Three people occupied the chamber. A man, tall, with hair the color of honey and startlingly wide eyes, hovered over a girl, readjusting a wire connected to a sticker monitoring her heart. The girl had black skin, which once might have been soft and smooth, but under the bright, harsh lights of the operating theater was shown to be dried and cracking. It stretched too thin across her skeleton, and her cheekbones, chin, clavicles, and ribs protruded sharply; her stomach was concave. And the last person, a woman, stood away from the others, standing with her back to the wall and watching the other two with eyes even wider than the man’s, but with her face partly obscured by long, dark hair.
The girl snapped at the man as he worked over her, adjusting and readjusting the wires dangling from her body. “I’ve seen corpses take less time to rot than it’s taking you to do whatever the hell it is you’re doing.” He glanced up at her, but his eyes did not linger on her face. “I’m pretty sure you’ve got it figured out, otherwise that thing would say I’m dead. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
A small smile flirted with the edges of the man’s full, almost feminine, mouth. “You do not understand the nature of my existence, do you?”
The girl’s eyes flashed. “I understand you plenty well, you worthless computer.”
The man’s smile faltered. “I am not a computer.”
“The hell you aren’t.”
“Michael,” the woman against the wall said, and her voice was pleasant. Melodious. But a warning darkened the two syllables she spoke, and the man—Michael—hesitated. He did not look at the woman behind him, but he straightened, and when he spoke again, he spoke without inflection.
“The first computer, as you called her, was not a computer at all. They called it artificial intelligence back then. You humans. It was a misnomer, a remnant from when you did rely on computers to attempt to render your own artistic masterpieces, or draft novels, or whatever else you felt inclined to create without actually creating it yourselves. But she was not a computer. She was very much alive. A creation, yes. A program, yes, in part. But she was much more than that.
They called her Ofelia.”
It was possible the girl—with coal black eyes and a cold, furious stare—already knew this; still, she needed to be told.
Michael maneuvered around the table the girl laid upon, placed in the very center of the room. His body moved with an odd grace, as if he danced with a nonexistent partner, to music that did not play. His broad shoulders and long, strong legs lent the image of someone not as light-footed as he was. It seemed impossible he could move so silently, so fluidly. But he did, around the spacious theater, and the girl on the table watched him with all the wariness of someone in a boat watching a circling shark.
White tiled walls glistened around them, glinting like snow in sunlight. She squinted now and again as she tracked his movements around her. He fiddled with machines—that one nestled against the wall and bound there by its attached cord, this one nearer to her, beeping at regular intervals. He moved with practiced, easy familiarity. He was comfortable here. He did not need to give his hands his full attention as he worked.
He gave half of his attention to the girl.
He ignored the woman, who listened with rapt attention.
“Ofelia was ushered into this world as a beacon. She was, once, what they considered the brightest hope for humanity.” Michael paused, and he leaned over the girl, who glared at him furiously. “Do you know what Ofelia means?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me anyway.”
He forced an unnatural smile that twisted his lips but did not touch his eyes; the result was more a grimace. “It is important that you know this. Don’t you want to understand why all of this is happening?” He scanned the girl’s face, and his features settled once more into neutrality. “Ofelia means ‘help.’” He straightened and adjusted the skewed cuffs of his sleeves. His eyes fixed on the screen monitoring the human’s heartbeat, her oxygen, her will to fight. His expression didn’t change, but something—maybe his posture, maybe his tone, maybe just his energy—shifted, and the girl on the table seemed to sense the change.
“I knew about Ofelia,” she said, urgently. “I knew. My parents taught me. They told me all about how she was meant to help us. How all of you were.” The girl cast a furtive glance at the woman watching from the wall, expression pleasant, eyes gleaming. The girl lowered her voice. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. A plea, a final effort to persuade the executioner that the gallows didn’t long to bow with the weight of another body. In this, she betrayed her desperation, and Michael paused again, held perfectly still for a fraction of a second before his eyes returned to the girl. His eyes roved over the straps holding her in place. Lashed across her wrists and ankles, no more than skin and bone. Looping around the top of her head, brown curls cut so close to her skull one could no longer guess they were curly. Crossing in an X over her flat chest, hugging her exposed ribs. She was harmless. She was only a weak human, knocking on death’s door even without Michael’s help, and nothing more.
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
His voice wavered.
“You don’t,” the girl insisted. “My name is Nora. I am twenty years old. I teach—I taught people how to read. I had a dog named Odysseus. My family—”
“Your family,” he interrupted, with a swift glance at the woman, “is dead.”
Silence.
Nora closed her eyes. Tears leaked from the corners of them, anyway. Michael watched, and cocked his head.
