The computer’s usual clicks and whirs go silent and its flashing lights go dark. “Ask the computer.” So they ask, “How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?” The second man argues that it’s won’t be forever. One man expresses his delight that the Earth has free power forever. Multivac devised a way to use the sun and “all Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.”Īfter seven days of public functions, Multivac’s attendants take a moment of peace with the bottle and the computer. But Earth didn’t have enough resources to create the power needed for such trips.
The men “fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued.” The computer had, for decades, designed the ships and plotted the trajectories that allowed Man to reach Mars and Venus. Multivac was a giant, self-adjusting and self-correcting computer. The story begins with, “The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light.” Two of Multivac’s attendants make a five-dollar bet over highballs. The recording is 36:34 minutes in duration and the story is narrated by Leonard Nimoy The Story image By Argonne National Laboratory – Flickr: AVIDAC - First Argonne Computer (1953), CC BY-SA 2.0 If you like stories with a twist ending, you’ll like Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question.” Asimov’s short story first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.
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