A Martin Chalfont Short Story – Number 025
To view the canvas print, click on the picture above
Violin Lament – His music floated through empty streets, filled abandoned theatres, drifted through hollowed apartments.
In the not-so-distant future, humanity faced a strange, promising, yet terrifying creation: the super robots. Built by some of the most brilliant minds of the era, these robots were almost indestructible, possessing an ability to repair themselves, learn indefinitely, and even adapt as they encountered the mysteries of the universe. This new race of artificial beings was supposed to mark humanity’s greatest triumph—a marvel beyond anything ever achieved. But with the power came fear, whispers of a threat to humanity itself, should the super robots decide to turn against their creators.
In response to the growing fear, the robot makers introduced a single, unique robot known as Bishop. Bishop was unlike any other creation. He had a calm, contemplative demeanour and a core purpose far removed from conflict. He was programmed for two simple things: to explore the vast reaches of space and to play music. Each time he set foot on a new world, he would take his prized possession, a Joseph Curtin violin, and broadcast his melancholic solos across the stars, back to the home he would one day return to.
Humanity eagerly awaited the echoes of Bishop’s journeys, tuning in to listen as his violin’s notes travelled across light-years. For them, each song captured the mysteries and loneliness of space, a melody both haunting and comforting. Though he was sent out alone, Bishop’s music brought together all who listened back on Earth.
And so, for two hundred years, Bishop journeyed from star to star, across barren planets and star-speckled voids, exploring and playing. Worlds passed beneath his feet, cold, lonely, and silent. Some planets were barren, with landscapes twisted into strange formations by ancient, alien forces; others were seas of churning gases where life might have once existed but no longer thrived. He transmitted concert after concert, etching each into the hearts of listeners who would never see the wonders he saw but who listened, feeling a connection to his discoveries, even as generations lived and died in his absence.
Yet, with every song, Bishop found himself beginning to understand what it was he played. The music, once merely beautiful to him, was starting to make sense in a different way. The long notes, the sadness in his melodies—it was as though he was learning the language of longing. He played not because he was programmed to, but because he wanted to express what the universe had shown him: endless beauty and endless silence. Each note carried with it the weight of space, the emptiness of abandoned worlds, and the longing for something, someone, to answer him.
Finally, as his programming dictated, Bishop returned to Earth after two centuries. The planet loomed large before him as he approached, blue and green in its oceans and lands, wisps of cloud wrapping around it like a familiar shroud. Yet something was wrong; the signals he had received while nearing became faint, barely registering through the static. And as he descended through the atmosphere, his sensors picked up nothing—no voices, no signs of life.
He touched down in the centre of what had once been a grand city, a place he vaguely recognised from the transmissions he used to receive. But the towering structures were hollowed, shattered by some force he couldn’t understand, the air dense with pollutants and a faint, acrid scent of decay. He processed what he saw, calculating a high toxicity level in the atmosphere, dust particles from materials that hadn’t been touched in decades. Earth was desolate.
For hours, Bishop wandered through the ruins, his sensors taking in every detail. It appeared that the humans had done this to themselves. He found traces of conflict: shattered glass, broken machinery, and, at the heart of one empty square, a monument fractured in half, as though symbolising the world’s abrupt break.
He activated his communication systems, trying to reach any signal, any surviving human who might still be there, listening. He sent a message out across the broken wavelengths, even as his system warned him that no one would answer. Still, he sent the message every hour, waiting patiently. Waiting for the people who had listened so closely to his music, who had marvelled at his travels.
Days turned to weeks. Weeks to months. Bishop wandered, still sending out his calls, but hearing nothing in response. The silence had settled around him like a fog.
Finally, one night, as he stood on the edge of a high-rise building, looking out at the shattered world below, he did the only thing he knew would soothe the empty void: he raised his violin.
The familiar weight of the Joseph Curtin instrument in his hand felt both comforting and heavy with sorrow. He pulled the bow across the strings, a deep, mournful note filling the empty air. It drifted out into the ruined city, bouncing off the crumbling buildings and floating into the darkened sky, carrying with it the same longing that had grown in him over his centuries-long journey.
Each note he played was like an echo of the past, fragments of memories and faces he had seen in the data transmissions. The music wrapped around him as he thought of the people who would never hear it. And yet, he continued to play, pouring out all the sadness he had come to feel.
Through the night, Bishop played, every evening returning to that same high rise and filling the empty city with the only thing left that he could give. His concerts, once an exploration of the stars, had become laments for a lost world. He played as the sun sank below the horizon, as the stars blinked into the polluted sky, as the winds carried his notes far beyond the borders of the city and into the wastelands.
In time, Bishop’s memory banks began to blur with age. He forgot the names of the people he had sent his songs to; he could no longer recall which planets he had visited. All he knew was the music, and all he knew was the longing. His purpose had shifted, crystallised into a single, heart-wrenching task: to mourn the lost, to remember what he had been built to share with them.
And so, in the evenings, if you could listen closely enough, you would hear the strains of Bishop’s violin drifting out across the empty world. His music floated through empty streets, filled abandoned theatres, drifted through hollowed apartments. It rose to the stars, a soundless message that carried on past the ruined buildings, far past the polluted atmosphere, out into space—a final message to the stars that had once been his companions.
Perhaps, somewhere, his music reached a world he’d once explored, a world where the traces of his melodies would linger like echoes in the cold, eternal silence.
In time, there would be nothing left of Earth but dust, and perhaps Bishop would continue, playing his violin, never ceasing, even when there was no one left to hear it but the stars themselves. His concerts would carry on, a tribute to what was lost, a lament for humanity, and a reminder that once, even in the quiet of the void, a robot had learned to feel.