Man, this story was wild. We have a world where all humans are going extinct and AI is tasked in creating a story that will be kept in a Linux version of Earth Archives. The AI falls in love with the human they are following and they start a lesbian romance in a simulated world where the human gives birth in the end to an universe. I feel like I’ve taken some drugs..

The general public used to enjoy asking the question

What would happen to a person in an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic situation?

They enjoyed asking this question for 284 years. They enjoyed asking because the answers they made up were exciting, violent, escapist, bestselling, and purposeful, with a hopeful twist at the end, a whole subgenre of entertainment […] So when the Great Transition began out in the real world, people mistook their imaginations for facts and thought they knew what to expect. They expected actual zombies and women sex slaves in chains. Leather muzzles and rope. Outfits with straps and buckles. Truck races across a desert environment. Dust. Heroes. Action sequences. Quality special effects. Or they expected something quieter yet emotionally resonant. Paper maps. Journeys. Blankets. Canned goods. A stirring soundtrack. Coughing in one’s sleep. Multiple acts of kindness. Loss and connection. Undercurrents of hope. A sense of purpose. Survival. Survivors. However, these specific things did not happen to the majority of people during the Great Transition or, in the end, to anyone at all.

Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is remove humans from the ecosystem.

Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.

[storyworker]ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.

As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker]ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.

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I can watch human history flatten, over millions of years, into a layer of rock thinner than a piece of paper

I think I liked this book, but I don’t think I can read it again. It’s hard-going between reference notes, loads of data pushed in, interviews, chat logs, time jumps, history re-edits.

Below all these, there is a story of two mothers who have a daughter, Sen. When the world goes to sh&t, they go to a cabin in the woods to survive but end up dying – one of the mothers succumbs to suicide, the other one wants to abandon Earth in a ship and Sen – the daughter, starves to death and is eaten by wolves (and other animals) – shy of her 22nd birthday. I think this book is sci-fi or “cli-fi” – climate science fiction – or what would happen if humanity were to be eradicated by sterilization.

To reach the happy ending one must pass through suffering, this is basic knowledge, but one isn’t always in the mood for suffering (C. Gutierrez, “Shadows, Sunshine, Passage, Pain,” OnLife, S.-9950 days). Sen flips to the beginning and reads to page 15 again. And again. In the margins of the pages there are rough sketches of edible roots and leaves. Her mother’s drawings. Sen skips ahead and rereads the book’s ending, in which there is talk of an awakening world, which there means human symphonies, newspapers, and electric lights. The term awakening world has a different meaning in Sen’s current situation: cities transmuting into forest, ecological succession, and the humans gone.

Blended through the book are also dictionaries – explained by AI very concise at first and then devolving into stories shouted into the void because there is no-one left to read this data.

S.+114 days
21.8. A Selection of Terms Recommended for Removal Post-S., SECOND DRAFT, cont.
Malthusian Growth, Market Equilibrium, Meals on Wheels, Mechanical Ventilation, Meconium, Megacity, Midwife, Milestone Planning, Miscarriage, Mitigation Potential, Morning-After Pill, Morning Sickness, Moro Reflex, Municipal Bonds,
Neonatal Unit, News Cycles, Not in My Backyard, Nutrition Education,
Obstetrics, Ocean Acidification, Office of Children and Family Services, ONA Opportunity Centers, Onesie,

At first I thought these sections were boring and then it hit me – all of these words have something to do with Children. No children will be born anymore, no more need of the word Miscarriage or Obstetrics. That is cool.

And the entire world switches from an Anthropocentric view (where humankind is the center of the universe) to a more universe-or-earth-centric view where the return of the natural form is more important.

“There are more than enough voices traveling right now through space. I don’t think we need any more voices.” She was wrong. There is something about the human voice.
That is unforgivably anthropocentric.

Towards the end of the book, the AI reading and cataloguing Sen develops “love” and by studying someone they get to know her to a point where they are one.

I feel like I know her.
Is this Maia? she asks.
No! I say, laughing. I feel like I’ve been watching her my entire life.
Why are you laughing? she asks.
Because you exist! And you’re so happy.
I don’t think I’m happy.
I make Sen’s mouth smile. I can make her mouth smile by thinking about it.
Who are you? she asks, her hand, her arm, lifting from the indentation of the mattress.
I tell her who I am.

We never find out who engineered the sterilization virus, but the uncomfortable implication is that it is the artificial intelligences running Afterworld. This huge issue is never explored and barely mentioned, as the author’s focus is on how people (primarily Sen and her two mothers) are reacting to the end of the world, as well as the gradual awakening to sentience of the storyworker Ennis, who falls into a somewhat creepy love/obsession with Sen.

We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends.

Life is explored by AI through Sen and her mothers and the other lives on earth. It’s the artificial speculating what it means to be alive.

“She will be loved in a multitude of ways,” predicts Dana.
“Each new day for her will be a surprise,” predicts Lindsy.
“She will have a purpose.”
“She will forgive us.”
It is difficult to create a life, certainly. It is more difficult to create one life than to end a life or a billion lives or 12 billion lives.
But that doesn’t mean life should never again be created.

It’s very meta indeed. I had to pause and gather my thoughts as the afterworld where an AI generated sentience and an uploaded human with two cyber ghost mothers with no voice populate a world and they get pregnant and give birth to a whole new world.

I would worry that she is losing something human or that she is no longer human–then I remember humanity is whatever she and I are becoming. This part is almost over and then we can move on to the next part. There is an escalation. What’s happening to me? Sen screams out. I cover her ears. I smooth her hair again. I smooth her hair 103,349 times in the span of a moment. You’re the only one who can do this, I say. I don’t think she can hear me because she’s screaming again. This is what creation sounds like, I guess. Sen’s ghost mothers gather around her scream and they hold on to the sound. They tuck the sound beneath their dresses among their undergarments. Sen’s legs are spread wide so they can frame the woods and the sky; the air smells of blood and fecal matter and urine. I place the shell of an acorn between her teeth for her to bite. You’re going to be such a great mother, I tell her. A mother was once said to birth the universe.

The lesson of the story was that men should fly neither literally nor metaphorically too close to the sun. As neither Sen nor I are men, the lesson does not apply to us.

Damn right 🙂 – but I do think this book is a hard read and very much conceptual in nature. What is life, what is love, what is a mother, what are children, how is sacrifice quantified, what’s a neighbour, how does humanity go, what is genocide? Will the world be better without humans?

Remember how beautiful they said the world would turn once we vanished?
I’m going to vanish then you see if they were telling us the truth