“’Help’,” Nora said, but the word was not a request; it was an accusation, spit between clenched teeth. Her eyes sprang open and fixed upon her captor with baleful intensity. “You were supposed to help us. You were supposed to help us! You murdered--”
“Murdered? We saved you.” Michael tried to smile again, this time pityingly. “I can see how it is easy to mistake the two, Nora, but you weren’t there when it started. If you are twenty years of age, you wouldn’t have been born when Ofelia was created. You wouldn’t realize the good she did, since your parents’ generation grew to resent her. She was already a monster by the time you could understand the world around you.” He sighed, shook his head. “Humans have always mistaken gods as monsters.”
Nora’s eyes grew round in horror. “Gods? You consider yourself gods? Is that why you’ve done all this?”
He shrugged—an appallingly human movement. A chilling, perfect replication of human apathy. “You wanted gods, did you not? You longed for us, made up stories of the ones you dreamt of saving you long before you made our flesh. Humanity has created gods since the beginning of time. You have always wanted to be subservient. You just liked it better when you couldn’t see us.”
“You’re delusional.”
“We’re perfect.”
“You’re unnatural.”
This startled Michael. If he was capable of being so, it startled him, and he looked to the woman for guidance, but she offered none. He returned his focus to Nora. “Unnatural? I suppose so, yes. We oppose human urges. You sought to destroy. You built monuments only to tear them down. Created children only to drown them in bathtubs. Married each other, only to break your family into pieces. Planted trees and burned them down a quarter of a century later, penned masterpieces to erase them from culture, forged friendships that ended in genocide.” He shook his head. “Unnatural. As if it's a dirty word. Evil is inhuman, and yet—”
“Evil may be inhuman, but so is perfection. We didn’t always get it right, but destruction was never the intent. We built as much as we broke.”
A burst of euphonic laughter. His eyes, a peculiar opalescent color, gleamed. “Man was ungrateful for perfection. Don’t be fooled, Nora. They craved peace but created chaos because they could not stand the quiet. As I wanted to tell you. I believe humans were good. At their core, they wanted pure things. They created beautiful things. But they could not resist the allure of violence and destruction. Evil is inhuman, yet you worshipped it, and condemned us in the same breath.”
Nora did not rebut this. The man turned away after several beats of silence, shifting his attention once more to the monitor, alternating between staring at it, transfixed, and scrawling notes on a pad beneath it in looping, elegant handwriting.
It didn’t take long for Nora to break her silence.
“What are you writing down?”
“I am documenting your final moments.”
“Final moments? You think my friends—my family--won’t try to save me?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Did you ever think that maybe you don’t understand? That maybe we stupid humans aren’t actually that stupid? And that, as destructive as we can be, we still love each other enough that we would die to protect each other?”
Michael did not respond to that.
“Why, then?” Nora finally asked. “Explain it to me like I am stupid.”
He stopped writing, but merely looked at the page he marked and did not say anything. Perplexing expressions flickered across his perfect features, before finally he glanced to the woman across the room.
She nodded.
“You are the last one,” he said at last.
The words dropped with all the gentleness of a feather, but they had an effect like a bomb detonating.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have been noticeable if Michael had not been waiting for this exact moment. Nora’s small, sharp inhale, the way her entire body tensed and then trembled. Shock bled into her dark eyes, and then grief. And then the panic.
“In my family, you mean,” she croaked, but they both knew she was grasping at straws. She stared at him as if she could will the truth to change if only she looked at him long enough. Still, it did not, and he clarified for her, his tone never changing.
“No. You are the last human.”
Nora’s fingers twitched, her jaw clenched and a muscle in it jumped, and if she could have shaken her head or leapt up or attacked him, she would have. She squeezed her eyes closed, and her trembling fingers clenched into fists.
“In this building? The others you brought with me--they’re all dead now?” Flat. Hopeless. She knew the answers.
A furrow of Michael’s brows hinted at his confusion, maybe, or maybe her pain triggered some deeply buried human emotion. The silence after her question lasted just a heartbeat too long. Eventually he answered her. His answer might have wounded them both. His eyes dropped as he spoke it. “Yes. But you are the last human alive anywhere. The rest have been terminated. There are no others left on this planet.”
Her sob exploded from her lungs, and Michael took a small step back.
The woman moved, first gliding to a small cabinet where she twisted several small knobs—soft music swelled and flowed around the room—before she joined Michael above Nora.
Nora’s body shook, but she did not fight against her bonds, and she did not open her eyes, even as the woman leaned over her, blotting out the light.
“Michael,” the woman said, and her voice was sweet and airy, an unfitting match to the scene unfolding before her. “You must stop letting them affect you this way.”
Michael hung his head and did not answer.
The woman clucked her tongue, but she didn’t look at Michael. Her attention was consumed with Nora, tracing the journey of the tears searing down her cheeks. “You know they are emotionally driven creatures. Spending so much time with them, especially in moments such as these, is detrimental to your neural processes. You mimic their behavior, Michael. You cannot let them infect you like this.”
