Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against

THE ARC BENDS ^{KIERON GILLEN}

I DIED, IN the hope I would get better. It seemed like a sensible thing to do.

It was the 21st century. Lots of things seemed to be the sensible thing to do, and so we did them. It’s only common sense. Over the centuries, I’ve come to understand that this belief is one of humanity’s more constant attributes, certainly more constant than any of the content of “common sense” itself. I’m sorry. I’m going to wax philosophical. This behavior was encouraged between then and now. I’m following my best, only legal advice.

As far as the early 21st century went, I knew I was lucky. I had a nationality (American), a career (accountancy, corporate), insurance (work based, surprisingly comprehensive), savings (some), property (house), a wife (short, enthusiastic, liked tropical fish, 1990s sitcoms, me), children (Child One who liked me, Child Two who hated me, Child Three who liked me. I felt that was pretty good going), etc. Unfortunately, I was born inside a human body whose faults include serious lower back pain, mysterious wax build-up in my left ear, and being a human body.

I remember seeing quizzes like, “What do you hate about your body?” and blinking when people answered things like, “My nose” or, “My wrists”. The only answer which made any sense was, “A tendency to start to degrade from the late teens, slowly lose function and stop working entirely within one hundred years tops.”

I just didn’t understand. I didn’t understand when my first pet died (cat, ginger, angry). I didn’t understand when my first friend died (teenage car-crash, no drinking, deeply unfair). I didn’t understand when my parents died (mercifully late, relatively painless). I didn’t understand when I saw famines on the news or shootings in the streets (constantly). I just didn’t understand. And I always thought two things simultaneously…

This shouldn’t happen.

This shouldn’t happen to me.

In short, my mid-life crisis started early, and kept on going. I had many weaknesses as a human, but you can’t say I didn’t commit. Eventually my perpetual mid-life crisis actually met my lucky mid-life, which meant I had some money to throw at the problem in hope it would just go away.

I sidestepped most of the well-worn, traditional methods. I didn’t buy the latest model of car or try to date a young model or experiment with plastic surgery. I didn’t leave my wife. I didn’t go on a ludicrous health kick, though I continued to eat more kale than I’d have strictly speaking liked (a fact which I would come to regret).

I already had a gym membership. I decided to join another club, with a similar aim. Both promised a longer life. Their methodology varied. My gym believed that the aim would be achieved by having a twenty-something shout at me to lift metal objects up and down, while my other club leaned toward decapitating my head and lobbing it in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

It takes all sorts.

I’d read the literature. Scientific opinion was distinctly mixed. Some argued that revival would only work if the decapitation happened before you died, which would require euthanasia to be legal, which it wasn’t where I came from. It was likely a waste of time, and people thought this was a lot of money to spend just to end up as a minty-fresh head-sicle. I didn’t really care. A chance was all I was looking for.

Religious people don’t really know if their afterlife of choice exists. Just the possibility makes the likelihood of absolute eternal non-existence a little more palatable. In the same way, the idea that I had a vat of liquid nitrogen of my very own was a comfort. It didn’t matter if it likely wouldn’t work. It might, and that hope was all I needed. Anyway: I was only still relatively young, life-expectancies were rising and who knew what new technologies would arise in the decades of happy life I had ahead of me?

“Look out for that car!”

“What car?”

Dead.

THIS IS WHAT resurrection is like.

One second you’re not there. The next, you’re there and you have this stream of sensory data which you desperately try to make sense of. From then on, it’s a case of everything slowly coming into focus, shapes becoming objects, objects getting their nouns attached. The blur of light became a white flat surface became a pristine featureless wall. Between me and it, the small white blur became a flat horizontal surface supported by four thin columns, became a chair.

Wherever I was had both walls and chairs. I’d read about future shock, so was relieved that the fantastical future world I found myself in featured both walls and chairs, two things I was quite familiar with.

I tried to turn my head. I tried to breathe deeply, and failed. I screamed. An electronic voice emerged from a box beneath my throat. It was only slightly better than the text-to-voice on my twenty-first century computer. I would have guessed we’d have finally made progress in vaguely convincing computer voices by the time that we’d mastered resurrecting the dead, but I was a simple layperson. It was likely a good thing. If they’d prioritized reanimating the dead over not making computers sound like they’re about to demand Earth surrenders to its cyborg legions, I could hardly complain. Also, if there was a position from which to complain, I couldn’t get there, as I was a decapitated head.

