A Catalog for the End of Humanity

Emmeline was allowed to pick from three “archetype” versions of herself, much like how she might have chosen a home-droid from a catalog. The ones best representing her were projected up onto the platform—her whole life and fears and experiences filtered down to ones and zeroes, color-coded and bullet-pointed with all the best features of each. She wondered how they’d calculated something like that.

The first version of her was skipping, the kind of thing she’d only done before the wars, before the Cold. Back then, she didn’t care if other people thought it was childish. Her curls and smile betrayed her naivete—hardships were losing friends and failing classes. That version also encompassed a simple joy Emmeline envied. Before her first love with all the hope of finding her.

Everything was so much brighter back then, even the colors. As if someone had turned up the saturation to unnatural levels, but the years, or time, or her outlook had blunted the blues and greens and mixed them in with grey.

“Do I lose it all? Everything that’s not in these files?” she asked Dr. Orlean.

The freckled woman clearly hated the question and pushed up her glasses with a grimace that briefly hardened the crow’s feet by her eyes. Maybe she had answered it too many times or was afraid the answer might push people away.

“Yes,” she admitted, “but that’s the upload price. The system hasn’t been perfected yet—we haven’t had the time. Meaning we can only store archetypes. Imperfect copies.”

“But it’ll still be me.”

Dr. Orlean jabbed a few buttons on the monitor. Emmeline’s first version halted and dug through her bag, the one she’d made herself and covered in pins. It had burned along with everything else. Her archetype had pulled out a camera to snap a few shots of a crow that had landed nearby.

“God, I still have that camera, you know? I thought I’d pawn it away for food. I haven’t photographed anything since….”

“You, yes?” Dr. Orlean said.

Emmeline nodded, first loosely, then firmly.

Her second version was clad in frontline armor, boots deep in the mud that she remembered felt like quicksand. Her cloak spoke to the Cold, and the fresh wound on her forehead spoke of how close she’d come to death. The Indestructible Orbital Fortifications had fallen—“Unsinkable too, I reckon,” she’d said at the time. Her people were fleeing, and they were coming.

The Cold wasn’t something around her; it was a part of her, bleeding into her fingers and eyes and drawing out the last gasps of life she had in her lungs. She desperately fought to kindle a fire, but the flames gave up over and over and over—till she did too.

The cliff-face. A fall. Darkness.

Emmeline didn’t know who had saved her.

Nothing had changed her more than those days in the Cold, and amongst the terror and pain and scars, she had also come to know herself better. She missed the days when taking a good photo of a crow was her only concern, but there was more to her now. More meat. More thought. More cynicism. She had saved people and been saved and felt the pain that reminded her to live. Emmeline marveled at how the projection captured it all in the depths of her eyes, or maybe it was a Rorschach test, and she was seeing what she needed to.

It was hell, but she couldn’t crawl through hell and pretend she hadn’t.

“I wish I could take some parts, leave others behind. Pick and choose.”

“Afraid that’s not possible. We tried storing fully digitized constructs, lifetime memories and all, and mixed constructs, but they fractured. It likes whole, completed consciousnesses with a specific environmental backdrop. Narratives it can organize everything into.”

Emmeline pursed her lips, understanding. “But people change.”

“Exactly, and for the moment, it doesn’t understand that.”

There was a cruel irony to it. The universe had molded her into a different person time and again, and now it was making her choose which would be the real Emmeline.

The third version of her was like looking into a warped mirror: it was her, but with something uncanny and bent out of shape. Maybe she didn’t recognize herself or didn’t want to and still imagined herself as young and beautiful, or middle-aged and grizzled. The wound from the second version had healed into a crescent, motley scar. Her one good eye sagged with memory, searching for someone that could look back at her. Not with a naïve, ignorant love like in the first projection, but one that understood her.

All of her.

She had found someone like that in Milanka. They met in the decrepit ruins of Koper during the worst of it. A fight for the last scraps of food. Milanka won but shared the stale loaf of bread and half a moldy potato with her anyway. They’d traveled together for years and wouldn't have made it half as far without the other. They’d made a life, or what life they could, and lived it together till Milanka couldn’t anymore, and Emmeline endured the remnants of what was left.

If the Cold was the curse of her second life, Loneliness was the curse of her third.

It was a deeper, more wretched kind of pain, and one, in her private thoughts, she sometimes wished she could live without.

“How long do I have?”

Dr. Orlean didn’t check her watch. “They’re coming.”

“Uh-huh.” She stepped back from the three versions.

“You were picked for several reasons, but this might be the only thing that survives out in the cosmos.”

“Half-baked digits of a handful of us?” She could only scoff.

“We tried our best.”

"I’m sorry."

Dr. Orlean waved her off. “I’ll prep the digitization chamber, and if you’d like, you can decide privately. It is, after all, a medical decision. We sometimes forget that.”

Emmeline gave her thanks and was left alone in the small industrial room. No time for the usual beautification of a place like that.

It would be so nice to return to a simple, gentle life, but she couldn’t forget the Cold or the Loneliness. Or perhaps she could. She had been many people across her life, but she could have been a thousand other people too—if not for the wars, if not for others, if the cards had dealt her a kinder hand.

“It might be good to try again.” Her voice curved with childish inquisitiveness.

With a heavy finger, she chose the new life she would return to.

Tim Hickson spends his days tucked away in the little corner of the world some would call New Zealand, where he enjoys writing about existentialism and mental health, the concept of the self, and the souls of androids. His work has appeared in Utopia Science Fiction and Vræyda Literary Journal. He has published two volumes in his On Writing and Worldbuilding series, and is sometimes better known as 'Hello Future Me' on YouTube. You can follow him there or at @TimHickson1 on Twitter.'