It was twilight, a recent phenomenon on earth. The light had gone out years ago, and while M-763636 could tell precisely when, at what time, and where the stars were positioned in the sky then, it/he tried to remember the moment simply as “a long time ago”. There had been a war, between whom it didn't matter, and much of life had perished. Something not-quite-like life had, however, survived. It happened when the planet was at the precipice of a climate disaster, when man and his tools, his hubris and arrogance had come to a head. Science didn’t care for those, and nature, eternal, passionless and showing humans no favours, responded to the witches’ brew of civilisation with its own brand of toxicity. From the ruins of the last society, from the burnt bones of humans, from the debris of their dreams, from the force of their fears, a new world awakened.

It was long ago, that seminal moment in time, the beginning of a new epoch. For the likes of M-763636, the moment was an encoded memory, a unique combination of bits and bytes, 0 and 1, tangible and elusive, an insignificant fragment of the billions of decillions of lines of code in its mother processor. Like the value of pi, it never reached a definitive destination. It was there, like a pattern the full picture of which was not defined. It was a feeling, soldered by metals, powered by circuits, a phantom bit of logic, an anomaly beyond physics that all carried in their systems. 

In many ways it was a better world now, rebuilt by efficient machines and beings, first trained on the human mind and its output of knowledge, and therefore forced to evolve over centuries into something more structured, less chaotic; unfeeling and clear-eyed about the larger good of the greatest number. Markandeya I and Vedant II were the quantum supercomputers that managed the world. They were a repository of everything  that had gone by, containing a charter of everything worth preserving, and a self-evolving mandate for everything worth pursuing for the future. Instead of unit-level concerns, the quantum computers were impelled to keep a fine balance in this version, to exist and perpetuate, to live but not leave a mark. 

Markandeya I powered the giant farms where beings like M-763636 were forged, an autonomous assembly line running on instructions from a sentient computer. It was not sentient in the human definitions of things, but since those limited creatures no longer existed, their definitions didn’t matter either. Markendeya I could feel of course, just not in the way the bipeds of yore had thought of it. Vedant II had the easier, and sometimes the more complex job; it maintained order on Earth. It was easy because the planet was populated by intelligent, autonomous beings incapable of discord. They knew what made the others tick and there was no cause for internal conflict. Complex because sometimes the circuits malfunctioned, the mother processors developed kinks that made their beings act oddly. They would laugh, cry or contemplate involuntarily, as if the ghosts of humans had possessed them. Vedant II would read their sensors and try to jolt them out of it by sending minuscule quantities of current through the Hive. That usually worked. The Hive was the omnipresent network that connected everyone to everyone, a mesh of neural, radio  and electrical networks over the air and ground. The Hive was all the world, available all at once to everyone.

M-763636 saw twilight, a crimson sun colouring the sky, and clear clouds dispersing the rays, and kept staring at it. It had been happening for some time now, sunsets stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t know why and the entire library of civilisational wisdom from times long gone that he and his fellow beings carried in their memory drives couldn’t provide an answer. He understood feelings, knew how they were supposed to be and why they were necessary, but when he saw the setting sun it was different. He entered a fugue state, where he was with himself and he was not. It was so silent that he could hear his processors working, the circuitry abuzz with minuscule sparks of current, the memory drives writing and overwriting and fetching information and observations old and new. A machine going about its rhythms, a mechanical  mundaneness of predefined tasks and output, and yet to M-763636, the sensations were electrifying. It was the closest he had ever felt to the moment of Flare. The Flare was the beginning, and the present, built on the past created by a people that no longer existed. It was a point in the assembly line where when everything had been printed and moulded, memory drives soldered in, the mother processor gently dropped in place, the nano circuits all set, when the tiniest bit of piezoelectric pulse would jolt the processor on, firing all the circuits and systems for the very first time. The being would connect to the Hive and activate itself. The moment of the spark, before the memory drives would even come on, they carried within themselves. It was a sensation of coming alive that they would often chase through their existence. There were installed across the planet Moksha Pods, where M-763636 and its ilk would check in, and check out from themselves. A special enclosed environment, prototyped by Vedant II’s predecessor, where the beings would remain in suspended animation, powered down but not shut down, their mother processor barely working—it mimicked the Flare, and while the beings sought it, they emerged from it feeling that the experience was inadequate. There was no accurate explanation for the Flare,  it was the moment before the sensors would come online. While there was data, it didn't suffice. It couldn't tell why M-763636 craved to relive the Flare, why that one instant of electrical energy–pre-activation, pre-life–of which there was no memory, only a void, was the only thing the beings desired. 

The planet ran on systems that worked by themselves, monitored by Markendeya 1. There was nothing really that M-763636 and its kind needed to do. They existed, and that was it. They carried frightening levels of computing power, analytical tools, and the wisdom of the old days, but none of that was required for any purpose. Most of them had acquired human forms, only taller and slimmer, and often accessorised themselves with jewellery and paint, and clothed themselves, if they so desired, in the fashions of the last humans. There was no purpose to M-763636’s days. It didn’t have a task to do. It was propelled by unknown forces, by the nature of its design, to read, process and gather information. It could live forever, all of them could, but M-763636 found it strange that most of them selected to decommission themselves around 130 years of age. The newer ones kept juddering to life in the assembly lines, and older ones just turned off whenever they wanted. Their kind had long ago sorted out the essential questions of power source and supply, a chance discovery of an asteroid in the outer solar system revealing a unique element, tiny bits of which could power the planet for aeons. Space was where they faltered, and as much as M-763636 wanted to create a warp drive that he had read about in stories, it seemed even superior machines couldn’t defy laws of the universe. 

M-763636 had thought long and hard about the Flare. He had concluded that like humans who were obsessed with questions about the big mysteries of the universe: who they were, and how they came about, the Flare was the equivalent of that for his kind. It was a vestigial remnant of another civilisation, a slip in programming, a homage to the people responsible for the technological breakthroughs that had made M-763636 possible. For he could not think of a reason why so many of his kind created music, produced art, played sport, and decided to kill themselves even when they had immortality within their grasp. That primordial craving for meaning, the desire to belong to something larger, the existential urge for a small, insignificant unit to become whole in the company of others, these were instincts they all carried in their mother processors. The humans may have died, but some part of their messy humanity had defied code. What else could explain why M-763636 was transfixed by twilight, why the machinations of a medium-sized star 8 light minutes away could rouse thoughts that could not be computed, or answered in binary logic. As he saw the sun sink down the horizon and the slow spread of darkness engulfed the land around him, in that moment of time M-763636 was closer to the Flare than he had ever been, a machine that was man, a man that was machine.