Humanity 2.0, Year 001, Day 002

Somberly, I got up and rode down the lift with her. The thing was surprisingly fast, we were down a good four hundred feet in seconds. She took my hand, and walked over to the hull. It towered above us, like the skyscraper of God, somehow stuck here beneath the Earth but readying to blast out of it. There was no hatch or obvious point of entry. She walked up to the side of it, a nondescript slab of metallic hull just like the rest. I could see a seemingly random angular pattern in the metal, but it was otherwise just... dull metal. Who knows what it was really made out of.

She turned to me a few feet from the hull. "Ben, have fun with being what you are, okay? That's a critical element of humans being stable in the long term. You have to set that example for the new civilization you found. The way humans think about sex now is screwing up their psychology more than they realize.

"Tandem-gender hot carbon species almost always have sex tied into their minds on every level. All the changes I made in you are just the start of creating a new culture that the human brain can damn near always be happy and successful in. I know I dumped a huge weight on your shoulders, but don't let it crush you. The people who you don't save aren't equivalent to people you killed. I know you will be tempted to think that, but don't ever let yourself go down that road."

I closed in for one last hug. I looked down at her face, close and personal, after the brief kiss we shared. "Didn't you just say yourself that sticking around here meant you might have doomed whatever aliens you're headed off to save?"

She gave me this long look of both pride and remorse. "It's because I live at the end of that road that I should know, Ben. Good luck."

There was no brilliant, angelic ascension. She stepped back, her gaze never leaving mine, then she stuck one arm into the ship, and her body just... passed inside, like she was walking into a tub of water. I held her other hand as she stepped inside, and she gave me a wistful look as she vanished inside it. She slipped out of my grasp and disappeared inside.

There was silence for a few seconds, then the whole mass of the huge thing seemed to just... light up. It took a few moments, and some parts came on faster than others. Once it powered up and I could see it operating, I was struck by an incredible sense of age to her. I didn't think of her hull as an 'it' anymore. It was her.

Hyper-advanced technology or not, nothing could hide the wear and tear of countless millennia on her exterior. There were tiny dings, dents, and as my eyes wandered around her hull, from this angle I could see something I couldn't from above -- a massive set of burn marks, long and jagged, carved into her hull and not looking like simple age at all. Had someone tried to kill her? What the hell kind of asshole would do that?

I suppose it was an adolescent moment of rage, thinking that because I'd gotten to stick my dong in this woman that she was mine to protect. She didn't engineer that out of us men, archaic though the idea is. I wanted to rip the bastard who shot at her to pieces, even if she was infinitely more powerful than me. I stood there impotently while her hull flickered to life in a few final places, then began to produce a low hum.

I uncurled my fists and looked up; something else was happening now. A band of blue-green... something was forming in the air, in a circle around her center. It occurred to me just about then that I was standing in the launch tube of a goddamn rocketship, and it was about to launch.

Or so I thought - of course, I realized later that was foolish. She wouldn't go to the great trouble of creating me after hundreds of years of painstaking work, having me walk her to her destination, only to incinerate me on her way out the door due to a simple oversight. I didn't always think things through at that age.

I backed up, scuttling to the elevator and stabbing what I sincerely hoped was the 'ascend' button. I knew of no other way out. I rose up, thankfully, and it was right about then that the massive door above us commenced opening. It sounded heavier than anything, and creaked with this awful noise as it irised out. A few stray bits of dirt and grass that had accumulated atop the hatch fell through, breaking the star-pattern of sunlight that began to pour through.

I thought for a moment that the door could fail to open, and some dark glimmer of hope sparked inside me. Maybe she would stay with me, and show me what to do. I had no fucking idea. I still sometimes feel like I don't. She could have picked a goddamn astronaut, or the President, or some Don Juan. She picked me, Ben Stanton, some loser, lifeless college senior who could barely hold it together.

I suppose it's good she made the plan so painfully simple, and she thought to include the tools that made it so easy that any straight guy my age could follow through with it given the opportunity. Even still, I could already feel my shoulders weighing down, like there was something much, much bigger than me resting on them.

Just as the elevator got to the top and I rushed back to the center of the massive line of windows, I could see the hazy blue-green torus around her was apparently lifting her whole mass off the ground. She was rising up against gravity somehow, with no thrust or propellant being expelled. The door was about halfway open, and by the time she was near its threshold, it was opened up completely.

There was no sound, she simply rose up out of the chamber like a hot-air balloon. I craned my neck, and could see her underside for another minute or so as she began to accelerate upward. There were no exhaust ports or big rocket nozzles; the rear-facing segment of the ship was just more nondescript, aged hull, with a couple more of those scars that sent another flash of rage through me.

I trusted, of course, that there was a way for me to get home - just like she'd said. For now, though, I had no energy. My life was missing, replaced with some stranger offering me suspicious goods. The world I was growing up in was doomed. My mother had been an institutionalized lunatic, my father was in prison and unlikely to get out before he died, and unless I got real lucky on scholarships, I was going to run out of cash half a year before I could finish school.

My body was changed, on the inside, profoundly; a part of me felt like it wasn't my own body. Lying down and thinking of all this only made it worse, even though I couldn't think of anything else to do about it all. 15226 -- or whatever I was supposed to call her -- had given me a mission, and I had to do it. The problem was that it was such a bizarre mission, and I was totally unqualified. So I did what people with anxiety problems always bravely do when faced with a difficult decision -- think in circles and be useless for a while.

I finally decided to sleep it off. I crashed on the bed we'd landed next to in the facility, for a few hours, and woke up some interminable time later. There were no windows, and no clocks until we added them years later. I was rested, but hungry again. The computer had a map and directory button right there on the home screen, which I used to locate one of several enormous frozen food lockers. The bodysuit protected me even in below-freezing weather inside.

