Post-Singularity

For tonight, I live in the clay ruins atop the highest peak. For many of their smaller buildings, the late transhuman civilization returned to less durable materials to reflect how they, too, would soon transition into the flux around them. But their buildings were still standing when I first found them, giving me a chance to live like they. It's much harder to find any on the plains, as the others humans destroy them wherever they can find them, but they don't come here: it's too hard to survive in this part of the world without technology. Not that I have anything to fear from them anyway, of course, but I'd rather not have to fight them. I haven't seen another human for years and I'd like to keep it that way.

So why am I here? I missed the Singularity. Actually, I'm not even sure if I was around at the time. I was born in a human tribe that had kept me away from all technology until after they disappeared off the face of the world. As a child I didn't even know there was ever a world out there. They told me the horizon was the edge of the world to keep me where I was, which of course had the opposite effect on me.

It wasn't until I ran away and found the ruins that I learned how much there was that I didn't know about. So I've been scavenging whatever ruins I could find for any technology they left behind. Actually, it found me, like a ghost wandering the ruins. Indeed, until it answered all my questions about the transhuman civilization, I thought it was a ghost, one that could magically fulfill all my wishes.

I don't know what will happen if the other humans ever find it… perhaps they were right to stay away from it, because about one thing they're right: it certainly doesn't belong in their hands. But the transhumans didn't care to hide it, as if to see what would happen to it over time.

*****

I wake up floating in the middle of the empty top floor room. Upheld by a cloud of nanites, I'm perfectly comfortable and in no rush to get up. The roof is a glass spheroid that funnels the horizons into a circle above me, and at night places all the stars in the sky in my field of view. The glass walls themselves form an ellipsoid, thickening at the corners to uphold the sphere. The whole room has no edges, so that the view transitions seamlessly from the distortion above me to the actual view around me.

This is just the way the room was last programmed to look, as the nanites can remold the materials at any time. Perhaps that's why the walls are made of clay and glass, as stone would take too much power to remold. I could repair the damage to the clay rooms easily, but somehow it feels sacrilegious to the memory of the transhumans, which is the only reason I'm here anyway. The nanites protect me against the elements well enough: I might as well sleep in the open, and sometimes I do, to walk in the transhumans' footsteps. Under the stars I must be closer to what they've become, but somehow it feels less lonely to stay where they lived when they were still more human, even though they no longer are.

So here I am, alone in my own paradise. I can't be with them, nor do I want to be with my kin. Is there anything left for me but to do but stare at where they disappeared beyond the horizon? It's too late to catch up with them, but even so I try to follow in their footsteps, even if I know that footsteps is all that I'll ever know of them. I try to find new footsteps every day to keep the illusion that the footsteps are still alive: finding what they left behind is the only dialogue I'll ever have with them, the only way to keep dreaming of how I could've been one of them.