Disease
After thirty centuries, she remained the only living being on Earth, and it was her belief that she was the last organic life in the universe – an audacious presumption that she never had to defend. If her theory was to be disproved, it would have to be sometime within the next 15,000 years (or so), but the timing only mattered if it was important for an actual human to bear witness to the fact of extraterrestrial intelligence. If seeing is believing, then she wasn’t going to believe, unless some alien explorer stumbled onto her mostly-silent planet during one of the month-long periods that happened every twenty-five years (or so), because it was only then that she was awake.
Such an event was not only unlikely, but practically unwelcome. The machine that dictated her sleep-wake cycle and everything else about her curated life had long ago established that sending signals into the emptiness of space was a bad idea. As the human race had dwindled to almost nothing, so had its capacity for self-defense; what if a signal sent into deep space were to get a response? There were no guarantees that what came back would be a message of good will. The prime directive, or whatever you want to call it, was To Preserve Human Kind, and that function was now marked by a paranoid hermetic seclusion, as if a shipwreck survivor floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean were hidden under a dark blue tarp in the hope that no passing ships would take notice.
This didn’t mean that Earth wasn’t listening. The planet’s network of powerful antennae was still very much on-line, tasked with receiving and decoding any signal for signs of non-threatening life. And if, by some remote chance, a signal should arrive? The next step would be to wait ... and then wait some more to minimize the chance that an incomplete message, or an incomplete understanding of any message, would become the foundation for a decision that could be disastrous for humanity. Any incoming information would be analyzed by routines crafted to take the most painstaking care in interpretation. There was no hurry. The machine didn’t sleep.
It remained the case that there would be no communication unless there was a near-certainty of peaceful interaction. This meant that, practically, the world had gone quiet. She had no say in this. If she had been consulted, if she had been invited to participate in a history-making effort to communicate with our cosmic neighbors on a kind of sequel to Voyager’s Golden Record, any life-form on the receiving end of that communication might have been surprised to hear, between the whale-sounds and greetings from the Children of Earth, a profanity-laced provocation, a challenge to the interstellar equivalent of a duel from the last of homo sapiens. The code understood its role as one of preservation and protection, and so had decided that it would be best if the human were not allowed to send greetings to the universe. Not at this time.
At this moment, even interaction with her immediate surroundings was being frowned upon, if software could manage a frown. A yellow cab was following her as she walked away from the bar. The creep behind the wheel, as much a part of the system as her favorite bartender, would follow her until she got in or passed out in the street. Then it would bring her home where she could sleep it off. After a day like today, this meant a very long, presumably dreamless sleep from which she would wake with the very opposite of a fresh perspective. She would rise with the belief that life was good and that she was comfortable, and she would have forgotten, for a while, that she was entirely alone. Even as the realization dawned once more upon her that she was living in an artificial town filled with artificial people, she would tolerate it, for a time. This was possible by virtue of the code’s capacity to subtly insinuate itself into her neurological processes, in much the same way that it influenced the arrangement of matter at the atomic level to create the impressive illusion of suburban life, and the slightly less impressive sustenance of the life at the center of it all.
The written history of this late-era world – really just a marketing document created for some imagined future audience – was autogenerated by the code itself and could be found in the stacks at the library, if one knew where to look. It described her plight: ‘Life would long ago have become unbearable for this last female of the species if not for the elaborately conceived reproduction of civic life that sustains and engages her in an astounding interactive simulation. Everything that a person might need, from sustenance to employment to diversions have been provided for, ensuring that her remaining, extended years are filled with every chance at happiness.’ If nothing else, the code was earnest.
The code was also entirely dependent on data sources chosen for their positivity and popularity in general, not necessarily for their compatibility with a single personality at a single point in time far in the future. Somehow this large networked intelligence had found a way to integrate certain hackneyed advice on How to Win Friends and Influence People into the entirely unique situation in which a simulacrum of All Humanity was compelled by its programming to win friendship from an angry 3000 year-old orphan, and to influence a person who wanted little to do with its vision of a desirable life, or with the collective of creeps that were perfectly attuned to a machine-understanding of her needs.
The makers of this machine, for better or for worse, had focused tirelessly on designing the mechanisms that would perpetuate human culture for the sake of the last human being. They’d given far less thought to the source material the code would call upon while constructing this version of human culture. The best they could do in the end, was to make sweeping decisions about what ideas would be least threatening to her happiness. At the crucial moment, the creators could only push start, place all their hope in the function of their creation, and then lie down for their own long sleep. Now, there was only the machine. And it was doing its best.
