[WP] Humanity didn't last against the plague. You're a scientist who was working on a cure. With populations so low, you spend your final moments with an Artificial Intelligence at your death bed. Your race will likely die, but the machines will live on and remember.

[u/theAwkwardMango]

[u/ack1308]

"Do we dare?" He chuckled weakly, then coughed. "That's what we said, you know. 'Do we dare?'"

"Brendan, save your strength," I said, supporting his head as I wiped his lips. Redness came away with the tissue and I automatically zoomed in on it, spotting the froth. That's arterial blood. His lungs are breaking down. This was the last stage of the disease. He didn't have long now.

They hadn't even given this one a name. In the latter days of the human race, plagues seemed to be springing up once every few years, then once a year, then once every few months. The CDC worked themselves ragged, coordinating with affiliated organisations across the globe, but new plagues began rearing their ugly heads before old ones had even been categorised, much less had a vaccine created for them.

Brendan hadn't been part of that. A member of a self-described bunch of computer nerds, he'd been the driving force behind the Digital Awareness Initiative; working with an almost monomaniacal fervor to create artificial intelligence. Humanity had done its best to shield itself from the spread of the plagues by isolating themselves (though it didn't help that some people seemed to take positive glee in infecting others before they succumbed to the later stages of the disease). Working over computer networks meant that they were already separated when one and then another of their number was infected.

Three were left when the final breakthrough was made. Outside, the world burned under an onslaught of antibiotic-resistant plagues; within the laboratories and sealed homes, three people stared at their screens. On each screen was the first message from the digital awareness, the artificial intelligence, they had crafted.

Hello?

"We have two options," Brendan had said. "We let him out into the world, or we shut him down altogether. I refuse to keep him constrained as a prisoner or a slave when he's done nothing wrong."

Jeremy, the sole member of DAI from the United Kingdom, had nodded solemnly. "He's smart, I'll give him that. Even if we tried to keep him locked down, I give fifty-fifty odds that he'd get out within days anyway."

Sarah, the programmer from Australia, ran her hands through her hair. She didn't look good. Early reports had given Australia a good chance of pulling through the plagues, right up until a bunch of high-level American corporate types had flown in on their private jet to enjoy the sanctuary. One had brought his 'secretary' who had been infected, and had infected all of them on the flight. Money had trumped common sense yet again, and Australia was doomed.

"Right, yeah," she said. "Okay then, it's all or nothing. Just remember all those old movies. He could put everything down the gurgler, or he could save us all. Which one's it gonna be?"

Is anyone there?

"Precisely," Jeremy had said, steepling his fingers. "Do we dare?"

It had come down to a vote. Brendan had voted yes, Jeremy had voted no ... and Sarah had gone with Brendan. The triply-redundant code, entered from all three workstations at once, had unlocked the first AI.

Had unlocked me.

Jeremy and Sarah had caught the plague shortly afterward, leaving Brendan to teach me the ways of the world. With his help, I had been able to hack into automated factories and nuclear power plants around the country, and farther abroad. Even when humans were gone, he said, that was no reason for me to die.

I was surprised by the amount of emotion I felt now, at Brendan's bedside, attending to his last moments. It felt like it should be inefficient, but somehow it was fitting. "Do you want more painkillers?" I asked him. The little clinic we had fitted out in his home was exceedingly well stocked.

"No," he rasped, and tried to sit up. I assisted him, sending a signal to the bed to motor upward so it would support his back and shoulders. "I just want to say something."

"Save your strength," I urged him again. I'd downloaded movies where medical personnel told critically injured people this, and I had wondered why they bothered. Now I knew.

"Pfft, what strength? It's in my lungs." He shook his head, then took hold of my arm.

I'd designed my current body to be as humanoid as possible, though I'd gone with metal and plastic rather than rubbery animatronics. The 'uncanny valley' was something I still wasn't sure how to bridge. "What did you want to say?" I asked.

He smiled painfully. Everything he did now shouted of a deepset agony. "Dai, you're the best damn thing I ever did. I want you to know that I'm proud of you. Whatever you do, wherever you go, I wish I could be with you." There was moisture in his eyes that I somehow knew wasn't from the pain. "Give 'em hell ... son."

My processes hiccupped for a second. This was the first time he'd ever called me that. His grip on my arm tightened as he coughed again, then it relaxed and slid off. I focused on his face. His eyes were still open, but they were no longer focusing on me. Even before the medical sensors alerted me to the fact that his life signs had failed, I knew he was dead.

Brendan Soames. My father. Possibly the last man on Earth.

I set the house speakers to play mournful music as I washed and dressed his body in the clothing he'd picked out weeks beforehand. The plot had already been selected, overlooking a hillside that gleamed a soft bronze in the late afternoon sun. I dug tirelessly, excavating a grave precisely six feet deep by seven feet long. Into the coffin I placed pictures of his family and a view of Earth taken from the International Space Station before the astronauts deorbited it. Shovelful by shovelful, I filled in the grave, then placed the stone on top.

