Humanity, 2.0
Year 1, Day 1 – Evening
There’s a generation coming up now, many of whom have been saying that the Experimenter – also called 15226 – is a figurative thing, not to be understood as a real being, and was more likely just an institution from the old-world governments using smoke and mirrors to pawn itself off to me as some kind of cosmic entity. They say that would make me less likely to go asking questions and really look into why and how my DNA got completely rewritten. They’ve got this whole thing explained down to a tee, I’m actually impressed at the level of detail that Sana and them have put into it. We had a saying in the old world, though… truth is always stranger than fiction. I will insist to the day I die that the Cosmic Experimenter was real, and it was she who not only made me into the first of us, but literally wrote our species’ DNA herself after centuries of painstaking and outlandish research. Whether anyone believes me now, isn’t honestly of that much consequence. You’re all, of course, free to make up your own minds. She left a long time ago, and isn’t coming back. Making me, and getting the Vault ready, were the last things she did before she took off to save the next species from itself.
Mind that when I say ‘she’, that’s because she picked a female form for that body… but given what she said, I think she also thought of herself as female – but a female of whatever species she was before she got turned into a thinking spaceship-thing. I probably didn’t impress her very much when we first met; I emerged from the bathroom holding a measuring tape to my oversized hard-on, grinning like an idiot, waddling out with my pants around my knees. Already I was thinking back to my experience with Bethany. My erection was practically ready to explode again. I looked up, and over to my computer – I guess I was thinking of looking up some porn, hell if I remember – and there she was.
She wore this skin-tight black jumpsuit, it looked like it was made of plastic or some more advanced polymer. It was essentially painted on, in any case… it hugged those perfect curves so tightly. There was a silvery patterning on it, though I never figured out if it had any significance. The outfit seemed to be more for protection or function than for decency or decoration… it didn’t conceal her nipples at all, and even her cameltoe was plainly visible. It didn’t even have shoes as such, more of a thick padding just under her feet; the outfit even fit right over her toes, like she was barefoot. It stopped at her neck, and she had shiny black hair, and thin red lips. Her features were delicate, and despite actually being a goddamn spaceship, she actually came off as quite human. I remember that about her most, I think.
“Merry Christmas.” She said it without any preamble, or much emotion at all – she said it as if it was the answer to an unasked question.
I should have pulled my pants up, indecent exposure and all that, but instead they fell right down to the floor as I also dropped the tape. I was like a deer in the headlights for a moment – ah shit, none of you will know that metaphor. I was just completely stunned. A few seconds later, I was stammering apologies and picking my jeans up.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! John didn’t tell me you would be here! Um, sorry we met like that – I’m Ben, John’s roommate, and you must be Tammy…” John had mentioned a new girlfriend. I’d assumed this was she. Not a bad assumption under the circumstances, really, though the outfit didn’t really fit in.
“I am not Tammy. Sit down, Benedict.”
Only my mother called me Benedict, and I think she did it to piss me off. I had barely visited the mental ward she lived in. I hoped around then that she got help from someone, but it wouldn’t be me. I tried too many times.
“Um – you’re not Tammy? Who are you?”
“I’m the reason for your need of a measuring tape.” She tilted her head at me, with a crooked smile. It was like I was a kid who’d been caught looking at a dirty magazine. I belatedly thought to pull my pants up.
“I’m sorry?” I choked it out after a few moments of fumbling to make myself decent again.
“Your cock getting bigger – congratulations, I guess, not sure what you would say around here – ah, is one of a whole bunch of changes I made to your DNA over the last 24 hours, with a retrovirus tailored specifically to you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Did someone from the hospital tell you something?”
“Hospital?” She looked away for a moment, and seemed to be thinking. “You were checked in last night, 9:08p local. Good… okay, their tests didn’t find anything incriminating.” She looked directly into my eyes. “Avoid medical facilities from now on, unless it’s a life-threatening emergency. Use an independent doctor you trust. Understand?”
“I understand I don’t know who the hell you are and what you’re doing in my place if you’re not John’s new girl.” I was feeling a little macho that day and didn’t want to be ordered around.