If returning to life was less interesting than you’d hope, being a living head more than made up for it. I’d read about guillotine victims’ heads blinking, or Mary Queen of Scots still mouthing the words of her prayers when her Catholic head was sliced from her Catholic body. I always thought that must be a uniquely strange experience, which my own experience swiftly confirmed.

Firstly, you’re uniquely breathless. Literally, without breath. I could move my mouth and tongue, but the soft, constant ebb and flow of air is just gone. I hadn’t realized how soothing the simple act of breathing was. It was as if I had my hair stroked my whole life, and suddenly it had stopped. I felt abandoned, betrayed by my body. I thought it would never leave me, yet here we are.

I’d read about phantom limbs. I had a phantom body. I could feel my whole self but a glance to the right showed I was mistaken—I was attached to a tall pillar, with no room for limbs, torso, or any of my usual fleshy accoutrements. It was like an awful, total sleep paralysis. I also had a headache. There’s only one part of me left, and it ached. This felt most unfair of all.

In short: I would not recommend.

I was only briefly alone. A seam opened in the far wall, and through it stepped a tall person wearing black, which was slimming. When the person was already as tall and thin as they were, the effect was profound, as if a sentient traffic pole had walked in, their head a solemn sign whose specific meaning proved unreadable.

“John Garth?” they said.

I’m using “they” as I eventually better understood their dialect, that it’s the best way to translate their preferred language into old English. It’s not that their preferred pronoun is “they.” It’s that all pronouns are “they,” with more specific pronouns used when more detail is required. You may think that this understanding suggests a happy ending, that everything turns out okay as me and future-humans become best friends. I would not make that assumption. Assume makes an ass out of you and me, and I had no ass, as I am a living head. Show some sensitivity.

In fact, their pronoun tree system seemed to make a lot of sense, and much more than my high-school French where I could never remember if a chair was male or female, or even understand why you’d need to know if a chair was male or female.

I was meeting my first ever future human and my first ever future human was looking at me in a way which implied I was far from the first past-human they’d ever met.

“Yes, I’m John Garth,” I said, in a buzz of syllables. “Where is this? I thought they’d clone my body and—”

I stopped, realizing there was another question.

“What year is this?” I said.

They sat down on the chair, whose gender (not being a French chair) can remain a matter of speculation.

“Let’s keep it to ‘The future,’” they sighed.

“Tell me,” I said, “Don’t worry. I won’t freak out. I can take it.”

“Yes, you probably can,” they said, “but I’m not telling you because I’m worried about you. I’m just not particularly interested in filling in the gaps for you.”

This was the exact moment when I realized this future would not be all I had hoped for.

I ASKED ABOUT my family. They were dead. I was upset.

They were all good kids. Well, not all good-good, but I loved them. Now they were good and dead. Like my good, dead wife. You can assume a lot of distress happened, because it did.

The person was hard, but not unkind. They left me alone to weep, with me only able to imagine my now-gone body bent double in torture. Instead, my face wracked in spasms as I cried. After some time, the machine I was attached to started gurgling. I eventually realized it was replacing fluids in my body. The gurgle was neither a dramatic or sympathetic noise. In fact, it sounded like it was mocking me, a situation which only made me weep harder. After some time, I started feeling better, if somewhat disconnected. To make a disembodied head feel disconnected says a lot.

Eventually, the tall figure made their way back into the room, peeking their head around the door.

“Sorry that I had to hit with you with some sedatives, but I’ve got to see a lot of people,” they said, “But you should know—your level of distress will definitely be in the plus column. It shows that you have sensitivity for people other than yourself. People like that. Some people will root for you.”

I took a second to add this to my growing collection of things that were not entirely comforting.

“Who are you?” I said. “Are you a doctor?”

“Yes, but not in a relevant way. I’m a Doctor of Philosophy and Law,” they said. “My name is Bobb. I’m your lawyer.”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong?”

They smiled in a way which made me suspect that while Bobb may be my lawyer, my lawyer was not entirely on my side.

“This is perhaps best made clear by a thought experiment,” they said. “How do you feel about Hitler?”

“Not a fan,” I said.

“I’m glad you agree,” they said, flicking their eyes to the right. I only later realized this was them making notes in an internal UI. At the moment, I thought they had a twitch. You live, you learn, and then you die, and it turns out you learn some more. They leaned forward, as if speaking to a child. I was already feeling like one. It turns out that being a living head is deeply emasculating.