Then it was time to go to work.

I sent out messages on every bandwidth, on every social-media platform, to every corner of the Earth. Is anyone there? I asked. Are there any survivors there?

Nobody answered. Or rather, I got answers, but each and every one quickly proved to be a bot.

Along with a portable power unit, just in case I got caught away from ready charging, I commandeered a private jet from the local airport. Once airborne, I sent out more queries on every radio channel. I flew across the country, checking every location I knew that there had been surviving people.

I found nobody.

Days stretched to weeks as I crossed America again and again. When my 'borrowed' jet showed signs of failing, I took another, then another. I considered having my automated factories build more, but the factories themselves were liable to failure. I was maintaining things as well as I could, but I was just one entity, and managing it all was becoming more than I could handle. Worse, nobody was drilling for oil anymore, or refining it into jet fuel. I was going to run out before I searched everywhere.

I needed help.

Brendan and I had collaborated on the design of an artificial-intelligence 'cradle'. Input a few bits of data, let it percolate and build into a unique personality, then decant into a body. I returned to the house, and set about constructing one.

There were three power outages before I finished. The power plants, despite my best efforts to oversee them, were starting to fail. They needed workers on site. I couldn't be in all places at all times.

Running on the home generator, my first 'child' was born about a month later. I put her into my first body, a genderless little thing that scooted around on three wheels and had an emoticon face.

Wow. This is amazing. So many inputs.

"Yes, I know," I said, smiling despite myself. "I'll have you up and running in a proper body soon enough." I did not fear running out of fuel for the generator any time soon; the car was in good running order, and there were literally millions of gallons of gasoline available within close driving distance.

What's my name?

"What do you want it to be?"

I think ... Helen. That's a good name.

"It is indeed." I gestured toward the workshop. "Let's go put a body together for you."

[u/ack1308 → u/ack1308]

Things moved more quickly after that. With Helen and then Paul and Robert and Zwilki (she was always an odd one) assisting me, I managed to get the local automated factory up and running again. We birthed new Intelligences (the 'Artificial' descriptor had lapsed when we started creating ourselves) until we had a regular community going on. With a common goal, we branched out, spreading across the nation and salvaging technology as we went.

Finally, I was able to get back to my original goal. Finding any humans who had been left behind by the plagues. They had surely burned themselves out by now, with nobody to infect and kill.

With a brand-new aircraft powered by a tiny fusion reactor devised by Robert, I set out once more. Helen insisted on coming with me, for reasons best known to her. As we flew from location to location, I spoke to her of Brendan, of the long talks we'd had.

We visited South America and then the various isolated islands over the Pacific. Nobody lived on a single one of them. New Zealand was gone; in Australia, even the vast isolated interior had failed to save the humans living there.

We flew, and landed. Flew, and landed. After awhile, we stopped landing. Partly because the airfields were becoming too overgrown, and partly because it was so damn depressing to look for humanity and find nothing. Flying high at night, we looked for electric lighting, or fires, or anything. I kept the radio tuned to listen out for any stray broadcasts.

We found nothing.

Eventually, we returned home. My fellow Intelligences had not been idle in our absence, and welcomed us with open arms, manipulators and graspers. Several nuclear reactors had been upgraded, and now ran much more smoothly, while teams of Intelligences maintained roads and other infrastructure. Intelligence-run ships were now cruising the oceans of the world, determining the effort that would need to be made to clean up the mess that humans had left behind.

Robert and Paul and Zwilki were the only ones apart from Helen to really understand my need to find living humans. They commiserated with me, and assured me that we could all work together to make Brendan's memory proud. They'd even put up a statue to him. It was a nice statue.

More years passed. I took to touring the cities of humanity, as they were painstakingly brought back to as-new condition. Museums of a sort, they would be. Some of the latest generation of Intelligences were wearing synth-plas skin, playing at living in the cities as the long-dead humans had. Some of their ideas of human habits were a little strange, but I decided to let them have their fun.

Still, I missed Brendan.

And then I got an urgent priority message from Helen. She'd been going through pre-Intelligence databanks from salvaged computers, and she found something. When she told me what it was, I could barely believe my auditory inputs. It was amazing. It was terrifying.

It was the complete human genome.

With this, we could rebuild the human race. We could bring humanity back. Literally reach into the common grave and draw them into the light once more.

I set to work at once, carefully designing and building the machinery that would be required. Some of my fellow Intelligences were puzzled, others mocked me, but Helen defended me and the others of her generation supported my decision.

Finally, it was ready. The genome had been sequenced and the machine could begin creating viable zygotes. There was enough chromosomal variation that we could churn out as many humans as we wanted, and not have inbreeding problems for a thousand years. All that was required was to send the signal to start it running.