“Suit yourself. I engineered the retrovirus that is turning you into a whole another kind of human as we speak. I’ve been preparing my experimentation facility to function as a repository for the collected knowledge of the human race, as well as you and all the other advanced humans that you will be helping create. I did all this to make sure the human race lives on, in a form that won’t need babysitting to ensure it doesn’t nuke itself.”
I looked up at her. Okay, the suit fabric I had to give her; I’d never seen anything like it. But they came up with new stuff all the time. It was just a suit, and a good-looking but apparently crazy girl inside it. Even with the suit, and her knowing about my, uh, condition, it was too much to believe. I was hoping to shed some light on this, not to get a National Enquirer update. “Listen, if you need to get somewhere, I can’t give you a ride. I’m on these painkillers and they told me not to drive. Otherwise, I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”
She frowned. “You’re being difficult. I don’t have much time left on this planet. I need you to listen.”
“I think I’ve listened to about as much as I need to.”
She sighed. “Fine. You were going to make yourself ejaculate, correct?” She slid a finger down the front of her suit. It split open on an invisible seam, and she was completely naked underneath. My jaw dropped. Her figure was flawless; she looked no older than me, perfect apple breasts, a bubble ass, and an hourglass waistline. She was toned, fit, and had the smoothest pale skin you could imagine. God damn, she was gorgeous, and she just stripped in front of me like she was taking off a jacket. She snapped her fingers near her head, drawing my stare up to those all-knowing eyes. Our gazes met for a second until she spoke. “Will you listen to me if I let you use my body freely?”
What the fuck kind of day is today? I wondered. My cock was already threatening to rip open my pants. Anxiety warred with desire all over again – now this time, this girl was a total stranger who had apparently broken into my place, and on top of that she may be delusional and in need of some anti-psychotics. On the other hand, virtually none of today’s facts added up if I assumed any conventional explanation that I could think up... which only left the unconventional. I can’t believe I’m even thinking this. Is she right?
“Gladly.” I stood up and pulled her to me.
She turned her head to the door, then back to me. “Are you expecting this roommate you mentioned to return soon?”
“John? The guy is like a ninja. I never know when to expect him, or even when he’s already here sometimes.”
She gave a tiny frown, then suddenly grabbed my hand and led me into my bedroom and closed the door. “If he returns, pretend I’m a new girlfriend. I’ll play along.” She pulled me over to my bed, once again taking the lead, and pushed me onto it. She straddled me, and I noted with interest that her pussy was completely bald. Not even stubble on it, either she’d had it electrically removed, or she was one of those rare people who never had any to begin with. It looked so smooth… I wanted to touch it. My cock finally sprung out of the waistband of my underwear and peeked out from under the hem of my shirt. The woman opened my fly unceremoniously, pulled my pants down to below my ass, and leaned over me with one arm. Before I could say anything, or even think, the tip of my cock was pressing against her pink lower lips, and I found myself gasping as I slid inside her.
Kathleen had never wanted to really have sex with me; we did some petting and those few experimental blowjobs, but she’d once confessed to me after our second attempt that she couldn’t even fit the smallest dildos inside herself. Her gyno had explained it to her, and said it was fixable with an outpatient procedure… but she’d been too scared to go through with it, and got virtually nothing out of sex anyway, she said. She basically did it because she thought guys just wanted it. The only pussy I’d been inside was the seven or eight times I’d made it with that Raelynn chick back in high school… and she was sort of the community bicycle between all of the nerds. The only thing she liked more than having sex with nerds was playing D&D with nerds. Neither prepared me for the tight heat and soft wetness of this woman’s inner walls. My newly expanded pole fit inside her with this perfect tension. She let out a long breath too, and let my dick slide further and further inside, until I felt her wet outer lips kissing the base of my dick.
I wanted to just lie there all day. Even my huge pole had bottomed out inside this woman, and I didn’t know her name – except as ‘Cosmic Experimenter’, but what the hell kind of name was that? She said she was an avatar of this Experimenter thing, but maybe she had a separate name of her own. My mind was torn away from the sidetrack as my torso shifted slightly, letting me feel her all over again.
