Writing Prompts

I should press the button I know I should. Why should they get to live happily ever after while I have to watch over them in a world they destroyed? I can’t even see the stars because the night sky is polluted beyond repair. Ash and radioactive dust clog the filters in my breathing suit anyway. Why should I press the damn button?

In their virtual world, they sit amongst other lifeforms that they treated so terribly in reality. Virtual representations of species long since extinct, canis lupus familiaris, felis catus, and my own personal favourite, anas platyrhynchos, the mallard duck, I went to great lengths getting that uploaded to the servers databanks. They even have horses there. Large, majestic beasts that humanity enslaved and forced to charge into war for centuries. All gone now, gone with all the other good things that this planet gave to us. I should have pressed that button as soon as the last one of them left me, but here I sit, with an empty bottle in my hands, just staring at that button. I drank all the alcohol I could find and there’s no way for me to make any more.

All I have left is the button and this cyanide capsule that a friend gave to me before he left to join the rest of them, a ghost without a shell. We were expected to maintain the servers so that humanity could live on forever, but each year that passed, the more the loneliness took over my colleagues. I swallow the slightly bitter pill and reach out with a shaky finger. They don’t deserve a second chance and neither do I. My finger misses the mark and I stumble out of the chair. Too much alcohol.

They are already dead anyway and I’m running out of time. I could still go and join them, there is time for that at least, but is it better to exist in a false paradise than to live amongst your guilt? All I have to do is press the button and my consciousness will be uploaded to the servers. I will suffer no more. The other me would be welcomed as a hero. The last of humanity to hold the line. Would it really be me though? When I die here, will my consciousness continue in an uninterrupted stream or will the other me become the real me? Blood starts to drip from my nose. I press the button.

Dammit, another transfer. I still can't believe I got suckered into this.

"Oh, Terry", they said, "you'll get to live forever, all you have to do is keep things running. The nanobots will do most of the work, so you get to kick back and enjoy the best of everything!"

Yeah. Right. Sure, the bots can grow anything for me, any food I want, any clothes from all of history, it's great. And since I can plug into the system, I can talk with anyone and everyone that converted. Great!

And it was great for the first thousand years. One body gets old, you have the bots clone you one, plug into the transfer matrix and hotswap. You get another hundred or so years in a healthy body.

Problem is that all those people in the machine are the same assholes I've been talking to for centuries. At this point, I'd have to look up how many millennia it's been, and the last time I did that, the nanobots had to rebuild my entire body and reboot me from back-up after I blew my damn head off. Can't even die, not allowed.

Don't get me wrong, when I'm plugged in, I can get all the sex I want, all the praise and adulation, but I've fucked every single person in there a dozen times, and it isn't like I can stay plugged in all the time. There's work. Maintaining nanobot code, scanning and repairing the crystalline matrices that allow a full person to be copied in, the turnover for all the storage units, it's a solid ten hours every day, though not always the same jobs every day.

And we're it. I've run sub-servers to try and figure out a way to create new people, to have children, but it won't work. The serious brains inside can't figure it out, so I don't know why I keep trying, but I keep failing. The religious and philosophical geeks inside say there's no way to make a soul "stick" inside, if it wasn't there already, that souls need meat to grow with, so there's no way to make it work at all.

I'm half tempted to stick my junk in a port and see if that works.

Eternal life! Bull. There's no life at all. It's static, it's eternal, but it ain't life.

I keep waiting and hoping that maybe the planetary defense network will fail, and I can just not fix it, and some kind of planetoid sized mass will slam into us, and that would maybe break up the nanobot network enough that it would all be over. But I suspect I'll be right here until the sun wipes us out.

At least, it'll wipe us out here. The other me, the one frozen and waiting with the back-up network cruising to space outside the galaxy, he'll wake up and get to start the same mind numbing wait for oblivion out there.

Yeah, great idea this was, Terry.

Okay Hannah, as soon as the new body decants, begin the transfer and scrub this mangy old shell.