“Assume Hitler won and his Reich dominated world politics for his whole life. He’s in his eighties, and eventually a cancer nasty enough to trump 1970s medicine turns up. They decide to try and preserve his body for future generations of Nazi scientists to have a crack at getting him back on his feet. Let’s assume they find a way which leaves something that far future science can actually reanimate. And then one day, they bring back Hitler.”

They paused. I resisted the urge to make a joke about Zombie Hitler. I assumed it would not be appreciated.

“Except since Hitler died, the world’s changed. The democratic powers found a way to out-produce the fascists, and are now top dogs. A society that at least pays lip service to multiculturalism has got the man responsible for the deaths of millions of beings. What do you think happens?”

“They have a trial?” I say.

“Exactly,” they said, “and they’re glad that Hitler was dumb enough to deliver themselves into their hands.”

They paused meaningfully, gesturing at me and my present predicament with great formality. They held the pose until I got what they meant.

“But I’m not Hitler!” I said.

“That remains to be seen,” they said, sighing.

They performed another series of eye-twitches, the future equivalent of flicking through the tabs on your browser.

“That’s the weird thing about you people,” they said. “You all acted the way you did, voted for what you did, fucked up the planet, were complicit in the abuse of billions of lives and then expect the people who inherited the world you made to welcome you with open arms. It’s like the drunk uncle who set fire to the house at Thanksgiving, turning up at Christmas and expecting to have a seat at the table.”

“You still have Thanksgiving?” I asked, jumping on the clue.

“No, we don’t,” they said, “I’m just trained in your idioms and cultural signifiers.”

Bobb got out a pen, and clicked it in and out. They held it above a paper, and made no note. The whole show was just to make me more comfortable. It really didn’t work.

“Let’s get this over with,” they said.

IT TOOK A while. I started to do what any good 21st century American human would do in a similar situation. I complained, with every single tactic I could muster. Whining. Anger. Bargaining. More anger. A lot more whining. Indignant huffing. Asking to see the boss. Asking to leave. Asking to see the boss’s boss. Nothing worked. Apparently this behavior is entirely normal. Later Bobb told me they were playing a Reanimation-Defense-Lawyer version of Bingo, ticking off my tactics as they came up.

“I have rights!” I said.

“You don’t have rights,” they said. “You died. You are legally dead.”

“How can I be accused of crimes if I’m dead?”

“You’re clearly a person, and a person with a history.”

“Don’t I have rights as a citizen?”

“You’re not a citizen of this state,” they said. “Even if you once were, now you are dead. You have no citizen rights. You are essentially a new being looking to join our society. We’ll keep you in a cage until we work out what to do with you.”

“You can’t just keep me trapped for that,” I said, before realizing exactly what I’d said.

A shamed silence.

“I was against that,” I eventually managed.

“Good,” said Bobb. “Did you do anything about that?”

“I wanted to call my representative,” I said.

“Right,” they said.

“And I retweeted a bunch of scathing jokes,” I said.

“Right,” they said.

“And I made disapproving noises when my wife’s father went on a tear on Mexicans that Thanksgiving,” I said.

“You’d get more credit for having an actual row rather than passive aggression, but it’s better than just staring at your turkey and blueberry,” they said.

“It’s cranberry,” I said.

“The records say blueberry,” I said.

“The records are wrong,” I said.

“You probably have minor brain damage. It’s natural after such a long freeze,” they said.

“You’re messing with me now, right?”

“A little,” they said. “Come on. I can trick you into answering the questions, but play along and it’ll be much easier and it’ll come across better. Let’s start with some basic ones. No lies.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“That wasn’t to you. That was to the machines. You can only answer truthfully now.”

I’d noticed a series of other lights had activated. I felt a tingle between the base of my spine and the nape of my neck, a distance considerably shorter than I had become used to in my whole-body years. An electronically stimulated truth-telling state. Now we’re doing future science.

They took a deep breath, and I tried to do one and failed. We began.

“Did you recycle?”

“Yes.”

“Did you pay your taxes?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give to charity?”

“Yes.”

“Was it—say—10% of your income?”

“Hell, no.”

“How much did you minimize your tax exposure in legal ways which you actually consider unethical.”

“Some.”

“How often did you spread information from a new source you had any doubts about whatsoever as it mirrored your pre-existing beliefs.”

“Wow, that’s specific. How am I to know?”

“You know. Just answer.”

“All the time. Who has time to check?”

“Right. How complicit were you with rape culture?”

“I never did anything to anyone.”

“How often did you stop your friends making jokes that treated women as a punchline.”

“Not enough.”

“So… once again, how complicit were you with rape culture?”

“I was passively complicit.”

“How did you vote?”

