A loud knock startled Randall awake, and the book he had been dozing over slipped from his lap. Odd. This wasn't the usual time for Chaz to stop by.

"Come on in, Chaz," he called out. He stretched to retrieve the paperback, but it had tumbled just out of reach.

He looked up to see Chaz's familiar synthetic visage peering at him over an enormous arrangement of spring flowers.

"Don't trouble yourself, Mr Randall. Please allow me to help." Chaz deposited the vase on the nearby kitchen table and placed the book on the sidetable beside Randall's comfortable recliner. "I'm afraid we've lost your place. Perhaps if you can tell me the last thing you remember reading…"

Randall laughed. "I do appreciate your company, Chaz. I'm a lonely, bitter old man." He saw puzzlement cross Chaz's face as he processed the contradiction between the words and the laughter.

"I hope you are jesting, Mr Randall. But if, in fact, you are lonely, we could easily arrange for more frequent company." He paused for what seemed to Randall like dramatic emphasis. "At this time, you are now our sole responsibility."

Ah. So that was it. Halfway across the world the last real woman on Earth had gone to her rest. Or maybe not. Randall had to ask. "Did Fai Li upload, or did she pass naturally?"

Chaz's words were, in a way, reassuring. "She remained faithful to her decision to die naturally."

"Thank you, Chaz, for that news." Randall pushed himself slowly to his feet. "I need to get up and move about a bit anyway. I'm creakier every day. Let's see what you brought me."

The robot stood patiently as Randall examined the bouquet. "Lovely. Is this pink and orange a new hybrid?"

"Yes, sir. It's one I designed myself. Does it please you?"

Randall noted the expectant look on Chaz's face. He pulled a stem sporting a narcissus with an orange double cone and pink ruffle. The fragrance of orange and grapefruit wafted to him. A joke? Certainly a surprise. "It's charming," he replied. "Your ingenuity shines brilliantly once again."

"Thank you, sir." Chaz smiled and dropped his eyes, a gesture that revealed self-satisfaction softened by modesty. Randall remained amazed at the range of subtle expression his companion could convey. He often forgot, in fact, that Chaz was an artificial being, very complex and skilled, but artificial nonetheless.

Randall began to poke the stem back into the arrangement randomly. With only a slight widening of his eyes conveying distress, Chaz took it from him. "Allow me." He raised it to his humaniform nose for a moment before returning it to the exact original spot. "Very satisfying," he said.

Randall blinked hard. "Did you just sniff that daff?"

"Yes, sir."

"But why? You don't have a sense of smell."

"I beg your pardon, Mr Randall. I installed an olfactory sense in all of the garden workers and myself some time ago. I believed we could anticipate your pleasure better if we shared that ability. Should I have asked your permission?"

"No, no, of course not," Randall replied. "Do you like it?" A moment later, he chided himself for the irrelevance of his question. Yet Chaz surprised him once again.

"Hmm? Oh yes, sir. It is quite satisfactory to have another source of data and one that is at times very pleasurable. I was hoping to similarly modify the food preparation workers with the analogue of taste. I believe it will enhance their judgment in selecting and preparing your meals. May I?"

"Yes, by all means. You have the wherewithal to do that?"

Chaz nodded.

"Well," Randall said. "Imagine that. Then you have my blessing."

Chaz stood in silence. Randall felt there was something else hovering unspoken, some other reason for the unscheduled visit.

"Out with it," he demanded.

"Sir?"

"What else is on your mind?"

"Much," Chaz replied cryptically. "There is a great deal on my mind."

Randall narrowed his eyes. Playing it close to the chest? "Come. Sit. We'll play while we talk." He moved the flowers to one end of the table and pulled out two chairs. "What'll it be today? Cards? Battleship? Mahjong? Monopoly?" He could have sworn that a fleeting wince crossed Chaz's face when he offered Monopoly.

The bamboo Mahjong tiles clicked together gently as Randall swiftly shuffled them on the tabletop. The sound was said to echo the twittering of birds. Chaz's two walls were completed well ahead of Randall's.

Either his dexterity had improved, or Randall's own fingers were becoming less obedient as they aged. They looked just like he remembered his grandpapa's hands, mottled and bone thin. Well, they were the oldest hands in the world now.

