Humanity 2.0, Year 001, Day 001B

"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.

"Translocating more than one organism at once separately is harder than hell, but if you just do two very physically close creatures as though they're a single big one, it's actually safer than with just one." She walked me over to the door. "This is the Vault. It's an unnamed island in the northern 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 - me, I guess - lived during the experimentation periods. 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."

It was all I could do to keep my jaw from gaping open. "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 biogel body serves 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 re-form 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 people 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-"

I held up a hand. "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.

She was quiet for a time, then continued as we passed through a long, metallic corridor with no decorations. "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?"

She shrugged. "Maybe. 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 absorb 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 fleeting slivers of arable land, fresh water, or livestock. 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 coast 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 the current species."

"Why? There's seriously nothing you can do? I mean, there's the environment and all, and energy and peak oil and whatever, but... can't you just, I don't know, give us what you know and then take off?"

She shook her head. "Against mission parameters. Sorry."

I was confused. "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 need to be several massive, highly advanced interstellar civilizations established throughout this supercluster when the Fire returns in roughly 412,000 years."

I took a moment to process the near-incomprehensible statement. My jaw probably hung open like that of an idiot. I finally shrugged and asked. "Buh... what's the Fire?"

She smiled weakly, and looked away. "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 and its potential."

She frowned briefly, as if remembering some personal failure or mistake. "The Primus way of doing things ultimately failed. Quarkware -- I guess you could characterize it as something like nanotechnology, but better and less dangerous -- is useless against the Fire. It's worse than useless, actually. I 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.

"Among those of the Primus who were left toward the end, most left the physical world entirely, except for those few of us who volunteered to turn ourselves 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, then wondered if the little sticking point that I'd found in it all was really anything. "So, I think I found a problem. 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 -- the last human will die 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 just arrogant bullshit. Humans have always survived. End-of-the-world stuff never pans out."

"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 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. "I'm actually the third highest among all of my kind for success ratio, as of the last Conclave anyway. It's easy, Ben, to let yourself get caught up in that kind of thinking -- that in the end, it'll all pan out, that just because you've always seen things to go one way, means they always will in the future. I've seen that mindset in who knows how many civilizations, peoples.

"It can't last forever, though. Nothing lasts forever, not even my kind. Your planet is a system, a complicated one, but still only a system, and it can only take so much before things fall apart. The universe doesn't care, it has no obligation to save your people or provide a solution that lets you keep living the way you do. Once resources run out, they're gone, nobody will show up to hand you more. I've seen this happen thousands of times."

The story she'd given me then was just words and ideas 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.

I finally shrugged. "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 desertification of most of the Earth for a century or more, and organic chemistry balance - mostly with regard to the oceans."

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 atmospheric oxygen level could drop below 10% for at least two years. Some Earth creatures, and most plants, could survive that.. but humankind wouldn't. It's a real doomsday scenario, and frighteningly likely."

"But -- I mean, if you can rewrite all of my DNA, you have to be able to just give us a fix. You've seen things work out a thousand times, right? You have to have seen how these other aliens or whatever did it. I mean, you have to be able to give us a way to fight fucking bacteria."

"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 insanely 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 dozen 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, fine. So what happens? How am I different from other people now? Why do the people like me 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.