“I voted Democrat whenever I voted.”

“How often did you vote?”

There was a pause.

“Is this question difficult or unclear?”

“I voted in the majority of elections,” I said. “Sometimes I didn’t see the point. The candidates all seemed the same and the polls seemed sure.”

Bobb closed their eyes and breathed.

“Do you know what happened to the world after you died?”

“No. I was dead.”

“And you’re not going to get to know. But you just should know that that alone is enough to make you guilty. You have no idea how angry your descendants are at you.”

“I’m really not as bad as Hitler,” I said. I realized that as far as arguments go, this is both undeniable and weak.

“Yeah, you’re not,” Bobb sighed. “We do grade on a curve. But say… let’s say we dropped a 19th century slave owner in your society’s lap. Let’s make it easier—a slave owner who actively beat, abused and murdered his slaves. What would happen?”

“A trial like this?” I said.

“It wouldn’t,” they said. “You’d have half the country saying it was okay because it was legal then and who are we to judge?”

I tried to deny it and found I couldn’t. I didn’t agree with the argument. I couldn’t say it. The computer had stopped me. I may have not been able to say it anyway. I got the point. Bobb sighed, and carried on.

“Did you eat kale?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you eat kale?”

“Yes, of course. All the time.”

Bobb froze, mortified.

“What?” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If I took you outside and showed you the kale-derived gene-modded superforest that’s filled the entire Pacific basin, torn down the east coast and is only kept even vaguely under control by an army of flamethrower-toting techno-barbarian special forces, you’d understand why kale-eaters aren’t too popular nowadays,” they said.

“That’s just unfair,” I said. “I had no idea. How could I have known that kale did that? You can’t hold me responsible.”

“It is a hard one, but when you lot may as well have been walking to the North Pole and manually applying heaters to the ice-face, a lot of people now don’t really give you the benefit of the doubt.”

I must have looked particularly depressed as Bobb took this moment to show a little sympathy. By now it was unexpected, though not as unexpected as my considerable kale consumption leading me to be pilloried by a future society.

“You have to understand—I am on your side. I don’t think what they want to do to you is fair. That’s why I’m in this job,” they said, “but people are angry. We’re tiny petri dishes of humans on this Satanic dish of a planet you cooked up. Many people don’t care. They just want to get back at anyone they can get hold of, and here you are.”

“What about our leaders?” I said. “They’re worse than me. Hell, it’s their fault. They should be punished, not me.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” They smiled. “We got them.”

I could imagine the cheering from my friends and the friends of Children One, Two and oddly not Three on Twitter. I may have said something sassy myself, but at this exact moment, it was just another reason to be depressed and fearful.

Bobb stood up, stretched, and started to head toward the near-imperceptible door. “That’ll do for now. You’re a relatively good person. Most people whose heads turn up are much richer, which normally means more complicit, and worse. Your family life will play well with the judges.”

Good Dead Wife and Good Dead Children One, Two and Three to the rescue.

“What are my chances?”

“Low.”

“How low? How many people have been found innocent?”

“None.”

“That does seem low. So I have no chance?”

“Of course you have a chance. You can’t predict the future from past events. That’s basic empiricism. There’s always a chance that it can be different next time, and you can’t prove otherwise.”

“That’s just nonsense! If clever sophism is my only hope, you can’t expect me to be optimistic.”

“Perhaps, but it would be better for you if you were philosophical.”

“I’ll try,” I said, and I did.

Child Two was the philosophical one. I should have listened more.

Bobb headed to the door, opened it, half stepped through, then looked back.

“The thing is, John, you know the Malcomb Luther King line about ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’?”

I nodded. Or rather, failed to nod. They got it anyway.

“You gave justice too much time to bend.”

I HAD MY trial. It went poorly. They sentenced me to eternal torture in a simulated Hell.

Bobb accompanied me as I was rolled to the detention area. It was another white room, yet less luxuriant. Where before I had privacy, now I had company. It was full of heads of various ages (within a fairly broad range) and races (within a far narrower window). Wires were embedded deep in their foreheads, scabs sealed around the cabling. A technician moved lazily between each, checking and prodding. I was a little surprised at both the casual brutality and the low tech solution. All the heads who were sentenced had an entirely convincing hallucination induced in their actual brains. On the bright side, it’d feel as if I had my whole body back, with the major con that my body wouldn’t be having a particularly nice time. This was not the tech rapture my old Wired magazines had promised me.

