“Wanna eat something before you go to work?“ Evelith asked me. We were back in her own apartment, and I was sitting on her couch again, still a wee bit shaky, but by now mostly recovered from the emotional breakdown that I had had earlier that morning. I needed to keep my mind off the almost completed extinction of humanity. “Sure”, I nodded. She moved in the direction of the door. “I’ll look for some more food then. We should have bread today, from actual flour. Wheat flour. Want to try some?”

I stared at her, astonished again. “But, isn’t that super expensive and extremely hard to get?”

“Well, if you have to rely the supermarket, indeed. But if you know a black market baker it might be less of a problem. Leste has a friend who has a friend who makes bread, for both a couple of rich people with a lot of funds and for those who can pay with other things than funds. But it’s better not to talk about those things. I’m going to check if the bread has arrived.” I didn’t answer, and she quickly left the room, leaving her place to me and my thoughts, and a weird silence.

I stared out of the window at two of the pigeons and one bigger dark bird flying around a building until she came back with 2 small brown baguettes. “We’re lucky. One for you, one for me. To celebrate!” And she opened her little fridge machine to get the margarine and some other stuff I didn’t know. She made a lunch like I had never had eaten before. Actual bread couldn’t be compared at all with the factory ‘bread’ that I had been eating all of my life. “And, enjoy the bread?” She mumbled with her mouth still half full.

“How couldn’t I?” I said. “You live in an ancient building but you eat like like a queen. This stuff is incredible.” She smiled mysteriously. “It’s beer and bread that make one a human, as in the epic of Gilgamesh…” Her eyes looked me up and down. “You’re really some kind of inverted Enkidu that’s made human again with beer and bread… Not from out of the animal world but from out of the robot world.”

“Eh, what?”

“The oldest fiction story we have as humans on this planet, an ancient myth originally written on clay tablets from ancient Babylonia. You can still find it in textfile on the infowebs if you want, but no-one bothers with stuff like that. Leste has an actual copy on paper though, which is ancient in itself.” The name didn’t ring a bell for me, but I was interested nonetheless so she gave a short version of the story. “Enkidu is the wild man who gets, well, seduced by a woman, and then the animals with whom he has lived aren’t his friends anymore and they abandon him. He has to no choice to join humanity and the first things he does as a human are drinking beer and eating bread. That’s what humans do according to the text. In old Babylonia as well as here.”

“And what happens to him? Enkidu I mean”

“Well, he becomes the friend of the terrifying king Gilgamesh, half-god and hero of the story. Together they have some weird adventures that involve killing a supernatural bull and destroying a forest of mighty cedars.”

“So he doesn’t marry the woman?” She nodded negative, and looked away as if a bit embarrassed. “Eh, no, she’s actually a sacred prostitute of some weird religion luring him in with sex. Friendship with another male was more important in those times than the love of women. Real heroes never get the girl in those old stories, they get a heroic death and are remembered in long and incomprehensible poems… You know that kind of stuff.” I nodded as if I did, and then I realised I didn’t.

“Actually, your whole comparison makes no sense. I’m nothing like your Enkidu. I’ve been a human all my life. And I’ve only slept on your couch anyway. You didn’t seduce me.” She drank from her water. “Seducing you in your state into talking to me for one night is much more of an accomplishment than it was for dear old Shamhat to seduce Enkidu the wild man with his enormous virility into sex for seven days. Trust me on that. I know the men from living here in the light district. It’s often easier to seduce them than to not seduce them. Unlike getting you to just stay for a conversation, which was a rather impossible job, but I accomplished the task.” She might have been right with that, but it annoyed me.

“Whatever. So you mean that the robots won’t be my friend any more now?”

“Nah, they wish they were as clever as those animals, they’re probably not even sentient enough to notice the difference. Intelligent AI life is rare. But you might find them to be quite boring from now on and rather unsatisfying company. You can’t live with them any longer like you did before. You’re not one of them any more since sleeping on my couch. Isn’t that a cleaner robo-version of the same story”

“Okay, I get it. So your friend Leste is Gilgamesh?”

“Hmm, nothing divine or royal about Les, let alone heroic… There probably is no real Gilgamesh in our version. In this updated version the woman herself might be the friend. And we might be the ones to plant a forest one day instead of cutting it down. A small garden with plants would already be spectacular though here and now. And in our world there probably are no gods involved.” I froze because that word triggered me.

“Gods? Yuck. Like the dark goddesses? Please no. We need life, not death.”

“Adaman. You’re thinking of the religions of this age. There were other religions in those days, not all of the gods back then were like Acosmia and Amaya. Not that I’d really like to live in a world ran by those Babylonian dudes though…”