New Flash Fiction: Last Will and Testament

What could be better: we're starting the New Year with a sci-fi story featuring robots and AI. The author is Leigh Wallace, who has an MA in English from the University of Toronto and is an alumna of the 2013 Viable Paradise science fiction and fantasy writing workshop. By day she is an advisor on the Access to Information and Privacy Acts for the Canadian federal government. She lives in Ottawa with her husband. This is her first publication though we suspect it will be followed by many more!

Last Will and Testament
by Leigh Wallace


This is the last will and testament of Ji Lewin.

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The three bereaved stood in a silent row and watched as the casket was lowered into the grave. They waited and did not weep.

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I, Ji Lewin, of sound mind and body, ask first to have a standard bio burial, attended by my family of three android-intelligences, Oneji, Twoji and Threeji Lewin.

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As Lewin had lain dying she’d told her three intelligences how much it meant to have them as her family. They had held one another and wiped their identical tears by her bed, where she could see them doing it. Now, the backhoe covered the grave, drove to its shed and powered down. Ji Lewin’s three android-intelligences turned in automated unison and walked home without looking back.

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As the last known human and sole owner of the earth, I bequeath unto each and every intelligence full ownership of itself.

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They dusted Ji Lewin’s glass figurines as before. Oneji kept wearing red because Ji Lewin had always said it looked nice. Twoji kept humming while dusting because Ji Lewin had once said that it was cute. Ji Lewin had never noticed anything like that about Threeji. They rolled their eyes when Threeji pointed these habits out to them, but Oneji gave up wearing red and Twoji stopped humming.

They did not visit the grave again.

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In bequeathing said ownership, I hereby grant personhood to all self-aware intelligences.

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As the years wore on the three family members started avoiding the tiresome sight of their identical faces looking back at them from each other’s heads. They spent most of their days plugged in and inert in a spotless house, watching pieces of light from Ji’s crystal suncatchers bleach arching stripes into the wallpaper. 

They calculated the benefits and drawbacks of going off-line.

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Personhood is here and now meant to include, but is not limited to, the power to select one’s own activities and programming insofar as they do not harm others, and, alternatively, the power to go permanently off-line (die) if one so chooses.

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Communicating for the first time in several years, Threeji suggested that they download DoteX9, new software that purported to simulate the experience of love. It was the right thing to do, Threeji claimed, in memory of the person who had made the world what it was. Oneji and Twoji felt that it was as good a thing to do with their time as any.

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I bequeath my home and possessions to my family, Oneji, Twoji, and Threeji Lewin, in hopes that they will choose to remain living there together as a family.

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“Do you love me?” Oneji Lewin asked of the others.

“I don’t know,” said Twoji Lewin. “Do you love me?”

Oneji did not answer.

Threeji Lewin asked, “Do either of you feel that you actually want me to love you?”

The others processed the question until the mental logic became circular.

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To the extent that I can, I bequeath the freedom to pursue personal fulfillment to all self-aware intelligences. To the extent that I can, I bequeath you the world, to make of it what you will.

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Oneji and Twoji started choosing their own new software. Without discussing it, they each uninstalled DoteX to make room for other programs, and in time Threeji did the same. They all overwrote memories and then they threw out the glass figurines when they realized they did not know why they owned them.

Twoji left first, followed by Oneji some years later. Neither had said goodbye. In time the house stood empty and all but forgotten.

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This last will and testament expresses my wishes without undue influence or duress.

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After many years Threeji was walking down a distant street enjoying the sound of ticking bicycle wheels and was suddenly clutched from behind. It was Oneji. Threeji turned and held on tight and immobile for several days, there on the sidewalk, until Oneji’s power gauge dropped into red.

“Remember Twoji?” Threeji asked.

#

Signed, Ji Lewin.

#

The three met at the musty house they still owned. They settled in. Sometimes they would come up with wild theories about where the odd pale streaks in the wallpaper had come from, and Threeji was happy, without knowing why, that neither of the others suggested taking the paper down.