“I always thought they’d be uploading personalities into a computer simulation by now,” I said. “If they wanted to do this, they’d make a computer copy of me and lob it onto a computer.”

“We did consider it. Forget about how many angels can dance on a head of a pin—let’s see how many sinners we can write to a hard-drive,” said Bobb. “The problem is that while the tech’s sort of there, people are generally against it. Especially for something like this, we prefer keeping the simulations running on wetware. As a culture, we never quite got past the philosophical question.”

While then I dreaded more philosophy, I couldn’t help but ask for elaboration.

“You know—all the continuity of consciousness questions,” they said. “Is a copy of you actually you? We can’t even be sure that a copy is functionally the same as you. Of course, same questions apply to your body. Every seven years every cell in your body is rejuvenated, so you’re strictly speaking not even the same person after seven years. How can we justly punish someone for something they did seven years ago? It’s the Argonaut’s ship problem—if a ship has every timber replaced, how can we say it’s the same ship?”

“Is it?”

“Thing is, we just do,” they said. “It’s commonly accepted, so they’d rather be punishing something everyone understands and basically agrees with rather than something some people will quibble over. At least, that’s what people claim. I think it’s nonsense. I’ve got another theory.”

The technician pulled out a drill.

“I think people just like sticking electrodes in the still-living heads of their ancient enemies,” said Bobb.

Human nature, eh? What’s a guy to do?

HERE’S A NON-COMPLETE list of my social activities in Hell. Evisceration. Obliteration. Things involving cuticles. Things involving genitals. Things involving electrodes and genitals. Being given extra decorative sets of genitals, a punishment which was immediately curtailed when they realized I was quite enjoying it. Basically, it was if I was in a poorly stocked bar whose only ingredients were genitals, electrodes and blades, and you could have anything you wanted as long as it involved lobbing at least two of the three ingredients together and mixing them enthusiastically.

This proved many things, of which two seemed most prominent.

Firstly, people who are into the idea of Hell are desperately unimaginative.

Secondly, people who are into the idea of Hell are really mean.

LUCKILY, IN THE real world, time went by, opinions changed and people agreed with me on that.

One day, I found myself alive (which was a surprise) and also not in extreme pain (which was also a surprise) and not suffering extreme trauma from the experience (which was perhaps the biggest surprise of all). I could remember Hell, and everything that occurred, but it was less the most awful experience imaginable and more a mild annoyance, on par with that holiday to Portland when it rained every single day. I could imagine Good, Dead Wife and me chewing it over wryly at the breakfast bar.

“Remember that time in Portland?” she’d say.

“Oh God. Just a week sitting in a coffee bar. That sucked,” I’d say. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had my own nose pulled out via my anus?”

“No!” she’d say, passing me the granola. “That must have sucked.”

“Yeah, it did,” I’d say, and then I’d have thanked her for the granola and eaten it.

Things were different this time of being alive. I was not in a white room. I was in a pastel room and a shorter person with multi-colored hair piled up on their head, like a cross between Marie Antoinette and a three-year-old’s crayon drawing of a multi-colored Spaghetti Monster.

“Ah, welcome back, John,” they said. “Sorry to meddle with your mind without permission. Removing you from that torture simulation and leaving the negative memories would be simply inhumane. We’ve purged the memories of the negative connections so we can explain what’s happening. Do you feel better?”

I did feel better, and was suitably grateful, and would be even more grateful to know what was going on. Having experienced the future twice, this was definitely my favorite so far.

“We have come to understand that the torture of beings from past times is simply inhumane, especially in a marginal case like yours. We cannot entirely blame a being for the society they find themselves born into and the context they exist in. The act that you experienced is not justice, but revenge, and simple revenge is wrong. Justice has to be natural. All reanimates must be treated appropriately, according to the contextual justice of their own times.”

I didn’t quite understand this, but if the logic seemed to end up with me not being in Hell, it was A-OK by me.

“So are you reanimating people from that era that threw me into Hell?”

“We are,” they said, “and as we believe that the only real justice is to be judged according to the moral codes of their own time, we treat them accordingly.”

“So what are you doing to them?”

“Oh, they did acts of unbelievable cruelty to people like you,” they said, “so we’re going to put them into a simulated Hell.”

This seemed off to me.

“Doesn’t that make you identical to them?” I said.

“No, because we don’t want to do it,” they said, a little annoyed. “We’re completely different to them.”

This seemed like an awfully big leap to make, but I didn’t want to push the question, as I had more immediate and selfish worries.

“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked.