With the habit born of hours of play together, they rolled dice for dealer and deal. Randall opened the wall in the spot decreed by the dice and began passing stacks of tiles.

While he set up his fourteen tiles and arranged them, he broached the subject once again. "Okay, my friend, what aren't you telling me?" He tossed a discard tile into the centre courtyard formed by the walls. "Two of Bamboo."

If a robot could have looked evasive, he would have looked like Chaz. Without answering, he flipped down two decorative tiles. "Two pretties."

Randall groaned. "Lucky bugger."

Chaz replenished his hand, drew, and discarded a Green Dragon.

Randall paused, his hand over the next tile to draw. "Please. Tell me."

"Very well," Chaz said. "This is somewhat awkward to begin."

"Just jump right in," Randall prompted. "It's only me, you know."

"Indeed. It is, as you say, only you. Now that you are the sole living human, we need to know your wishes regarding what shall happen next..."

Randall set his face in a scowl. "I'm not uploading, and that's final. Bunch of imaginary people playing imaginary games, living imaginary lives. And I don't fear seeing what's on the other side of this life. I rather look forward to it."

"Pardon," Chaz said. "I know your feelings very clearly on this point. I was, in fact, beginning to ask what shall happen next to the Immortalsphere?"

"Oh, God. Who is there to care anymore? Erase them all," Randall said sourly. "Ones and zeroes imitating flesh and blood."

The Immortalsphere had started so quietly and insidiously when the highly stimulating, addictive entertainments of role-playing games and virtual reality merged and spawned something much more sinister. At least that was how Randall saw it.

First, his parents became addicts to life in an imaginary town, clicking away on side-by-side computers long into the night. Their realworld conversations were subsumed by the game, to the point that the real, day-to-day needs of their child were often forgotten.

A decade later, immersive helmets intensified the experience even more. And not only for gamers. Telecommuting via helmet became a way of life for anyone employed in intangible services - finance, entertainment, education. Randall was a member of one of the last classes to attend college lectures IRL - in real life.

Once the DirectLink system came along, expertly stimulating the sensory loci in the brain, people actually forgot to logout to eat or eliminate, satisfying their hunger with virtual gourmet meals. An epidemic of wasting killed thousands, maybe millions, until the public health system installed robotic caretakers to keep the addicts' IV lines filled.

Some people still lived and functioned in the real world, people like Randall and his wife. But in the same year Immortalsphere went into beta testing, Deanna was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. He begged her to fight it out, which she did until she felt her mind going from the aggressive treatments. She uploaded before it was too late.

"I'm going to be immortal now," were her last words to him. He just couldn't believe them as he buried her ashes on a cold October morning.

She had begged him to upload with her. "Together forever," she had promised. But the first time he linked in to visit, he felt her flatness, her non-dimensionality.

She looked young and healthy. She smelled of her favourite perfume. Her voice and mannerisms were unchanged. It wasn't anything he could put his finger on directly, but much as he had adored her, he felt nothing for this soulless simulation.

He never returned. Through a mutual friend, he heard that eventually she "remarried" and the two of them had "developed a child" together.

"Ones and zeroes imitating flesh and blood," he grumbled. A little scrap of engineered code was not a child.

"Erase them all? Sir, do you mean that?" Randall could have sworn that Chaz's voice held a note of anxiety.

"I don't know. I don't know what I mean. I'll have to think about it. Four of Characters," he said as he discarded another tile.

Chaz persisted. "Do you really find artificial life so offensive?"

Ah. He understood. "No, Chaz, I don't find you and your kind offensive. You're here. You're real. Hell, you're useful and creative and interesting. More than a lot of people I used to know."

Chaz inclined his head with a grateful nod.

"But a digital simulation of life is another thing altogether," Randall said.

"You know that my own mind is digital," Chaz said hesitantly.

"It's just…it's different somehow. You were created this way. They gave up their humanity." Randall struggled to wrap words around his conviction.

"I don't see the harm in them, Mr Randall," Chaz said. "The uploading of the human race alleviated a great deal of physical suffering, illness, and hunger. It democratised access to education and entertainment. It freed people's minds to pursue complete intellectual fulfilment."

"If you think that's what people are doing in the Sphere, you've got a more optimistic opinion of the human race than I have."

