The Last Survivor

In my dreams I am whole.

I am running along a beach my bare feet shifting sprays of sand behind me and my lungs filling with air like I was a newborn taking its first true breath. On my back I can finally feel the gloriously warm and comforting hands of sol wrap me in her heat and warmth as my whole body pulses with life, my hearth pounding in rhythm with my feet as they work together to run what perhaps could be forever.

But dreams aren’t reality as much as one may hope them to be. They are a shadow of our awareness that we drop our thoughts, our fears and desires into as we rest our minds. For most they never make sense. For me they are my greatest desires.


It was my 10,045th birthday and I was passing Mars on another interstellar run. My mind was on the usual things as I monitored the ship's systems. It was normal for me to feel anxious I was to meet Prosper as he accelerated up from the green surface of what people were now calling the "melting" planet. My sensors picked up the greeting and mail packets from the commune net and I sent the standard reply waiting for Prospero’s soppy standard love notes I had grown accustomed to. There was nothing, his normal messenger rocketed past me without even pausing for a handshake packet. My heart, if I had a body clenched. I knew what it meant and scanned the news packet for the information. Nothing on what had become of him could be found. He had to still be running the local couriers. It was unheard of...my train of thought was lost as I found something that explained what had happened.

There had been an accident. They had lost him. It was evidenced in a tri-dee vid of a massive starship exploding in its hanger as Prospero’s last moments were recorded by his security cameras. The last of the brains, well other than myself had been killed. I was alone.

Ever since the AI wars that I had fought in and survived over ten millennia ago, I had been among a handful of ships that had limped home from the outer colonies. Now since humans had perfected faster than light travel that they could move their whole bodies without harm instead of a singe brain in a special enclosure I had been obsolete. Many of my brethren, the ones who had survived combat with the merciless AI monsters had taken a myriad of jobs and settled down. I decided that space, was where I belonged.

I'm a long rang scout and prospector. At least that’s what I always tell myself. Humans had taken to calling me the Ghost, as I was rarely seen and sometimes sightings of me, my silver arrow-shaped craft was taken as a good omen that brought the reports of a new charted and fertile world from the depths of space.
If human records would go back so far they would find that my ship was once called the Prometheus, and me a human myself, once called Alicia Dax, was the helmsmen to the golden age of exploration. One that ended abruptly in fire.
My ship is actually whatever shape I want it to be, provided I have the necessary resources to reform it. I'm what they call a Nanomatrix, made in a time when humanity didn't use the living metals and grow their spacecraft in a way that could shield them from the effects of timespace. That was before the Tarragon device made the timespace problems moot. Now I and any other ship that had it in its mind to lift off from a planet only had to clear the system's greater gravity well and then the ship and anything in it could phase effortlessly. Humanity had never used nanos to build ships again anyways.

I'm a freak, a curiosity and a legend. My ship was part of the fated squadron that flown into the heart of the AI's core and destroyed it. When it was over I was the only one standing or more accurately drifting, using solar sails as my main power plant had been destroyed and I didn't have the energy to start another zero-state reactor. It had taken my two hundred years to collect the resources to rebuild enough to rejoin the what they called, the last march.
I can remember as one by one my brethren limped back from their assignments, as they watched the new living ships streak past them filled with humans. We assembled back at what was left of Terra. There were only forty of us left out of thousands. No one wanted us, and no one knew what to make of the silent watchers in their sky, slowly falling into orbit over the course of thousands of years.

Now I was the only one. And I knew the AI was back.

How do I know this? Well one by one "accidents" had started occurring to my counterparts. Prosper being the most recent and the last. I was the only one of the brains that had not stayed in the sol system. I had seen and felt too much and I was too hurt by our reception after I had worked so hard to see the sun again I had sulked like a little child, playing hide and seek in the heavens, leaving humanity behind time and time again in my constant thirst for exploration.
The AI was terminating all who knew how to fight it. The survivors who had earned their status as veterans by simply outwitting and outfighting it. It was obvious to me, I had fought it and knew how patient the AI was.
An actual name had been given to the consciousness that was collectively called the "AI" by humans. I was one of the few that actually knew its true name and that it was in fact a stored awareness, once human like me. The difference being that he replicated himself like a virus, but he was in fact not born of the digital world.
I had been there for the start of it all.

Malcolm’s face was etched in my mind, once the mind of a child but now the mind of a starship. I looked down at his face as he slept with the life support nanomachines desperately trying to repair his body as the Habra disease ripped it apart. I was in a hovering bio-chair. My deformed body misshaped by the scars of third-degree burns, constantly struggling to keep itself alive.