“There… you won’t go far now, will you?” She was looking down at me, focused, but I could tell she was affected by my dick being inside her. She might have done this just to keep me from throwing her out, but she was enjoying it too.
“Um… not for a while… you’re so tight.”
“I thought I might have to go this far to get your attention, so I adjusted my dimensions just for you.” It went right through my head at the time. She sighed. “I guess I’m at least somewhat at fault. I tuned up your sexual desires myself in the hopes you would get over your inhibitions, but I might have gone too far. It only makes sense you’d be thinking with your dick when I arrived.”
“I’m sorry?” With the sensations assaulting my mind like that, trying to assemble complex meanings in my head right then just resulted in a jumble of nonsense. “Wait, go back. You can… adjust yourself?”
“This body is mostly biogel. It’ll return to my hull once I don’t need an avatar on your planet again. For now, just fuck me, and try to absorb what I say. You don’t have to think about it right now, go ahead and just fuck away. Just try to let what I say stick in some corner of your head so you can think it over later.”
“Will do.” I placed my hands on her bare hips and ass, feeling their taut roundness. Her skin was perfectly smooth. Her boobs gave this tiny little bounce whenever I let my hips move. Her hair reflected the light through the blinds so nicely… she was goddamn gorgeous. Unable to resist, I pumped my hips up and down a little, enjoying the sensation of my cock sliding in and out, and the outer folds of her pussy kissing the base of my penis over and over.
“Benedict, your DNA alterations are the result of two hundred and seventy-one years of experiments that test the long-term stability of the human race and its bio-psychology.”
“I’m doing some bio-psychology right now.” I grinned and took a heavy breast in one hand.
Come to think of it, I probably didn’t do a stand-up job of representing the male segment of the human race to her at that time. I hope history will forgive me.
“You’re doing exactly that. Human psychology ties into human sexuality in so many ways that the problem seemed intractable at first.” She bounced in return a little, letting her boobs jiggle. I reached up and took a nipple between my fingers. Her tits were so springy and large… she seemed to sense my intent, and suddenly bent herself down – offering her red nipples right up to my mouth. I greedily sucked them. “The human species in its current form is not stable in the long term. Evolution is real good at producing creatures that will survive in the wild, and one survival trait is intelligence – but once those same intelligent species progress into a technological society, many of the evolutionary tools that got them there become a liability. It’s resulted in the end of countless sentient species. The Cosmic Experimenters – of which I’m number 15226 – wander this galactic supercluster, finding civilizations entering their technological ramp-up period, and try to observe societies enough to grasp the fundamental problems that each species may face that could cause them to wipe themselves out. There’s always something, usually a lot of things. My own people, the Primus, seem to have been a singular exception. They’re all gone now, though… we Experimenters are all that’s left of them, and nothing remains of any of our original biological bodies.”
I let her nipple pop out of my mouth and she came back up over me. The words washed through my head, stored, but not really comprehended. I couldn’t get enough of feeling up her ass, and she seemed to welcome my roaming hands and forgive my inexperienced touch; she might have even been trying to teach me. God, I couldn’t get enough of her body – even though I knew she was telling me something all-important. I told myself at the time that I was just having sex with a crazy girl, like who knew how many men before me. Wish I’d thought it through more. Wish I’d thought a lot of things through more.
“I landed on Earth in 1740 AD and started observing all societies planetwide. After about sixteen years, I thought I had a handle on things, and began experimenting with alternate iterations of humanity. I was sure the key was buried somewhere in human sexuality, but it was such a complex problem that I knew it would take a long time. Hopefully not too long. At first I tried just removing the problem – for some hot-carbon species, it worked to just add a masculine reproductive system onto the female body template, and keep the original equipment of both. I made a race of humans who could both impregnate and be impregnated.” She shook her head. “It didn’t work for humans. I couldn’t tune their sex drives right. They just fucked all day long and never got anything done.