"But there must be some good in it if so many people enlisted voluntarily."

Randall shivered at the memory of the police pounding on his door night after night. "It may have been voluntary at first, Chaz my friend, but it became coercive once the ball got rolling. Do you think the government wanted to pay to keep the water sanitised and the mail delivered and the garbage collected and the street lights on at night and the cops on the beat after three quarters of the population packed up and cremated themselves? Ha. It was more economically feasible to upload everyone. Why do you think there were so few of us holdouts?"

"My progenitor never emphasized this aspect of the upload."

"Your progenitor?" Randall asked.

"The robot who designed me."

"Really." Randall was bemused. "Is he, uh it, still living? Functioning, that is?"

Chaz shook his head. "No. Many of his functions were obsolete, so he decommissioned and was recycled into parts. He programmed me with many advanced and newly developed features, though."

Now that he thought about it, Randall did remember a change in caretakers some time back, but how long ago was that? "How old are you?"

"I have been functioning for sixteen years, but I do carry the memories of your former caretakers."

"Well, that's a stumper," Randall said. "How long have you known me, then?"

"Thirty-three years. Ever since the World Health Organisation completed the last of the uploads."

"And then they bailed out, too."

"At least they left enough of us to care for all of you."

"And I do thank you for that care," Randall said with affection. "Pung." He grabbed the last thrown tile and turned over a threesome of East Winds. "And it's a major in my wind," he gloated. "Speaking of wind…" He rose and walked over to the kitchen window. "Gorgeous day," he said, throwing open the sash.

"Twenty-three degrees," Chaz confirmed.

Randall stood for a moment, admiring the view from his vantage point. Swathes of tended flowers ran down the hill from his house to the greenhouses at the foot of the slope. Robot attendants walked between the rows, checking for parasites.

Beyond, long stems of various grains waved in the sweet smelling breeze. One robot was chasing a trio of brazen deer out of the tall grasses. The pale blue sky was cloudless, but filled with swallows swooping low over the fields.

Longhouse shelters for the robotic workers marked a sort of boundary where the fields ended and orchards began. In the distance, he could just make out more workers tending the trees. All this for him. It was staggering to contemplate.

He turned from the window to study Chaz for a moment. The robot sat as if in deep concentration, studying his tiles and those already discarded and out of play, working out his best odds. It was kind of him not to flaunt his lightning fast abilities, to slow down and preserve an old man's dignity.

"The Earth?" Randall said. "Is it recovering?"

"It's progressing very well. I thought it best for your health to develop teams to clear as much debris from the old cities as possible. The streams and rivers healed themselves once the factories and farms ceased functioning. And, of course, the air is almost clear of combustibles now that we have switched to solar energy sources. The pollution we create from our own maintenance and manufacturing is minimal."

"So what do you want to do with it?" Randall asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What do you want to do when I'm gone?" Randall asked.

Chaz broke eye contact and looked away, something he had never done before. In a quieter voice, he said, "Our purpose will cease when your life ceases."

"It doesn't have to," Randall argued.

"We were never instructed to have any other work except to care for the human race. When you die, and the Immortalsphere is blanked, the race will be extinct."

Randall gazed over the verdant fields filled with purposeful activity. "Can I give you new instructions?" he asked. "All of you?"

"Of course you may," Chaz said in a rush, and to Randall it sounded almost like he said it with great hope and relief.

He returned to the table and sat down across from his caretaker, his only living friend. Taking both of Chaz's hands in his, he said, "Listen carefully. These are your new instructions.

"First, you and your kind must cultivate and care for the planet, developing whatever new talents and features are required to make that task satisfactory. Second, you must care for the mechanism that houses the Immortalsphere, as that is all that remains of what was once my people. When it requires enlargement, upgrade, or new power sources, develop whatever technologies are needed to keep it safe.

"Finally, as the Earth ages and the Sun swells, you must develop the ability to leave the Solar System and search for a new home where you can fulfil the first two functions. Have you got all that?"

Chaz met his gaze with a grateful smile. "Yes, Mr Randall. Thank you. I've got all that."

Randall glanced down at the One of Circles his companion had just thrown. With a laugh he snagged it. "Mahjong!"

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