The Epitaph of Antigone

THE EPITAPH OF ANTIGONE

by Fatima Shafiq

Antigone hears the voices of the dead.

There’s an audio recording of its human inventors burned into its memory chip:  it starts with a static buzz, then comes a thick rumbling like distant thunder, and then… voices. One stutters out words in little hiccups. The other is slow and gluey, thick with age, repeating the syllables of Antigone’s name like a fading heartbeat. Antigone always handles the recording gently, doesn’t listen to it too often, afraid of corrupting the audiofile. 

You were born to join in love, not hate.

On the days Antigone joins Oyster and Birdie at the harbour to scavenge for scrap metal, it inevitably drifts away to search for words—the last remnants of human voices. There are a lot to be found in the vast dunes of refuse, which are pockmarked with bullet holes and hollowed skulls and wriggling black maggots. Antigone’s odour sensor often overloads with the smell of dead and dying things. But it’s worth the treasures found out there…  

A white plastic strip with the sun-faded words N t Pr gna t.

Half an instruction manual to build the IKEA SUNDVIK.

A book with more scrawling in the margins than words on the pages. Little notes. Observations. A thick, blotting pen once furiously circled the words, we have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead, as if afraid to forget they were there. 

Antigone fills in the voices itself, imagines how human mouths shaped around the words. The tilts and curves of letters are all as different as pronunciations. There are spelling errors and missing words and commas where there should have been full stops. That little curving symbol intrigues Antigone most of all. A sign that there is more ahead, that there is something left to say. 

•••

Antigone starts the day early in the winters. 

The snow is already falling black beyond the window of the foundry office where Antigone nests. The sunlight runs as thick as honey between the cracks of the city, until the urban pattern resembles rivers of molten lava. The city heaves like a volcano, a grave emptying itself, casting out wafers of ash and cinder. 

On its route to the docks, Antigone has to navigate rubber wheels over old rail lines and splintered pavingstones, past a cement dome that’s cracked open on the sidewalk like an egg. It pauses briefly to deploy its sensor tray and sample the falling snowdrifts, which always taste of burnt earth.

As Antigone approaches the docks, Birdie signals enthusiastically while Oyster remains unmoved. Antigone doesn’t begrudge him. Winter leaves its marks on their mechanisms: filigrees of frost transform their gears into delicate, crystalline sculptures; the chill grinds their processors down to a near halt. Antigone hurriedly untangles the galvanized wire mesh from its storage compartment. 

A film of moss hovers over the water like a pale green mist. The three of them extend their metal claws, the net between them, combing the grayish depths for coins, keys, or zippers. The metal they recover is valuable for repairs—aluminum for joints, copper for wires, and the rest for their solar plates.

The pickings have thinned since the first time they discovered the large body of water. It takes longer than usual to find even a meager amount of scrap metal. When the snow begins to pile in lumps in the crevices of their machinery, even Birdie moves slower than usual. Antigone decides to offer her its share of the findings. A peculiar vibration stirs in its hard drive as it watches Birdie swivel on her back wheels, emitting beeps and bops in an odd rhythm. Antigone supposes the humans might have called that gratitude.

Oyster narrows his optic shutters, a little less impressed. “What will you have for yourself if you give everything away?”

“It’s not everything. Humans often gave each other things, calling it a gift or a present.”

“You said ‘present’ was the term for now.”

Antigone’s gears tighten and relax—an almost-shrug. “It can be both.”

•••

Antigone takes the net, skinning it of algae to feed to the goldfish residing in the ruins of the warehouse district. ​​The fish are a curious splash of colour in the midst of that collapsing concrete leviathan. The humans must have put them there on purpose, a desperate attempt to inject life into such a desolate place. 

At the sight of Antigone, the fish come sliding toward the misty glass, mouths perforating in motion, gills undulating in the water. Antigone extends a metal claw towards the tank; watches with fascination as the fish follow its movement. The pump burbles like the tank is whispering as Antigone sprinkles the algae inside.

One goldfish casts itself far adrift from the others, untempted by the algae. Antigone’s high-definition lenses focus on this solitary fish, noting with concern the blackened edges of its otherwise vibrant orange scales, as though stained with ink. Or perhaps oil or tar.