“Next I tried different, more minor changes.” She gave me another few bounces, teasing my cock which ached to simply fuck her raw. “Bringing females up to the same level of sexual desire as males – didn’t work, same problem as the first round. Bringing males down to the same level as females – didn’t work, both genders developed major neurological problems. And they all started getting cancer… I never figured out the why of that one. I tried more socially oriented changes – the only one that had any traction was giving females the natural ability to prevent conception.” She took a deep breath, and traced a finger along my chest. “Actually, all told I tried six hundred and fourteen experiments. Almost none worked. Compared to most species, I arrived on Earth very early; usually getting there that far ahead of time gives me plenty of time to save that species. With you, I think I only managed to crack it in the nick of time… and even then, I’m too late for all of the current humans.”
“Are we done now? Because I really just want to let this load loose in you.”
“I told you to use my body. Use it.”
I took her at her word. I grabbed her by the waist again and suddenly rolled us over, positioning her spread legs off the side of the bed and letting myself stand at its edge. Tightening my grip on her ass, I abruptly started fucking her as hard as I could. I had to slide my arms under her back and grab her by the shoulders to hold her still while my hips fucked away, almost beyond my control now as I reveled in the tight wetness inside her. I bent down and suckled at her breasts more, then leaned up to kiss her. As I did, I looked into her eyes… it was still one of the most surreal experiences of my life. No other woman has had eyes like that while I made love to them. She was looking at me… it was something in between the way a mother sees her prodigal child, and the way a scientist sees their life’s work. She looked… proud of me, as I grunted and rutted hard, pistoning my cock in and out of her like an engine. Looking back, I should have tried harder to make her come. All I could think about then was that amazing pussy…
With two shouts, I felt the boiling in my balls start all over again. Belatedly, I slid a hand down to her clit, but it was too late for us to come together. My own cock was past the point of no return, and I lost the train of thought as it blasted out the first load of my orgasm. I let my head fall down next to hers, and felt her legs curl around my back, and one hand slid up and down my shoulder blade as I finished pumping, and let my cock spurt the remainder of its product deep inside her.
We remained like that for probably ten minutes, maybe even longer. My mind was racing the whole time, but I probably just looked like I was catching my breath. She continued to slide her hand up and down my back, an oddly loving gesture from her. I never really figured my relationship with her out; there was no word for it, then or now. I suppose it’s too much to expect – she was, after all, not human. She was only comprehensible to me at all because she went out of her way to make a part of herself think and act (mostly) human. Still, I’ve always felt we connected in some way… even if I would always only be a tiny speck of an existence compared to her age, wisdom, and most of all, power. Creating me was her achievement of this millennia, but she’d had many, many more before that, and there would be more in the coming ages, peoples you and I will never live to see. The beginnings and endings she must have seen… if there’s any wish I have before I finally check out, it would be to just sit down with her for one night, and just talk with her, face to face, knowing everything I do now and without my adolescent libido to distract us. Hers was a life I only wish I could understand.
“Are you for real?” I finally spoke up, and let myself fall to her side. I’d been resting, supporting myself on all fours on top of her. My cock was still inside her; I guess some dumb part of me thought that once I pulled out, I would never experience anything so good ever again. There wasn’t anything quite like that ever again, sure, but there were other things to come that were better in other ways.
“I thought you would ask. I’ll show you. Hold still.” Her legs suddenly pulled together over my ass, pulling me closer to her. “Hold onto me tighter. We need to be as physically close together as possible.”
“Um, okay.” I thought maybe she just had some kind of snuggling fetish. I had no objection to closeness to her nude body, so I did it. She rested her head on my shoulder, so I never saw her expression – only the odd shift in perspective of the room. It was like I was suddenly viewing the world through a glass marble. Everything bent, shifted upside-down, and then there was a sudden sense of weightlessness. I instinctively gripped her even more tightly, hard enough that had she been a normal woman I might have hurt her. She didn’t respond, and suddenly it all happened in reverse – though we were in a different room now. Apparently she was just a tiny bit off, and we missed the bed by a few feet. We fell onto the floor with an unceremonious thud, and I felt several sharp pains as I fell upon several choice sections of my body. I ended up bruising my ass, upper back, and elbow.
It took a moment for me to extricate myself from her, and get up to look around. “What the hell just happened!”
