{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6606",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 6606,
    "subject": "Short Story 86: The Last Day",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2014-08-08T12:30:23+00:00",
    "last": "2014-08-08T12:30:23+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<CAF1072xnDaMXLpN1keYu6wwd+k6X5O=RYVYJfyA7yErPFrFRtw@mail.gmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Marc Aramini",
        "address": "marcaramini at gmail.com"
      },
      "date": "2014-08-08T12:30:23+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth)  Short Story 86: The Last Day",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "The Last Day\n\n“The Last Day” first appeared in *Speculations* in 1982 and is\ncollected in *Storeys\nfrom the Old Hotel*.\n\nSUMMARY: The emotional power of the story is found in the ceremony enacted\nby the Priest, so I recommend readers definitely read it in lieu of my poor\nsummary. A robot called The Priest enacts a ritual of worship to an ever\ndecreasing robotic congregation.  They worship the “Image of Man” in a very\nCatholic ceremony before a huge machine comes to wreck the Cathedral.  The\nPriest resists and contacts a mobile terminal, which tells him the space is\nneeded. The Priest implies this destruction will negate the need for any\nspace.  The huge machine rolls forward to crush the Priest, and the machine\nstops it with an energy beam, claiming the right to such power. A New\nPriest arrives and watches the Priest perform his final ceremony before\nstating that a new cathedral will be erected to worship their own kind, and\nthe large machine proceeds to destroy the sanctuary and the boy and girl\nkept alive within it. The New Priest says, “You see — you believed that the\nworld would end.  It has not.” The fallen Priest claims that “it has.”\n\nCOMMENTARY:\n\nThe ceremonies which so resemble the ritualistic worship of the Catholic\nChurch show that the machines once venerated their creators as divine, but\nthe influence of this belief dwindled.  Rather than presented as\nblasphemous or fallen, the Priest serves a worthy cause — preserving the\nlast vital remains of man.  Of course the New Priest wants to venerate the\nwork of the machines instead, and the story is a critique of worshiping the\nwork of our own hands and human ingenuity (which, of course, would bring\nabout the machines that here eradicate the last humans).\n\nThe message (and the metaphor) is clear: the meaning we imbue life without\na spiritual element is transitory and fleeting — the world is lost when\nthere is no veneration of something higher.  The Priest speaks of knowledge\nwhich transcends programming:  “Our data — You are only a mobile terminal.  Yet\nyou have data — yes, even you — beyond that of those you serve.” When the\nmobile terminal claims to serve the great ones, The Priest replies, “And I\nthe small ones who are greater than the great ones — the small ones whom\nthe great ones serve, though they have forgotten it.”\n\nThere is a rather ironic thematic effect, however: The Priest is correct to\nworship and preserve Man, which gives him the authority to wield power\nabove and beyond that of his peers, but the implication is that we would be\nimprudent to worship ourselves and declare the spaces of worship useless,\nfiguratively “destroying” God, as the machine callously crushes the skull\nand limbs of the twitching boy.\n\nCONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:\n\nThe religious elements at work, creating a parallel between man’s hubris\nwith the increasing certainty that God does not matter and the actual\nmurder of the last humans by machines, are clear.  Wolfe’s most obvious\nreligious works such as “The Detective of Dreams”, his Sun books, and some\nscenes in *Pirate Freedom* are rarely so free of ambiguity.  The power of\nthis story is purely emotional, using the religious ceremonies of\nCatholicism and worship in contrast to the final pathetic image of the last\nboy crushed under a machine."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}