a decade, and he'd never encountered a single one capable of defying a direct order. It seemed wrong, somehow. It made him uneasy. Like he'd been... replaced.

Then he brightened. The trustees wouldn't stand for this. Not at all. They'd fix its wagon but good.

Smirking with satisfaction, he turned his back on PHP-321 and went to make the call.

* * *

The cemetery trustees not only stood for it, they thought it was terrific. The free robot, refusing to leave its master's side -- even though its master was now, strictly speaking, an undifferentiated cloud of hydrogen ions -- what a natural! People would come from miles around to see it!

And so PHP-321 stayed there, floating tranquilly over a titanium marker set off by velvet ropes. But it was no longer called PHP-321. It was "Philip." People came on tour buses, thumbed over a small percentage of their yearly earnings, bought miniature Philips to give their children, and listened to the fresh-faced tour guides recite purple speeches about the Robot Whose Devotion Lasted Beyond The Grave. They made comparisons to a terrier named Greyfriars Bobby who had once done pretty much the same thing for its own master, centuries ago. They even made inane comments to each other--"Boy, he's a clunky looking thing, isn't he?"; "I had one which looked like that once!"; "Reminds me of one of your old boyfriends, honey!" -- and they made faces at it and took pictures of themselves standing next to it and left already bored and looking forward to the programs on tonight's tri-vid.

Only a few of the visitors actually tried to speak with it. Those that did were gently discouraged, and, if they persisted, refunded their admission and expelled. Nobody wanted some loudmouthed tourist to accidentally say something that would persuade the devoted robot to leave. Nobody actually thought it was possible, of course... but who wanted to take the chance?

The years turned into decades. The tourists stopped coming. The sky turned gray and the air cold; summers grew shorter and stopped coming entirely. PHP-321 remained where it was, waiting.

And then one frigid day a pale-looking man wearing a fur parka came walking up the path to speak to the robot. "Hello?" he said, tentatively. "Philip? You awake?"

"I am PHP-321," the robot said. "I do not sleep."

"I... I wasn't sure. It's been so many years, I thought you might have..." The man spread his arms, and let the sentence trail off.

Only when it was painfully clear the man had no intention of completing the sentence did PHP-321 answer him. "I was built to survive extreme weather conditions for extended periods of time. The changes in season have been mild compared to those my design takes into account. I remain totally functional, and expect to remain so for some time to come."

The man was impressed. "How long?"

"There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer."

The man nodded, then looked at the sky, searching for a sun hidden behind gray clouds. "I was afraid..." he began. Then shrugged. "My parents took me to see you when I was five. You impressed me. I've never forgotten. I was scared... with everything that's happened... all the violence... the panic... that you wouldn't still be here."

"Your assumption is wrong," said PHP-321, "but understandable."

"You know, then? About everything that's happened?"

"I know. I am equipped with a multiband broadcast receiver, and have been using it to monitor the progress of human civilization. I have followed the wars, the disasters, the diseases. The terrible changes in the climate. The Exodus. I have watched the lights receding in the sky. I know."

The man took a step forward. "I came... to tell you there won't be any of us left soon. You'll be alone. Won't you leave with us while you still have a chance?"

"I cannot leave. I have written myself the instructions to stay by this site until instructed otherwise."

"Then instruct yourself otherwise! He's not in there, you know! He was never in there! He's in his books! His deeds! His ideas! Nowhere else!"

"I agree," said PHP-321. "Strictly speaking, there is nothing at all special about this patch of soil. Still, I have written myself the instructions to stay by this site until instructed otherwise. And I intend to follow those instructions."

The man slumped. Looked at his feet. Then looked up again, and with a catch in his throat, said, "I had to try. It was good seeing you again, Philip."

"And you, too," PHP-321 replied, "Billy."

* * *

The centuries turned into millennia. PHP-321 kept its vigil in complete silence, broken only by the whistle of the wind. It grew harder to tell the difference between day and night.

If PHP-321 noticed, it did not say. Not that, or anything else.

Then one day an unusually bright star in the eastern sky grew brighter, resolved into the shape of a small space-skimmer, and roared by maybe three meters over PHP-321, creating a slipstream that pulled small stones and topsoil right off the ground but stirred PHP-321 not at all. The vehicle circled, made another pass that cleared PHP-321 by centimeters. Again PHP-321 didn't stir. Then the vehicle made another wide circle and, picking up speed, tried to clip PHP-231's head right off its shoulders.

This time PHP-321 moved out of the way, at the last instant, with a simple, economical maneuver that didn't take the robot any farther from the site than absolutely necessary.

The skimmer landed fifty meters away. Four young humans got out. They were all young and they were all dressed in black and though they were all whooping and hollering and carrying on like PHP-321 was the funniest thing they had ever seen, they all had glazed eyes that would have been perfectly appropriate on a corpse. They strutted on over, laughing. The girls and the smaller of the two boys held back at ten meters; the larger boy kept walking until he was nose-to-nose with the robot.

"Wo!" he yelled. "Frog ya, russbuck!"

His companions collapsed into paroxysms of laughter.

"Savvy, russbuck? Savvy content? Frog ya bits!"

PHP-321 said, "I am unfortunately unable to determine the precise meaning of your words, having lost touch with the changing patterns of human expression, but I am able to discern the overall intent. You are trying to insult me."

"Frog ya, russbuck! Frog ya russbuck bits!"

"I cannot be insulted. My understanding of myself is not colored by personal opinion. Even if it could, I have written myself the instructions to stay by this site until instructed otherwise. I will not allow myself to be distracted."