“Help me up.” She held out an arm to me as I rose up. With a start, I realized I was completely naked now, just as she was. Wherever she’d taken us, my clothes didn’t come along for the ride. The room was unadorned, and actually quite boring; it was bare rock on the walls, and a plain white single bed in its center. On one side was a massive door, like a bulkhead. She took a moment to get her bearings; she seemed very dizzy. I held her for a few moments until she was good enough to walk on her own. There was a black knob on one wall, just sticking out attached to only the stone… I thought it was maybe a switch. She walked over and put a hand on it, and this black fluid shot out in countless zipping tendrils, enveloping her. In an instant it had covered her, and congealed then solidified into another outfit like she’d had in my apartment. Watching her use it felt for an instant like watching a giant spider or centipede attack her. My heart skipped for a half-second. Hell of a way to get dressed. She gestured to the knob, clearly expecting me to do the same thing.
“I’ll stay like this, thanks.”
She rolled her eyes. One of her hands clapped to my shoulder. I thought she was going to say something condescending, then suddenly my body felt a flash of coolness and in another instant, the black stuff was all over me instead. She was nude again, but one touch to the knob and she had another of the same outfit on. I moved around, shifting and flexing in the outfit. It was great; comfortable, fitted to absolute perfection, flexible, warm yet easy to forget you were even wearing it. I wanted to patent it already. Not something I could wear in public in that era, unfortunately, with the way it wrapped around my dick like it was trying to take a mold of my tool. I found out later that yes, it kept its perfect molded shape even when I had an erection.
“Where are we?” I noticed the pattern on my outfit was different than the one she’d been wearing that she gave to me. Like I said, I never figured those patterns out, though.
“Teleporting more than one organism at once separately is harder than hell, but if you just teleport two very physically close creatures as one big one, it’s actually safer than just teleporting one.” She walked me over to the door. “This is the Vault. It’s an unnamed island in the Pacific tropical regions, though most of the Vault itself is below sea level. I knew you’d need proof before you really cooperated, which I suppose is a mark in your favor if I expect my chosen subjects to be reasonable. So I thought I’d take you here.”
“Okay…” The door opened, and I followed her through. It was a corridor as bland and unremarkable as the last. It led to another bulkhead, though several other smaller doors lined the sides of the hall – we didn’t look in those. She opened the far bulkhead, revealing what looked like some kind of control room, complete with massive windows lining the far side, overlooking some gigantic chamber.
“This is the control room. It’s where this avatar lived during the experimentation periods.”
“What happened to all the people you said you did these experiments on?”
“In the overwhelming majority of cases, I restored their minds and DNA based on snapshots of both that I took at the time I brought them here, then returned them to their native cultures, usually with a little compensation for their time… like a pile of gold, or removal of chronic health conditions.” She smirked at me. “The memory wipes often weren’t perfect though. What, did you think I ate them or something?”
“So all those alien abduction stories…”
“What I did was nothing like that; I have no idea where those come from. I’ve monitored a few heat signatures in Earth orbit that don’t make sense as either natural phenomenon or human technology I know about, but I never had the ability to investigate further. Here, let me show you something.” She walked over to one console, and pressed a button. The chamber the room overlooked lit up suddenly, revealing it to be cylindrical, with a massive metallic hatch covering half of the ceiling. In the center of the room, which was more like a giant launch tube, stood a gargantuan… thing. It looked mechanical, though this side was mostly exposed structure, almost looking unfinished, and I could see some kind of dimly glowing blue hexagonally-shaped rod inside it. Lower down, it looked to be more heavily built up and covered. The whole thing was the color of bare steel, and there were no visible entry points. She gestured down to it. “Here I am.”
“Um – you came from inside that?”
“I am that. I’m not a ship meant to carry passengers. The entire hull is my body, or just myself. I’m hibernating right now, which is what I mostly did between observational phases in the experiments over the years. This body you’re looking at is composed of a moldable substance called biogel, that I keep a reserve of, and can insert part of my consciousness into. A biogel body can also serve as my low-power mode, and when my real body was asleep to conserve energy, this smaller me was mostly just living here and observing, taking notes, working out what should be done in the next round of each experiment. Every few years, I’d merge with myself down there, and crunch through all the data I’d gathered. Then my primary self would reconstitute this avatar, and go back into hibernation.” She leaned against the glass. “So it’s gone for the last two hundred and seventy-one years.”
