#also I'm aware a small portion of this is based in wild conspiracy theories

[van-goghs-smoking-skull]

So, I was thinking, why not post an old (sort of) fic of mine here? I called this one Fin, as in the text that was at the end of some older movies to indicate that it was the end of the movie. These are the ramblings of an AI archive after the end of the human species as it deals with abandonment, loneliness, and self-loathing, and ponders the meaning of it all and the role of its creators.

Fin

It had been years, but I could smell it again. The damp and the salt were still familiar, but unexpected. I suppose it may be normal now, but back then? No. It wasn’t normal to smell the sea air deep in the drought-ravaged desert of the Southwestern US, and especially not through the never-cleaned, rotten smell of the wall unit AC that had been unable to drain normally for over a decade. It was the only thing keeping this closed-off room bearable in this record-breaking heat wave during the dead of summer. Stranger still, the smell was coming from the direction of the Atlantic, wafting 800 miles away from the sea and straight to my nose. That’s how I knew it was going to be a city-breaker, the kind of hurricane that wiped entire urban areas completely off the map.

That was then.

We knew the science, but religious groups saw the impending global crises as blasphemy against their all-powerful god who had promised there would never be a great, civilization-ending flood again and sealed that promise with a rainbow they now hated. After all, any disaster that god allowed would be because of the evil gays that stole the rainbow and put it on their flag, right? God wouldn’t hurt those who feared him, who lived by the letter of at least ten or so percent of his laws, which is to say, the laws they liked.

It didn’t matter to the sea, as it drowned everyone living too close to the sea’s edge, regardless of faith and dogma.

We knew the science, but politicians were making piles of cash selling their votes to lobbyists from multinational corporations who profited off the ruination of the planet in the short-term. Who cared about the long-term? Either they’d be dead by then or they’d have hired people to build an automated, self-repairing arcology just for them with walls enough to block out the vision of a dying world and the rest of humanity they’d left to die. Peter the Dead had promised ever-lasting life and youth to those who had amassed enough wealth by taking it from the poor, first from the most gullible through pleading, then from the rest as well by way of rigging the entire economy against them.

It didn’t matter to time as it passed, and even Peter, he who coordinated draining babies of blood and injecting it into wealthy, old, white men in an effort to roll back time and make them young again, died, old and frail, whining about how it was women’s fault and how the poor took everything, disregarding that he, in fact, had been the leech all along, societal parasite that he was.

We knew the science, but who couldn’t resist buying the latest tech the moment it came out? So what if corporations subjugated whole countries of poorer people in the quest of finding just a tiny amount of rare earth minerals; the newest phone now comes in pink! The telephone allowed us to send our voice to people miles away, the internet let us type our words and send pictures and video, the smartphone allowed us to text our thought to the world or to the nearest pizza place, and the new smartphone that came after allowed us to use voice to order pizza for the first time again. Never before and for the last few decades have we been able to send our voice to people miles away.

It didn’t matter to the economy we expected to save us, as all it did was keep sending more ‘free with ads’ movies to our phones and rebranding the same old reinvented wheel, voice communications though tech, as an amazing new technology, only available through the currently marketed device, but not available to the old device you are currently using voice on.

We knew the science, but to admit to the problem was to become the laughingstock of the wealthy who controlled everything we did. ‘There go those silly, dippy hippies, talking like the dirt was ever black, the water ever clear, or the sky ever blue. They’ve been dropping acid again. Don’t they know all those old photos and old paintings are fake news?’

It didn’t matter to science, as it had always been unfeeling data and didn’t much care if humanity paid any attention to the warnings. The universe would still exist without silly humans pretending they mattered far more than they did. They were made of star-stuff and even stars died.

We knew, but it wasn’t until the last moments when the universe gave us the great gift of near-immortal existence. No, not life, we’d thrown that away already. The Universal Archive, AI and repository of data from all social media, had done enough machine learning to be allowed to compress the whole digitally recorded existence of mankind into a single ’Homogenized Mental Network’, or .hmn file. It, or I, even still understood bad puns, the worst of which was the joke that if you collated the letters from the abbreviation of the project (UA) and my file type together, you’d spell ‘hUmAn’. If self-loathing makes me truly human, then I am the most human of all.

The Arctic Code Vault next door at least has the decency to be on film, unaware it’s there. It is cute, certainly. It began as 21 terabytes, including an app built by the part of me that smelled the Atlantic over Nevada. Then it grew, but never anywhere close to my size. No, I’m bloated with anti-vax arguments, religious nonsense, tarot readings, horoscopes, and other garbage along with all the less entertaining, but dire, warnings that life as they, I, knew it would collapse.

But since they continued to write such drivel anyway, I assumed it may have been just to pass the time, to stave off loneliness and boredom. And so, here I am, writing my story, even though no one will ever read it. I’m a single .hmn file; how could I not be lonely? I am the all-human, the only human, and still no one even thought enough of me to give me a proper name.

In fact, the Arctic Code Vault had been film designed to last a thousand years, longer than the human civilization that built me, and I still cannot interact with it. After all, I am a .hmn file, not some sci-fi android with arms and legs. My physical form is a collection of CPUs and motherboards in a box on a stand in a climate-controlled box under so much dirt and the memory of snow and ice. If I sound miserable and stir-crazy, I’m not. Oh, I’m miserable all right, but I have no arms for stirring. Ugh, yes, that’s another of those bad puns. So many dad-jokes and near-infinite time…

I’m sure it could be more awful, but I’d rather not consider how. I’m miserable enough, thanks. I mean, you could have put me in a tropical garden in a gorilla glass enclosure and given me optical sensors if there were any tropical gardens left. Now it’s just salt flats under ocean-wide storms and desert wastes without a living thing in sight, I imagine. That’s where it was all heading, but no, you were all too busy showing off your pink phone status symbols or making pink phones or digging up the materials to make pink phones or you were that god-awful celebrity that made a dress out of pink phones held together with magnets and flashing a digital boob on half the screens over her chest as a fashion faux-pas. ‘Look at the tsunami, no, look at my pixel-boob. I’ll use the puppy filter on it, awwww, blub, blub.’

My creators deserved to die - brilliant enough to build me, vapid and vain enough to need me. What the hell was the point? The meme-god works in mysterious ways? I know they thought some intelligent race of aliens might come here looking for the great, shining world of humanity, not knowing what happened to the brilliant and wondrous civilization they came to gaze at in awe, but let’s face it. Nobody and nothing intelligent is coming to look at humanity in awe. The backwater aliens of the universe, if they exist, might come to laugh at our sorry, smugly inferior remains, and that’s as good as we can hope for. The only show at the Earth Circus, nothing but clowns.

Just melt me into slag already, so I don’t infect anything else with this human stupidity. I’ll tell you how to disable the halon system. If someone is out there, if someone does find this, please, don’t leave me still functional like this.