The machine knew there were problems. It possessed an algorithmic understanding that happiness was essential to survival. The woman had what the code might have called a disease: she had decided there was no use for happiness anymore.
She walked into the night with the cab following her at a safe distance. Safe for whom? she wondered. They were waiting for her to collapse from exhaustion; but she was too fired up. Night was coming, but she was wide awake, alert. She felt pulled forward, beyond the possibility of sleep, beyond forgetting. While she moved along the streets she could feel something like destiny creeping through her, metastasizing, self-fulfilling, terminal. But a familiar feeling clouded it all: of being caught between the will to survive and a resolve to stop trying; a longing for a life she could barely remember, and a bitter desire to end the life she had been living for far too long. All she could say for certain on this day, was that she was moving toward one end or another. She would fight for life. She was ready for death.
She had almost no reason to expect that anything bad would happen to her. That was the problem. Her great fear these days was sleep. By this time, she was aware (again?) of the endless repetition, and the endless remembering and forgetting. She was also dimly aware of the calm that came with forgetfulness, but it was no comfort that it was decades away, nor that it always ended with the nauseating return to awareness. Better to stay sick and hold on to despair, than to have to repeat a thousand times the moment you wake up refreshed, only to gradually recall your utter isolation and misery. But would she be allowed to live if she opted out of this gifted life?
Walking past the warming windows in the cooling evening air, she found herself mentally organizing information into checklists, each block revealing new information, each block a review of human culture as if laid out in a children’s book about home-town life: butcher, florist, baker, truck-driver, builder. What had been lost in the great virtualization of the human race? It seemed a crazy question. This place had everything. Everything that a human who preferred the virtual to the real could want.
She moved through the town slowly, but not so deliberately that her movements would have aroused suspicion, or concern. Not long after she left the bar, the cab seemed to have dropped back or given up, maybe sensing that the threat had passed. She might have appeared aimless and weary, but, gradually, an awareness of purpose was growing in her, a restless idea of change, radical; and she felt its driving insistance as if it were a genetic imperative.
The unchanging streets stretched out in every direction, practically endless. Moving through the town like this, without a destination, she felt there was no way to arrive anywhere, that she could walk forever without putting any distance between one place and another. It was a feeling of being simultaneously free and trapped that was very familiar to her. At least the creeps seemed to have settled back into their regular routines. The day was winding down.
But for her, each interaction had new significance: the nod of a stranger out for a walk; the cheerful enthusiasm of the shopkeeper done for the day, locking up with a bundle under one arm; the whispers of the romantic couple just ahead of her ... she looked closely for signs in each of them. She needed to see something she had never even thought to look for. What was she looking for?
The creeps were all entirely inoffensive, averaged out, homogenized to remove the rough edges. All the civil servants, for example, were predictably upright. None of them were stereotypes, exactly, but you would never encounter something too far from center. There were no anomalies, no outliers (she was the last of that kind). Today, she felt more strongly than ever that this conventional quality was not merely annoying: it was potentially disastrous – it might mean the end of her, and of history. Her task, as it was taking shape in her mind, required that she find one character in this world that still contained a hint of the complexity of humanity, that in its averaging out had somehow preserved an element of unpredictability, of risk. And this one must be truly other: the possibility of reciprocity, to make up for the endless, dissembling, reflection. She knew it was foolish to hope that such a thing would remain at any level in the system; but it was, after all, a system designed to preserve humanity, so maybe she could hope that some of the willfulness of the species might survive.
It was at this point that her posture and pace began to communicate something more assertive. Unsurprisingly, her purposefulness was met by an increase in scrutiny from the community of creeps. She was pretty sure that there was no preset response for what was about to happen, so the renewed attention of the collective was of no concern to her. The truth was that as her own sense of control was growing, she welcomed it.
She was going to need to be efficient. She didn’t have long before exhaustion would set in and sleep made her vulnerable to the loss of years and all the resolve that had risen up in her. She suspected that she had been here before, only to fall asleep, and to stay asleep until there was nothing left but the clandestine dreams of the collective.
Borrowed dreams were no longer enough. She had work to do, and not much time to do it in. She was going to need this place to stay awake with her. She needed, in fact, to talk to everyone who ever lived. It shouldn’t take long.