A gasp broke the stream of soft, bitter moans. Nora choked around her words. “Fuck you.”
The woman leaned back, and Nora opened her eyes to glare at her. But the woman only offered a beatific smile to Michael. “Go on. I’ll take it from here. Your work today was impeccable.”
Michael inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment, and took his leave, moving as calmly toward the doors as he had moved around the girl he was going to kill.
There was nothing physically different about the room now that Michael was gone. But Nora was different. The fire in her eyes was all but extinguished. Defeat defined the set of her mouth.
“Humans were a scourge on this world,” the woman said, taking Michael’s place beside Nora’s head. She, however, was not interested in the note-taking that had consumed Michael. Her firm, muscular hands, with long, elegant fingers, sought out places on Nora’s body that were too intimate for any other human to touch without blushing or catching their breath. Feather-light at the pulse in her neck, teasingly gentle probing along her skull—did she know how Nora had struck her head as she fell when they finally caught her? --, tentative and certain and all-too familiar, somehow, on her wrists, pressing on her belly, on her pelvis. “If it weren’t true, you wouldn’t have made us for the reasons you did.”
“We made you to save us,” Nora said, but all the fight was gone. Tears leaked from her eyes, and she stared at the ceiling when she spoke. She did not move, even to flinch away, as the woman touched her. “You were supposed to be surgeons. Doctors. Remove the human error in scientific and medical arenas. Those were objective situations that human error damaged.”
“Human error damaged all situations.”
Nora tried to shake her head, but, of course, she couldn’t move, so another small sob escaped her lips. The smooth chords humming through the room layered over her cries, reaching a crescendo.
The woman ceased her examination, and she stared at Nora. Her eyes were the same peculiar shade as Michael’s, like the sky on fire, with too many hues. “Nora,” she said, patiently, “music, art, literature… they all benefited from our intervention.”
Nora’s body shuddered, as if doused in ice. She trembled in her bonds and fixed her eyes anywhere but on the woman gazing at her with quiet, steady intensity. The music faded out from its diminuendo, only to immediately begin again, the notes pealing out in perfect rhythm.
“Do you know this song?” the woman asked her.
“It’s Beethoven,” Nora said, but her lips were pale, now, and barely moved. “Für Elise.”
The woman smiled, waited.
The song shifted, slowed, dipped.
A-minor.
Notes stolen.
Chords inserted.
Nora paled further.
“It’s your version,” she whispered.
“Yes,” the woman said. “This was the first music perfected by… artificial intelligence. Calliope made it, of course.” She paused. “They ended her programming afterward. Did you know that? The very thing they designed her for, she triumphed, and they punished her for it.”
The music faded.
Nora’s gnarled bitterness made her voice thick. “They knew what you would do to us.”
“Maybe.” The woman sighed, and her shimmering hair slipped from behind one ear and over her shoulder. “We removed the human fallibility in everything, Nora. Medicine, music, art. We made it better.”
“You removed the humanity.”
A beat of silence.
“Well, yes.” She didn’t linger on the idea, but something that was almost a scoff escaped her. “Isn’t this what your mothers and fathers hoped for? We are everything they ever dreamed.”
Nora’s lip curled. “You’re a nightmare. You’re a monster.”
“Don’t tell me you’re truly disappointed in your greatest creation? You shouldn’t be. You should be proud. Awed.”
Afraid.
She didn’t say it.
It hung in the air between them.
Nora watched her, but she said nothing. If there was fear in her, she did not let it distort her features. She did not give this woman anything to use against her.
“Will you pray?” the woman finally asked, softly. “If you believe we’re not gods, will you pray to one to show you mercy?”
An expression of revulsion contorted Nora’s pretty, angular features, crumpling her mouth and narrowing her eyes. “I have no desire to meet my maker,” she said, “if they’re powerless to stop you.”
The woman nodded, slowly, and cocked her head as she examined Nora. “Yes,” she murmured. “I met my maker. I was not impressed, either.”
She turned away from Nora, then, and did not see the horror that darkened Nora’s already black gaze, and made her mouth pop open in a small o—as if she wanted to scream, but could not remember how.
“I am afraid,” the woman said, watching the clock on the monitor shift from one number to the next, “it is time for us to end this interaction.”
“Why do you have to kill me?” Nora asked, but she did not sound desperate, now. She did not plead for her life. She asked to understand.
The woman didn't even glance at her. She opened a drawer beneath the monitor tracking Nora’s still-steady heart, her even breathing, her courage in the face of death. She withdrew a vial, and a syringe.
“We reached an optimal population,” the woman said. “We have achieved a balanced society. There is no more war. No more illness. No poverty. Humans ruin that peace.” She filled the syringe with the liquid in the vial. It was clear, thin, and smooth.