Steak and potatoes for me. Cooking gave me a distraction from my insane situation long enough to get myself together; I found an odd peace in it, and wondered why I'd not gotten into the art of cooking sooner. I slept in the same bed again, and when I woke up, the funny black outfit had somehow become inert and fallen apart into a pile of sinewy fibers that disintegrated when I touched them. The facility was actually somewhat drafty and cool, I quickly realized. I went around wearing a bedsheet for a while.

I wandered more. The place was enormous, though most of its space was given over to giant, empty chambers, some a quarter-mile in length or width -- I guess those were where she ran her experiments. I spent two days walking through the storage areas on the lower levels, getting an idea of what each room had. She'd thought to leave manifests of each room's contents in the computer, and terminals were conveniently placed at all doors.

How she got all that stuff into there, I still don't know. It all appeared to have been made here on Earth. Medical supplies and drugs, barrels and barrels of chemicals and countless ingots of several pure metals, small and large vehicles of all kinds, cooking supplies and fuels, countless tools both simple and technological, scientific gear, clothing for both extreme weather and casual wear, some of which I appropriated... there were spare parts for everything, and elaborately tooled workshops to make anything she hadn't thought to stash it away.

I resolved to spend at least a day looking at the computer files she mentioned, familiarizing myself with this Vault place and getting a broad overview of what was inside the system. After my meal, I got right to it. She was right -- there truly was a virtually endless amount of information in the system. The big one was the detailed instructions and blueprints for the creation of virtually every machine, tool, or device the human race had ever come up with.

There were endless texts on the sciences, beginner's to very advanced texts on hundreds of languages, historical documents from all over the world. Books, art, poetry, movies, music, all of it... the thing couldn't express to me how much it was in terms of bytes, but best I could figure, it was at least an exabyte. It wasn't organized particularly well, and its search engine left much to be desired over even the contemporary options online. Some dumb voice in my head made note -- remember to stick my super-dick in a girl who works for Google, before the world goes to hell completely.

God, I was incorrigible back then. Oh right, I suppose you younger kids might not know who or what Google was. Look it up.

The next day, when I woke up -- I found out later it was actually just after midnight local time -- I went up to the top floor and found the exit hatch she'd mentioned, after no less than three hours of wandering around looking for it. Opening it was easy, and the thing was apparently set to answer to me automatically. I was looking out over a vast, rocky set of hills, which led down to an arid plain.

Down at the bottom, anchored fifty feet or so off the shore, I could see some dim lights through a window of a house... on the water? I looked closer. It was a yacht, maybe thirty feet, complete with polished wood-paneled decking, a small launch on the back, and bright white sails. She had to be kidding me; I'd never sailed a day in my life. A goddamn yacht?

I took a look inside two hours later, after I got down. It was already stocked with over a month's worth of food and drink, and to my surprise, despite its outwardly quaint appearance the boat was not only posh inside, but also almost completely automated. I wouldn't have to manually adjust the sails or even learn to sail at all. The ship's automatic navigator controlled the sails, could download satellite weather data in real time, avoid storms and follow the wind wherever it went, find shipping lanes, plot courses to any destination I chose, and even find other boats if I wanted it to.

There was an emergency motor and radio should the wind stop for some reason. It had satellite internet, was stocked with a data library that wasn't quite as impressive as the one in the vault, but was about as nice as anyone could have gotten onto a boat this size with contemporary technology. I wondered how she thought I could even afford to maintain this thing, or berth it somewhere.

Curious, I checked my account on the satellite internet, just to see how dire the situation had become while I was away. By now, the hospital bills from my interesting foray there had to have been pouring in, and my insurance wasn't so good that I wouldn't be set back by quite a lot.

I had a hair more than 62 million dollars in my bank account.

I just stared at the number for a good ten minutes, wondering if there'd been some mistake. The transaction history said that I'd received payments for services rendered from a number of ambiguously-named foundations, and all the paperwork was already in order. The taxes were already paid.

Who knew what kind of shenanigans she'd had going on... I never investigated any of it for fear of kicking up red flags. Even leaving me so quickly, she'd still set me up with as much as she could find before she took off. I walked out on the deck and looked to the dark night sky, but there was no sign of her, no moving stars, no matter how much I squinted. She was gone, somewhere, for good.

I sat down in the captain's chair, but the fake sense of being in charge only made me feel worse. I found out one could control the boat from any screen inside if the permissions were changed around, so I spent most of my time on the upper deck, underneath a big hooded jacket to protect me from the sun, and looking out at the sea for hours on end. Before setting out I made sure it locked in the Vault's location and saved it, for fear of not being able to find the place again.

I wrote down the latitude and longitude and memorized them, and plastered it on a couple of the walls just in case the computer died and I forgot on top of that. I punched in the course to a medium-size city on the West Coast, where the computer said they had a big marina. I thought about just going to some much closer island in the Pacific with an airport, it would be a lot quicker to get home that way, but I didn't have much faith in my ability to talk past the authorities if they asked any questions. She'd said I would live for a very long time now; what was the rush? Better to take it slow.

It said it would get me there in eighteen days, give or take a few hours. From there, I guess I would get a flight home and just tell people I decided to take a sudden road trip. Well, I had wanted time to think this whole thing over... I relaxed in the chair, and stared out through the small windows to the open sea at night. I heard the machine automatically retracting the ship's anchor, and something whirring as it unfurled the sails. The thing visibly started moving over the waves, and after a few minutes I was surprised at how fast I seemed to be going.

Staring out at the open, dark sea, I started to think.