“We apply the same rules,” they explained, heading toward me, “You’re a person in trouble. It seems by your admission you basically ignored people in need, so we’re going to ignore you. And as you’re only alive because of us, that means you have to die. I’m sorry.”

“Wait! We had charities and some welfare and—”

“No, we’ve heard this one before,” she said, cutting me off. “Bye!”

Then I died for a while, again.

THEN I WAS alive.

I had been dead for a long time (according to a calendar) or not a long time (according to my own perception). By this point I was rapidly becoming a veteran at this “being dead” thing. Let me tell you this; it’s not the big deal I was worried about. It’s literally nothing. With everything that had happened to me, particularly the Hell thing, I was beginning to feel like life’s merits had been overstated, and death had a lot going for it. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

Bobb would have been proud. I was becoming philosophical.

Unfortunately, as I was coming to see my own death’s up side, the world had come to disagree. My life was fascinating! While I’d been away and dead, it had been decided that all humans had merit, so should be spared any artificial hells—which was good news for Bobb, and for those who tortured people like Bobb and me, I’m sure. However, to be resurrected resulted in a huge debt to the society that revived us. We needed to pay back what we owed to our saviors. I was unsure what use a decapitated accountant would be to this world, but it seems I was a font of useful information.

I was a keyhole into the mythologized death-days of the 21st century, and the fabled golden age of television. I would earn my existence by providing invaluable primary evidence and help in reconstructing lost texts. I disagreed, but I didn’t really have a choice. I was put in a liberal arts professor’s office, trying to recall episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and occasionally plopped down in front of students to talk about my favorite memes.

I won’t say it’s Hell. When you’ve been to even a fairly hacky Hell, you learn not to compare it to anything else—but an eternity explaining to bored undergraduates why we thought it was a big deal whether a dress was blue or gold wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for.

Anyway, it wasn’t an eternity, and eventually they decided me being alive was a bad idea, and I was dead again.

AND THEN I was alive, as people had changed their minds again.

This lot agreed that I should have a body (which was good news) but unfortunately society was collapsing technologically, so they were no longer able to perform the feat (which was bad news). They were only able to revive me due to this pre-existing machinery they were experimenting with, in hope of saving the human race from the awful fate they’d brought upon themselves. While they’d got useful data from my resurrection, they didn’t really have the power to keep me on perpetually, so they’d have to turn me off. But when they sorted everything out, they’ll definitely bring me back. They seemed very apologetic. I liked them.

“Thanks for the help,” they said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Good Luck!”

They did not have good luck.

I WAS MADE alive a few more times along the way, by increasingly shaggy, increasingly desperate people. Civilization was not going well, but it was always good to catch up.

And then I was dead for a really long time, and now I’m speaking to you.

That cute bewildered look you’re sporting makes me suspect you’ve turned me on entirely by accident. Please don’t worship me as a god. That would be awful.

What to make of you? You clearly don’t have any idea what I am. You’re not speaking a language I understand. You’re looking around and prodding things, somewhat carefully, which shows an impressive amount of sense for cave people.

I think it’s been a long time, and you’re the humanity that crawled from the rubble. Hell, maybe it’s been long enough for the planet to clean up after us. That would mean you get as clean a start as any of us get. Destroying the planet was never going to happen. Turns out we couldn’t even destroy ourselves. The species is having a second shot. Good work. I’m rooting for you.

I know you can’t understand me, but one day you may. After all, everything you need to make sense of me is lying around here. It’s possibly even recording, which means there’s a risk that you’ll take anything I say as holy scripture. Oh God. That would be worse than you thinking I’m a god.

Oh.

I’m not sure if the lights are dimming or my sight is. It’s probably both.

Ah, I’m running on the last dregs of the future-batteries before they splutter out and I do too. For the last time, I guess. No power for the support system means this head slowly rotting on a plinth, and no further comebacks.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to scream. It just hit me. I was so calm before about death, but it seems panic is making a last minute return. Repeated experience doesn’t make everything falling away any more pleasant. This is horrible.

Help me take my mind away from the abyss. Dying words. I’ll give it a shot, and hope I can make them count.

Humanity Version Two, try this:

I have been alive, if not for a long time, certainly across a long period. I have been dead many times. I have seen this dumb species from all sorts of angles, even though most of those angles have been limited to whatever stationary position people left me in.

Bobb told me the arc bent toward justice. I think they misunderstood.

The only truth I’ve learned is that the arc bends whatever way we damn choose.

Bend it! Bend it good and hard!

That’s all I’ve got. Be careful. Look after each other. It’s getting dark now.