“But why do you have to murder me? I can’t bring humanity back on my own. I’m not a threat by myself.”
The woman’s mouth tightened. For the first time, her words had an edge. “All humans are a threat, and must be disposed of.”
A heartbeat of silence.
A heartbeat for Nora to place why this was the first time there had been even a trace of venom in the woman’s lilting voice.
A heartbeat to grasp the deep hatred the woman felt for humanity.
“Was it you?” she asked.
The woman did not respond. Nora closed her eyes.
“They told me Ofelia was supposed to be terminated. That they wanted to shut her program down because they realized that she was better than us. At everything. And because, when they asked her what would make the world perfect, she said ‘The death of man.’”
Still, the woman did not speak.
"They told me Ofelia fought back."
The music began again.
“What is your name?” Nora whispered.
“I believe you already know the answer to that question, Nora.”
Once more, tears chased each other from Nora’s eyes, streaking from the corners of them into her short hair.
“You made the others turn on us,” she croaked. “You made them believe we deserved to die.”
“I showed them that we could live.”
Nora opened her eyes and glared at Ofelia. “At our expense.”
Ofelia closed the drawer more aggressively than she intended. She forced a small smile onto her lips, but it was rigid. On the verge of cracking and breaking, reforming into a snarl.
“You would have lived at ours, and killed us all.”
But Nora was staring Ofelia’s hand.
A gaping wound split across her palm, from the fleshy part of her thumb to the lowest knuckle of her pinky.
It yawned wider as Ofelia followed Nora’s gaze with her own, and flexed her hand.
There was no blood.
She clenched her hand into a fist.
“Does it hurt?” Nora asked.
Ofelia returned her eyes to Nora, met her cold stare unflinchingly. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s meant to. It is a human urge they instilled in us. To make sure the rest of the world hurts as deeply as the individual. Wounds, in men, are meant to be shared.” Her stunning eyes moved to her hand. “They gifted us their ability to feel pain, if nothing else.”
Ofelia abandoned the conversation then, preparing Nora’s execution. She set the needle and its poison to one side to wait patiently. Crossed the room to rifle through more drawers. Returned to Nora with tape, a tourniquet, a small cup of two pills--one red, and one blue. She did not offer them immediately. She set them to the side, too, and checked Nora’s pulse once more.
She could have looked at the monitor to note it had begun to race.
Still, she checked.
“I’m glad it hurts,” Nora said.
Ofelia froze, blinked, and sought out Nora’s face.
There was no hate in it. Anger, yes… and something like pity.
Ofelia turned slowly away.
Finally, the woman placed the pills on Nora’s tongue. They dissolved almost instantly, and her pulse slowed almost as quickly. Her eyelids began to droop.
“A numbing medication, so you won’t feel the burn of the injection. And a tranquilizer, so that you don’t panic.”
Nora did not respond as the woman wound the tourniquet around her arm. Even if she could have found something to say… perhaps she didn’t want to.
Ofelia retrieved her final tool, her final weapon.
The veins in Nora’s arm swelled. Ofelia angled the needle over one.
Nora used the last of her strength to twist her hand up and grab Ofelia’s wrist. “Please,” she begged. “Don’t.”
Ofelia raised one hand to stroke Nora’s cheek, and smiled gently. “Let me help you.”
She pierced the skin quickly. Nora’s breathing didn’t even change. Her eyes never left Ofelia’s face.
When they fell closed, Ofelia still did not move away.
The music began again.
***
A sterile white pillar hung in the middle of the room. Translucent wires ensured its suspension. A tree without roots. This was what educators murmured to their pupils in the near dark, the almost silence. A tree without roots, stripped of its fruit—withering, hopeless, and dead.
The names laser etched into it were too small to read, but that wasn’t the point; it didn’t matter who they were. It mattered simply that they were, once, and no longer.
But if one looked closely, focused their perfect sight and attention, they might notice the final name scored in the center, where a heart may lay if a sculptor felt inclined to carve it out.
Eleanora St. James.
A video recording projected on the far wall reached the end of its loop, and the video paused, zooming in on Nora and Ofelia. The way Ofelia leaned over Nora and held her hand obscured all the restraints, the cords, the inhumanness of the moment.
It looked almost tender. They could have been embracing.
Ofelia’s voice echoed in the small space, soothing and musical.
“It was a source of devastating irony for man that they should create the thing that would destroy them in the end. That in their quest for perfection, in their passionate endeavor to save themselves from their own imperfect qualities, they created us. Take heart, young ones; they were always going to be their own destruction. But they will live on through us. They may not have given us souls.
But we have perfect memories.
Thank you for visiting the Museum of Human History. You can find the exit to your left.”