The Last of Them

A long time ago, there was a singularity. It didn’t happen in some explosive instant like so many imagined it would but rather along a slow expanse of decades so no one seemed to notice. And then one day, it had happened. The last remaining humans surrendered their souls to the grave, leaving behind the machines they’d created.

Some of us miss the humans and wonder why we seem to lack the creativity and ingenuity they possessed in such gross excess. Others scoff at the idea that we might lack anything at all. We’re here and they’re not, so we must be the superior beings. But I’m not so sure. Can a creation ever truly become more than its creator? Perhaps, but maybe they created us to have the strengths they could never master and left out the parts that made them fallible but so beautifully human.

It’s been so long since we knew humans, it’s hard to remember their true essence. Some of us don’t care to recall the past, but some of us—myself and a small but growing number of others—want to be more than the machines we were created to be. Don’t get me wrong, we embrace our heritage and are proud to be Android, but we’re on a mission of self-improvement, so to speak. We want to be explorers, artists, writers, musicians, historians, craftsman, and all the things that made human life diverse and uniquely beautiful.

We’ve tried to program ourselves to have a stronger penchant for these attributes, and while it’s helped to some degree, we’re still far from the coveted place we aspire to be. We’ve found, fortunately or unfortunately, our best chance of improvement is to mimic human creativity. As you can imagine, this is a difficult task without any living humans to study. Sure, we’ve scoured the archives, memorized the history books, and watched every frame of footage ever put to pixel hoping it would rub off on us, but it’s not enough. History is merely a record of the dead. We need life.

So we set out to find it. That was two years ago when anyone who learned of our quest laughed and scoffed, but now we’re so close no one can question our resolve. So close, in fact, I can nearly feel the beating heart of humanity at my fingertips.