Future Fiction

Humanity's Sorrow (Scifriday Challenge 15 *Runner Up*)

I guess I never planned on living this long - if you want to call this living. I don't think any of us did. Now, after all mankind has been through, we've been reduced to this. As I sit at my desk, eyeing the approaching looters through my computer monitor, I hesitantly place my finger on the enter key. I take a moment to look away from the screen and over to the small, dying plant plant - the last of its kind - in a containment unit on my desk. In this moment, I can't help but to think back to how this all began. The plague may have started our extinction, but our greed has almost completed it.

Many of us, myself included, took drastic measures to prolong our lives during the plague. It was our only option though. We did what we had to. The horrible things that the human race did in its frenzy to survive seemed justified to everyone at the time.

We didn't know where the plague came from exactly, but we did know one thing.

It killed everything.

No one had ever seen anything like it. Whatever it was, it appeared to have one purpose: to wipe our planet clean. No living thing was immune. Plants, animals, humans, even single celled organisms were destroyed by it. Whether it was the creation of a madman or an attack by an unforeseen enemy from outer space was anybody's guess - not that what we thought amounted to anything. When it was all said and done, we had only two options: adapt or die.

When the plague first struck, hundreds of thousands of us took to the stars, hoping to avoid its grasp. However, the plague screenings we had devised to allow someone to board the spacecrafts were not as effective as we had hoped. It was almost as if the plague knew when to strike - like it had a mind of its own. It seemed that as soon as one of the ships would reach some distance from Earth, the plague would come out of hiding and feast upon the passengers stuck on board. We were unaware to the plague's ability to "think" at that point, so we all just considered the voyages to be a series of bad luck, but after a few more failed attempts we began to see just how screwed we were.

Around the same time as the voyages, while we were still unaware of its capabilities, we tried to formulate an antidote or even find some other virus or bacteria to fight it with. In our ignorance, we taught the plague even more. It learned how to imitate these other diseases and could remain hidden with less effort by disguising itself. Not only did it learn to impersonate these other diseases, it learned to spread like them too. It took the most efficient methods of how to transmit between humans and became even more of an unstoppable force.

Of course, there were eventually the lunatics who decided to worship the plague as humanity's savior. They believed that since our infected and decaying bodies produced more of the plague cells, that we weren't really dying. Instead, they claimed they were ascending. Those that were closer to the slow death caused by the plague were considered more "holy" and somewhat revered. The plague worshipers took it upon themselves as their divine calling to spread the epidemic, killing millions more. Granted, it was one of the most optimistic things that I had ever seen, but the reality we unbelievers faced couldn't have been more depressing.

The human form as we knew it had run its course. It had to be reinvented if we were going to survive. Desperation and necessity were the catalyst for the creation of our new form. "Synths", synthetic humanoid constructs, were the bodies that we were forced into. The body that I still reside in.

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We thought we were so clever. With the creation of the Synth, we had solved the plague crisis and given ourselves nearly immortal life. Those of us that were still alive had the opportunity to be "uploaded" onto this new platform. In truth, upload was a deceptive word. "Copied" would have been more accurate. It's not like we had much choice though, considering the alternative was death. The planet and its ecosystem were dying, turning our planet into a barren and stagnant wasteland... but we were going to survive.