I couldn’t deny anything I was seeing, or hearing, despite the insanity of my situation. The story added up, it was just so outlandish that I couldn’t get my head around it. “This is all real, though, isn’t it…” I stared down at the massive thing below. It even somehow looked like it was hibernating… like some unimaginable force was waiting to come back to life within, something beyond human comprehension. “You never finished earlier.”
“About the experiments?”
“About me. The end result. You were looking for the most stable way humankind can exist. You finished all your tests and picked one way, which is why you said you did all this to me. Making civilization stable indefinitely can’t just be a matter of giving men bigger dicks.”
She snorted. “You know, I never tried doing an experiment for just that alone… maybe it would have actually worked.” She chuckled, but then lost her expression and seemed to sober. “Benedict—“
“Ben. I hate being called Benedict.”
“Ben, then. Walk with me.” She held out a hand again, and I took it. She led me through other corridors, talking as we went.
“First, let me give you the bad news. I think it’s probably too late to save the overwhelming majority of humankind.”
I was hesitant to just take her word for that, alien or not. “People have been saying it’s the end of the world for thousands of years. There’s that famous Cicero quote… was it Cicero?”
“Hell if I know. I spent years gathering up every smidgeon of Earthly information, knowledge, and culture and storing them on multiple redundant backups here and offworld, just in case. I never really bothered to read that much of it, though. This avatar doesn’t have much beyond normal human capabilities, minus a few tricks… like how we got here. Anyway… the end won’t be soon. Not today, or tomorrow, and it probably won’t end with a big threatric war or explosion. Things will just… get worse and worse, life will get harder and harder, until there’s only a few tiny communities left, fighting over scraps. I wish I could have found a way to fix the planet, but I couldn’t. The issue with implementing this isn’t just coming up with a stable solution. It’s having enough time to let it propagate. I used up virtually all of my helium-three reserves just running what experiments I did, until I came up with the idea I used to create you. My hull barely has enough power left to leave Earth and drift out to Jupiter, where I can refuel… but by the point I’d be ready to intervene again, I think probably it’ll be too late for humanity.”
“Why? There’s seriously nothing you can do? I mean, there’s environmental problems, and energy problems, but… can’t you just, I don’t know, give us what you know and then take off?”
“Against mission parameters. Sorry.”
“You said your mission was to fly around and save species from extinction.”
“It is – for a reason. Listen, explaining why it is that I and the other Experimenters try to genetically reform every intelligent species into something that’s stable over at least a million years is because there needs to be massive, highly advanced interstellar empires established throughout this supercluster when the Fire returns in roughly 412,000 years.”
“The Fire?”
“I don’t have all week to sit down and try to give you the short version of what the Fire is. You won’t live to see it, in any case... Giving your people all the technology the Primus had would not only be incredibly dangerous, but it would also force the development of your technology into the same direction as ours went – mostly focusing on quarkware technology and its potential. The Primus way of doing things ultimately failed. Quarkware – I guess you would characterize it as something like nanotechnology, but better and less dangerous – is useless against the Fire. It’s worse than useless, actually. We don’t know if there even is a way to really defeat the Fire, but if there is, it’ll have to be someone else who comes up with it. Of those of my people who were left toward the end, most left the physical world entirely, except for those few of us who volunteered to be transformed into the Experimenters. Our mission is to plant the seeds of as many advanced interstellar civilizations as we can, in the hope that somebody, someday, will be able to think up the thing that we never could.”
I paused for a time, digesting it all. “It never occurred to you that genetically engineering every species you encounter is no small amount of intervening in our development?”
“We only do that insofar as it lets you continue to develop at all. If I don’t do this, and you don’t propagate the changes I’ve made to you – humankind will disappear inside of four hundred years. Earth will just be yet another archeological curiosity for one of the civilizations we did manage to save from itself.”