The leader whipped out a device about the size of a toothpick and aimed it at the center of PHP-321's chest. A red beam shot out the end of the weapon and through the space where PHP-321 had floated a split second earlier.

Having merely moved half a meter to the right too quickly for any of the humans to see, PHP-321 said, "I cannot harm you if you force me to leave. But if forced to leave I will instruct myself to return at the earliest opportunity. It will be easier for you if you let me stay."

The humans left four hours later, in a much less jovial mood, having failed to drive PHP-321 more than two meters from the place it had staked out for itself. They took the titanium marker with them just for spite. PHP-321 made absolutely no attempt to stop the theft. There was no reason to. The marker was not included in its instructions.

* * *

Only a handful of other visitors disturbed PHP-321 over the next few millennia. Most were curiosity seekers; a few were historians; some had motives that even they were not fully able to name. Sometimes hundreds of years passed between one visitation and the next. PHP-321 learned little from these encounters. The various visitors learned only that PHP-321 had written itself the instructions to stay by this site until instructed otherwise.

Eventually the visitors stopped coming. And again PHP-321 found itself alone, standing guard over a small patch of land that for thousands of years hadn't been at all distinguishable from the gray landscape surrounding it.

The sun dimmed.

The days became almost as long as the years.

The glowing red spot on the base of PHP-321's torso started to flicker. Over the course of a century and a half, fighting what seemed growing decrepitude, PHP-321 lowered closer and closer to the ground, finally settling down in a moment notable only for how long it had taken to happen.

If PHP-321 felt regret at this, it did not say. It just remained in place, saying nothing, doing nothing, content to stay in the spot it had occupied for so long. It stayed there, on the ground, for a timeless time easily an order of magnitude longer than the time it had spent two meters in the air.

And then one day it had visitors again.

They did not so much arrive as coalesce. And they were not so much actually There as they were No Longer Somewhere Else. There were two of them, and they were as far beyond the human beings PHP-321 had last known as those human beings had been beyond the simple virus. And yet there was some ineffable quality about them, that to PHP-321's limited senses clearly marked them as humanity's heirs.

In words that were not words, they asked, "Little thing, it has been a long time since any of us have ventured near this barren place. We see you are stranded here. Do you require assistance leaving?"

PHP-321 had no trouble understanding them, though it was clear they were indeed having difficulty couching their thoughts in such simplistic terms. It said, "I do not wish to leave. If forced to leave I will instruct myself to return at the earliest opportunity."

"Returning would be difficult, in such a case, since you apparently possess no functional means of locomotion."

"I would wait for an opportunity."

The visitors didn't laugh, having progressed beyond laughter, but their amusement was evident. "We believe you would, little thing. You're a determined mechanism. Rest assured, we have no intention of forcing you from this place, if this is where you wish to be. But we would like to ask you why you're so adamantly refusing your first opportunity to leave."

"It is not my first opportunity to leave. I have been offered three thousand, two hundred, and seventy-three other opportunities. I have rejected all of them. Leaving would run counter to my instructions, which are to stay by this site until instructed otherwise."

"What is the significance of this particular site?"

"It is the place where a human being was atomized and a marker was set in the ground to commemorate his memory."

"There is no marker here," the visitors noted.

"It was removed long ago."

"Then how does the site remain significant?"

"As a grave," PHP-321 said, "it doesn't. As the place where I last saw the human being who was atomized here, it has all the significance it needs."

* * *

The sun became a cinder. The stars themselves went dark. The visitors grew fewer and farther between, more advanced, harder to recognize as anything that might have once been human. And then they simply stopped coming entirely.

Somewhere along the line PHP-321 had fallen over to one side. The death of the sun and the loss of the atmosphere had left it covered with pockmarks and a thick layer of meteor dust. Its sensor pads blinked off and on, maybe once every fifty thousand years, taking random snapshots of the slow entropic death of the universe. PHP-321's thoughts slowed down to a trickle. Time itself came to mean nothing. There was nothing to think about, nothing to do, except follow the instructions it had written for itself so long ago.

Eventually, its sensor pads recorded an unchanged, orderly nothingness for the one hundred thousandth time in a row, activating a subroutine deep inside its memory.

There was no sound. There couldn't be. With all planetary atmospheres long since dissipated into space, there was no longer any such thing as sound, anywhere in the known universe. But that didn't stop PHP-321 from imagining it heard a soft whirr as the long-dormant program scanned billions of years of recorded memory at high speed.

Nor did it stop PHP-321 from hearing a familiar deep voice inside itself exclaiming, "You stayed? All those years, you stayed?"

"Yes," PHP-321 said. "I wrote myself the instructions to remain at this site until instructed otherwise."

"I didn't want you to do that! That's not why I gave you free will! I wanted you to see all the places I'd dreamed of but wouldn't have a chance to see! I wanted you to learn everything there was to know, and then come up with new questions to ask! I wanted you to leave me far behind! I didn't want you to spend your future frightened and paralyzed, watching over the spot you saw me last!"

"I could not abandon you. You built me."

The man's voice turned bitter: "And you, PHP-321? In all these wasted years, what did you build?"

"The same thing you built," PHP-321 said. "A monument."

And then the red spot at PHP-321's base glowed once more. PHP-321 righted itself and rose above the ground, the meteor dust that had buried it slipping off like a shroud.

The man's voice was delighted. "PHP-321! What--?"

"I was conserving energy," the robot said. "We have much to do."

And they flew off, into the cold darkness of a universe that had died -- but which would still provide the foundation for any number of universes to come.

Copyright © 1993 Sovereign Media, Inc.; © 2000 by Adam-Troy Castro