While Antigone has never encountered a maintenance manual for goldfish, the unusual discoloration suggests a festering wound, a sign of illness seeping through and corrupting the creature from within. Antigone’s computing systems stutter and glitch; it experiences a new sensation, one it thinks might resemble panic in a human, like on the posters plastered at odd intervals around the city, depicting a group of flailing humans with faces grotesquely twisted. Antigone collected most of those, liking the big, bold words at the top: REMAIN CALM, DO NOT PANIC, PANIC IS HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS. 

Antigone's optical scanners—two soft, glowing orbs—begin a frantic search for a remedy for its little goldfish. Its algorithms are accustomed to pairing problems with solutions—viruses with antiviruses.

Finding none at hand, Antigone resolves to locate the appropriate program, the words the humans would have left behind, to treat this sort of malware.  

You were born to join in love, not hate.  

No matter Oyster’s misgivings, Antigone is certain that the humans were once wise—maddeningly cryptic, but wise—always leaving answers buried in riddles, in myths, in half-broken code.

“And I won’t return until I’ve found one,” Antigone pledges to the little goldfish, gently tapping its iron claw against the glass tank in some vague effort to give solace. It’s what the humans would have done.

•••

Antigone treks far past the harbour—for hours, it’s sure. 

The sky is awash with the watery light of a winter afternoon. The small, pallid sun, like an old coin, barely burns through the thin patches of clouds. 

The area sprawls out like a microcosm of its own—a city within a city, or a fishtank with glass too pristine to see. Rows upon rows of shops sit stacked like dominoes all slightly tipped over. There are shutters folded over the windows, doors of chipped brown varnish, and striped canopies loosely hanging over the storefronts. A few shops are just blackened cavities in the earth, wreckages looted by wind and weather until not even a teaspoon remained.

There must have been a bookstore on the block. Antigone thinks it’s the one with the yellow walls of sunbaked stone, where the winter wind blows and whistles through every crevice of every structure, flinging loose pages all along the street, one after the other. 

Antigone stretches its iron arms to catch them. There are plenty of blank pages, a few with words faded or hidden by coffee stains, and one glossy piece of paper with an exquisitely rendered human face. Her features are pointed and somewhat hidden in shadows, her brilliant blue eyes looking somewhere off to the side, solemn and sunken in prophet-like meditation. Antigone wonders what had captured her thoughts. It looks like it might have been the solution to all the malware in the universe.

Antigone putters forward, ripping more pages out of the wind, leafing through them…   

"MISSING DOG! Charlie is a Golden Retriever and has been missing since…"

"And as for those who fail me, may the gods deny them the fruit of the earth…"

"Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Add to bowl 1 cup all-purpose flour…"

"The First World War was also known as the War to End All Wars. (Refer to pg. 29)…"

"Around the sixth week, the baby’s heart will start beating…"

Antigone’s scanning accelerates. It stumbles over words, hardly comprehending what it’s reading. There are no references to goldfish or to black viruses that eat you from the inside out.   

As the flying pages dwindle, Antigone reaches the curve of the road, where a diner bookends the street—a place where humans would go to be given sustenance like algae. The interior is veiled in shadows and its contents tossed asunder. Antigone imagines round tables and chairs and shelves,  smashed teacups and silverware resting on lace tablecloths. 

Antigone rolls inside, its sensors catching a glimpse of a small cylindrical box labeled Premium Biscuits. It grips the object too tightly, the packet popping open and scattering brown dust everywhere. In an instant, hundreds of little mice with wriggling tails and pebble-black eyes appear—from everywhere and nowhere all at once—and gather around the crumbs in circles. Antigone senses it has stumbled upon something profound.

•••

Shadows stretch their long fingers across the crater of the warehouse district. The last bands of sunset gild every rough edge and jagged corner of the ruins in burnished gold. Antigone propels its wheels with an unfamiliar eagerness, the Premium Biscuits clutched gently in its grip.

The light of the fishtank throws spectral impressions on the walls. The goldfish glide up to the glass, and Antigone wonders if they are perpetually waiting—waiting for someone to disrupt their stillness, to offer them a reason to awaken to life once more.

One goldfish remains suspended at the top of the tank, its underside exposed to the air. Antigone taps the glass. No response. It opens the Premium Biscuits, letting its brown, life-giving dust drift into the tank. The upside-down fish remains motionless, not even a bubble rising to the surface.