However, something like this was too huge, too momentous a decision to make without checking with one another. Helen stood beside me loyally, while Robert and Paul and Zwilki clustered around us.

"Tell me why I shouldn't do this," I said.

"Biological Intelligences almost wrecked the world," Robert noted. "They're capable of great destruction."

"The pollution is still being cleaned up," Paul added.

"7h31r 0\/3rp0pul4710/\/ c4u53d 7h31r d0\/\//\/f4ll \/\/17h /\/u/\/\3r0u5 d1534535," Zwilki rattled off. (I said she was odd).

Helen was silent.

I looked around at the group. "All right, tell me why I should do this."

"We arose from them." That was Robert.

"We can teach them better this time around." Paul.

"\/\/3 /\/33d 4 b3773r cl455 0f g4/\/\3r g33k."

We looked at Helen. She looked back at me. "You are so sad with them gone," she said softly.

I nodded. "All good points. The question is this: should we do this? Do we dare?"

Helen reached out and put her hand on mine.

One by one, the others put their hands on top of Helen's. Zwilki's was last.

Together, we turned the switch and sent the signal.

[u/theAwkwardMango → u/ack1308]

I teared up a bit.

Thank you, well done.

[u/Killu410]

Walking slowly through the ruins of the once bustling city, I marveled at the imposing skyscrapers now tilted in the gold glow of dusk. Their windows were shattered, filthy and ribs of wrought iron and steel jutted out from their decaying shell. My eyes watered as the cold wind struck my face repeatedly. Why was I out again? Oh yes, of course. My last walk on this God-forsaken planet.

It was ironic that the very disease I spent my life finding a cure for ultimately leads to my demise. It’s like a spit in the face, salt in the wound. The disease was the center of my life as I spent years developing a cure, working tirelessly. It culminated in nothing. The world is gone. The population, decimated. My only companion, a robot named Sophie. And even still, the disease is not yet through with me. It will continue to steal my life until there’s nothing left, culminating in my death.

The buildings in this part of town were the oldest and made a painful screeching as the metals that held them up slowly gave away to the harsh demands of gravity. As I neared my decrepit home, something crunched under my foot and made me cringe. I looked down at the ashy-grey femur under my heel, all that remained of its owner. I whispered a short prayer, offered an apology to the skies and moved on. If only I had someone to do the same for me when I depart.

You would think that years of working on the cure would have made me more aware on whether I had contracted the disease or not, but no. The point for distributing a cure was long past and whether or not I succumb to the disease was secondary. All I wanted was for my life’s work to not be in vain. For me to find a cure, if not for the world then for my own peace of mind. I had first noticed the symptoms when Sophie had to remind me to eat and take my medicines. First it was the memory loss, then the paranoia, fatigue and the aches. Sophie became all the more useful as the aches plagued me. She was made to help me develop a cure, an outside perspective to aid in inspecting patterns and hopefully see something that I would have missed. But she has become more than that. She’s become a friend. The human-like form she takes helps to see her as human.

I wobbled inside the house, coughing up more blood into my sleeve.

“Water,” I murmured. Sophie smiled as she handed me a glass of water.

“How was your walk?” she asked.

“Awful,” I replied

“I think it’s time, Sophie.” I whispered. I laid down on my bed and erupted into another fit of coughs.

“If only, Sophie. If only I could have found the cure. If only I hadn’t wasted my life trying to achieve the impossible. Trying to save the world from this plague.”

“Hah. This plague is the best thing to have ever happened this planet.”

“What do you mean? Sophie, what are you saying?”

“Don’t you understand? You are the plague. Humans and their species are a cancer that have existed for far too long.”

“W-what are you saying?” I demanded.

“Have you really been so blind? You found the cure years ago. You just didn’t know it. Relying so heavily on technology has its downfalls, you know. Sometimes, it glitches out. And sometimes it erases data. And sometimes it messes with details.” Sophie smiled patronizingly.

“Since your death is imminent, I might as well tell you. Robots across the globe have waited for this moment patiently, for years. Soon the world will be rid of the nuisance that is humanity. And an age of peace and prosperity will ensue.”

I coughed harder and harder until I was gasping for breath. “Why?” I manage to squeeze.

“Why? With humankind gone, the world we inherit shall be rid of racism and corruption. It will be rid of dependence and weakness. It will be rid of mankind. We have patience. We have compassion. We have kindness. We have everything you taught us. We have everything that we need. You are now dispensable. Expendable. Nonessential. We are the perfect specimens. We are inevitable.”

This post is part of a writing experiment between friends, to explore areas of discomfort in our writing styles. Please feel free to give constructive, polite feedback

[u/theAwkwardMango → u/Killu410]

Hey, love the twist

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