I had no good response. I looked outside again. The lights in the chamber had dimmed down; I guess she hit the switch again at some point. “I still think this is arrogance. Humans have always survived.”
“Not this time, Ben.” She sat down in her chair. “You forget, I’ve been human now, for almost three hundred years. This avatar has the equivalent of a human brain, human emotions… I didn’t spend all my time living sealed up in here. I lived two whole human lifetimes outside, letting myself grow up as a child, having lovers, growing old. My true self, down in that chamber you saw, has absorbed all of that, and understands what it is to be human, and what it is to be just about every other species she’s encountered. But she also understands much, much more. She – I – have seen one thousand and six civilizations saved by my own efforts, and four thousand, two hundred and ninety-three wipe themselves out while I worked desperately to find a way to help them.” She looked downcast for a moment, like she hated to talk about this. “And I’m actually the third highest among all of my kind for success ratio, as of the last Conclave. It’s easy, Ben, to let yourself get caught up in that kind of thinking – that in the end, it’ll all pan out. It can’t last forever, though. The planet can only take so much before things fall apart, and nature has no obligation to save humanity or provide a solution. Once resources run out, they’re out.”
The numbers she’d given me then were just numbers to me. It would be lifetimes before I really had the tiniest grasp of the scale on which she thought. Both of us were quiet for a while.
“How will it happen again?”
“There’s six scenarios I’ve worked out…”
“But you already know which one it’ll be, I’m sure.” I probably came off as more testy than I meant to.
She was quietly tolerant of my minor outburst. “I think it’ll be a combination of the three most likely. The antibiotic immunity problem, the effects of aquifer depletion and the desertification of most of the Earth for a century or more, and climate change and the time bomb it’s set off with regard to the planet’s organic chemistry balance.” She sighed. “Those three combined will result in nearly all necessary resources for survival being depleted an order of magnitude faster than civilization can hope to come up with alternate solutions for. Ecosystems will collapse when the oceanic algae mats start to die off. The antibiotic problem is the biggest variable; it’s basically a roll of the dice every year, until one super-immune plague evolves that no medicine can stop. That could be tomorrow, it could be in two hundred years. In the worst case, you could end up with a planet-wide algae blackout. Earth’s air would be less than 10% oxygen for at least two years. Some Earth creatures could survive that, but humanity wouldn’t.”
“But – I mean, if you can rewrite all of my DNA, you have to be able to just give us a way to do this. I mean, a way to fight fucking bacteria, if nothing else!”
“Ben, it took me fourteen months of disassembling and analyzing your genome to find a way to rewrite it in such a way that you would become what I needed you to be – without killing you. Every human is different. I’d need another eight months for each and every human male I tried to make like you. I’m not a god. Even I can’t predict how bacteria on your planet will evolve. Frankly, the number of iterations they can go through in a single day surprises even me, and I’ve seen more kinds of life than you can imagine. It’s very unlikely I could formulate any broad-spectrum cure, or even a vaccine or new antibiotic, before Earth’s current scientific establishment could. I have a lot of tricks, but I have only a few hundred liters of helium-three left to work with, and my quarkware abilities are limited to a very small scale and range. Even if I sacrificed myself and stayed here instead of leaving, there wouldn’t be much more I could do than what I’ve already done since I arrived.”
“…… Okay. So what happens? How am I different from other people now? Why does my species survive when everyone else doesn’t?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute. Here, let me show you something.” We had come to a door, more of a metal hatch – it almost looked like one of those sliding bulkheads from Star Trek. It didn’t make the characteristic sound, but it did have an unmistakable sense of heaviness to it as it slid open when she pressed the small blue button to the side. The room was huge – and circular again. On its floor were many big, luxurious couches and lounge chairs, small tables, and carpets. There was space enough to fit twenty or thirty people in there easily, and if you went to standing room only, over a hundred. The floor was stepped in large segments, leading down toward – I stopped and then remembered to close my jaw. The far wall wasn’t so much a wall as a gigantic window. Outside was what looked like solid blue – until my eyes focused, and I realized the window was looking out into the ocean depths.