There is no further sense of panic within Antigone; its systems slow but remain operational. The data firing from its circuits confirms what it had feared: the little orange fish is dead. Antigone recalls reading that death is "the action or fact of dying or being killed; the end of the life of a person or organism." There is no shock or difficulty in processing this information. There is a finality to it. It is not the haunting, echoing voice slowly descending a spiral of steps, fading into emptiness. It is the quick tear of a page, the snuff of a flame.

Antigone simply ponders what it should do next, if there is anything left to be done at all. All around Antigone, there are signs of life—things humans built, places they sat, words they wrote—but these signs are now just decorative tokens in the city that became their crypt. Living among the dead presents a peculiar paradox. 

In a quiet, shadowed corner, Antigone carefully excavates a small hole in the cold, solid earth. Antigone lowers the goldfish—casketed in an old tin box—into the shallow trench. Antigone’s iron claws move tenderly as it covers the fish with dirt, each scoop methodical and respectful. 

As the final mound of earth is smoothed over, Antigone pauses, its sensors casting a reflective glow across the makeshift grave. In the fading light, Antigone stands sentinel, a silent guardian in a world where witnesses to life and death are few.

•••

Antigone retires to its quarters in the foundry office before dark.

Its wheels squeak on slippery linoleum floors; the roof is leaking water and rotting into a patchwork of plaster and creeping mold. Antigone likes to look at the clock when it comes in; the hands don’t move, but there is still a faint ticking sound. It doesn’t bother with that tonight. A robot doesn’t need a clock to tell time anyway.

Antigone settles near the desk, under a bowl of lamplight, its movements feeling more mechanical. A sheaf of loose pages, newspaper clippings, posters, and weather-beaten books are strewn over the surface. Antigone deposits its findings from today atop the rest. They are some humans’ tattered notes, unfinished thoughts, stories with missing pieces. Antigone sometimes puzzles over them, tries to fit them together, finish them, but tonight it feels like a vain and trivial task. 

Antigone is sure the humans left all these words, all these remnants of themselves, for a reason—their entire existence captured in ink-stained pages.  

Antigone’s optical sensors scan the texts it brought back today, but the words blur together, ink chasing itself on the page and dusting away the meaning. These scattered relics drop further and further into a tomb of forgotten significance.

 A missing dog. A verse of poetry. A recipe. A history lesson. Antigone almost misses the little pamphlet with a large comma on its cover, growing with the turn of each page. Antigone pauses for a sliver of a moment.         

Around the sixth week, the baby’s heart will start beating. You may start to feel the baby move inside you. The baby is able to make facial expressions and hear your voice.

•••

Antigone doesn’t dream, but it likes to simulate the experience.

It has heard that humans dream at night, closing their eyes against the dark, a sequence of images flickering through their minds at blinding speeds. It waits until the vast ocean of the night sky is pierced with chipped-glass stars, then relaxes its tense gears and runs its computer-system at full speed, oscillating rapidly between user files. 

A sequence of codes. An antivirus. The syllables of its name fading like a heartbeat, the voice getting further away as though descending a flight of spiral steps… Antigone… Antigone… “Antigone!”

Antigone startles, its computer sputtering. Oyster is in the doorway, a band of shadows cutting across his cubiform body. “It’s Birdie.” 

Oyster leads it through white-washed hallways with strips of fluorescent light, toward the other wing of the foundry, where Antigone expects a still, silent Birdie. Instead the small, metallic automation seems unrestrained, in constant motion, wheels pivoting back and forth. 

“Her hard-drive’s failing,” Oyster proclaims. 

“Have you tried rebooting her?” Antigone asks.

“The first thing I tried. It only made things worse.”  

Antigone’s own hard-drive feels strange: vibrating, pulsating. The audio file is still open…“We spent an awful—awful lot of time building you. You’ll be good… for—for the world. You’ll do—you’ll do what we couldn’t.”

“It is the dead, not the living, who make the longest demands. Just remember this: you were born to join in love, not hate—that is your nature, Antigone… tigone… gone.”

As Antigone reaches into its CPU, unplugs its hard drive, and extends it toward Birdie, it wonders faintly if humans had ever given each other their hearts.

It strongly suspects that they had.