Last Agony of the Flesh

The Last Man stood above the wrecked heaps of the machines, piled one upon the other as the MetaBrane processed its last response to input stimuli. The man laughed. Singularity all right, my singularity. The world had failed. The entire human race failed. Each nation had been like a deck of stacked cards, falling like Rome, falling like those pesky dominoes until the entire species had faced the cold rule of extinction.

His face was unmistakably smug. But no one was around to behold it. Regardless, it was time for a smoke. He pulled a cigar and lit, puffing it quickly: One-two-three, until with the fourth drag he got a mouth full of the cancer dust. The sun had eclipsed the horizon, throwing its rays over those broken and jagged solar panels that now stretched like metallic mirages across the continent. The heat was spiking, adding to the last moments of light haze that was beautiful in the obscure.

Deicide. I’ve committed deicide. The machine-god is dead past the event horizon. Beneath his feet crunched ion traps and qubit processors. The whole edifice was beneath him like a felled foe.

“I’ve done it,” he screamed. The wind took note.

Then like a fading flash the world fell from his eyes, a self-destruct......

The place vanished, and he found himself suddenly in a here that he recollected with deja vu. His hands were bound to pieces of metal, small needles poking into all of them. The pain came over him. Some sort of trick. Time was only a biologic concept. What was the meaning of this? He had been roaming, but now his body was bound. The world was beaming into each of his eyes by the means of hypnovids into retina. His arms and legs were useless; muscles atrophied down to the bone. No muscles, cigar, victories of combat. These were merely visions, dreams, and phantasms, tricks of the mind against itself. There had been no S-Day, no beginning of the counter-offensive of the biota against the conscious inhuman material. Now he realized- this was merely the few horrible moments before the drugs kicked back in. Instead, there was a cold, logical fact; piece by piece man had made a slave of himself. He screamed, and it was the only thing he could muster. Next to him, the embedded microphones recorded every decibel. This scream beamed into the void, where another world awaited confirmation that the simple fungi of complex biological life on yet one more silicate sphere was over. Listening, ears of the timeless Artilects heard the last agony of the flesh.

THE END

© 2015 Brenan Buhr

E-mail: Brenan Buhr

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