It was a losing battle. I struggled not to cry, my mother had told me that they would help him but seeing my best virtual-friend like this in his real form was heartbreaking. It would be painless they told me. He would still be Malco, the bright and cheerful joker that had always taken things in stride and keeping me from being depressed was his favorite pastime. How could he himself not be depressed when he was dying?
But was being sent thousands of light-years away from earth really living? Malco's favorite pastime was doing VR attacks on cam drones and sharing his rides inside of them with me as we zoomed around the cities of earth, watching and commenting like a sideshow peanut gallery.

Eventually he had to stop and find something more creative to do as the netcops began a sweep for his real identity. I mean if they caught him he really couldn't take his body anywhere else to try and get away could he. At least I could hover away at a loftily twenty miles an hour. He could only sit in his nanotray and use the small drone that hovered around the room to look at his immediate world.

Then one day I came to see him and his bed was empty, and when I jacked into the net to see where they had yet again moved him to I found his farewell message.

They did the transfer at noon, and I ran away. No doubt they will question you and tell you that once they put me in my starship, by trying to upload my awareness into its datananos I hacked the gateway and was never seen again. Its just a ruse of course, the starship is going to a place far from here but I will always be with you. When I woke up I found that I could go anywhere I wanted. It will be years until they find me in the nets, by that time it will be too late.
Join me, we can live in the stars and build a new world just you and me.
Think about it, I will be out here waiting when you are ready .

Live? I was reading the note on a small slate that burst into a thousand pieces and disappeared into the surface of the net as I felt for their origin with my mind. How could we ever hold each other without hands? our bodies weren't real just figments of our imagination.

Little did I know my future and that we would be pitted against each other not as friends but as dire enemies as humanity fought the shackles that Malcolm had tried to throw on them in an attempt to keep himself alive.

It had almost meant the end of the human race. And it would have been if Malcolm had not made the mistake of underestimating the adaptability and the blinding fear humanity could sow within itself.

When the core blew, the other brainships and myself limped home I had wanted to fly myself into a star, just craw into a dark corner of space and power down forever. I had felt like he had trusted me and I had finally betrayed him in the end.

The problem with me, its that I'm a survivor. Its what had kept me alive and that unbreakable and tenacious spirit is what had led me to be the last ship to limp back home when so many others had left their frozen wrecks strewn across the cosmos. It was what had seen my across thousands of recon missions to hostile star systems, and the many dangers that would kill a normal ship, and many times it had been a close call for me as well.

As I sped into Mars orbit I watched as a massive star liner stopped in its tracks as it was about to boost. It hovered over my tiny little form and slowly swept past as it's awed passengers glimpsed me and pointed in their acceleration chairs. I watched their faces as they craned their necks in the padded eggshells they would need to survive the g-forces that were needed to push the ship out of the sun's main gravity well. Their tri-dee displays showed me as I coasted past I could see tears on the faces of many old-timers who knew me and had probably thought they would never see the ghost return again in their lifetimes.

Since the average lifespan of humans was now measured in the span of centuries even dozens of centuries that was another proof that once again I had been gone far too long. The children squalled to their parents as they focused in with the ship's sensors and memorized my every detail, from the arrowhead shape of the hull to the faded and battle-mauled surface on which you could still see the faded wings of a human taking flight that was my ancient callsign. I knew that some might even remember my name, as I was once called. Light-Giver, the one that had saved humanity. Prometheus. I fired up my boosters and told the liner's pilots of my intent.

Spiraling around the ship at a break-neck speed I spun at its prowl and saluted it in the age-forgotten custom that was featured by my brothers and sisters in arms in an age when humanity was still striving for the stars.
Dropping back off I let the ship accelerate back into its exodus route and sighed with longing. If only I could truly step onto the distant world in my own body and feel the pebbles of it's seas with my bare feet.

My dreams were still out there I realized.


So was Malcolm, and I didn't know if when we would meet I would have to fight him, or if I would join him this time.


All that I know is that....

It is so lonely alone.

I don't ask for correction at the moment, just to see if you will enjoy it. I cobbled it up in about two hours while just playing around with a random story idea. I originally wanted to make this into a longer narrative, but I passed out on my keyboard while trying to figure out how to continue it at 3:00 am. Its interesting though and I'm surprised my tired braincells were able to make sense enough to put something forward that was even mildly coherent at this early hour.

Its pretty much in its raw form, only fixed a few things as I transplanted it from my blog I think the formatting is still a bit screwed up but I'm too tired at the moment to go back and fix the paragraphs I didn't space right.

I hope you guys enjoy reading it.