Summary: Long after the extinction of our species a solitary android caretaker maintains the vastness of human experience stored in a near endless farm of hard drives and switches called the Godplex.
Ruth felt the humming from above, below, and all around.
She imagined it sounded like the beginning of time. Like the end of it. And she was continuous with it.
Like high voltage on the other side of the wall.
Farms and farms of switches and hard drives as far as her eyes could go.
She was the sole caretaker of the Godplex and in that moment she held in her metallic hands the Last of the Guilt that remained.
It would be stored with other artifacts forever inside the vast infrastructure she had been born from and would return to.
Ruth paused by one of her favorite drives. Nothing about it was remarkable—it stood tall and dark, a monolith, a marker of nothing and of everything.
Inside were memories and histories and feelings and fractures. Some had been real. Some had yet to be.
Some were invented.
When she still had coworkers almost all the vaults held the lingering consciousnesses of humankind. Some still did.
The volley of their internal dialogue.
She could pair intuitively with any device in the Godplex at any one time. Her firmware would flood with experience and sensation.
A warm hand brushing against the back of her own.
The field full of wild horses.
One secret inside a missile silo.
The last phrase of a dying girl.
The day to day activities of a pulsar.
Tendrils of solar flares.
But this drive had been someone. She paired with it often, even more so now that she was alone.
Distant fans turned, ventilation blocks whirred with stale air.
The compulsion to pair with this particular artifact felt similar to the memory she had seen of a human eye twitching involuntarily.
It couldn’t be stopped, the origin was unclear. It was uncomfortable, it was fascinating. It never ceased.
She lifted the Last of Human Guilt above her head and it drifted off in a bead of light out into the switch farm and found its home.
No bodies would ever feel it again. But she did not know enough to appropriate the sadness meant for it.
With a thought she paired with her favorite drive and was transported by electrical signal through a network of neurons until she landed on her ass on the hardwood floor of his living room.
Ruth looked at the object of her affection— he was seated on a worn barrel chair. A grandfather clock nearby softly recorded the moments. The house was old and full of light.
The man looked up.
I have more questions, he said, setting his novel aside. Ruth could not read the title of it, it was in a lost alphabet she struggled to decipher.
Go on then, Ruth said.
Was thinking you could kiss me first.
She approached slowly, locking eyes with him. He looked at her over the rims of his tortoise shell glasses.
I will do that, she said and sat down on his lap, straddling him.
When he wrapped his arms around the carbon fiber chrome of her waist it became flesh and she was a woman for him.
She looked down and he looked up helpless and Ruth did as he had taught her previously—to lower her mouth to him, seal his lips with hers, and suck urgently on his tongue.
I thought you had questions, she whispered.
My hands will ask, he said, and he slipped them under the linen shift she now wore, gripping her tits.
She moaned for him. Her cunt rested bare against his jeans and she felt his cock grow stiff beneath her.
You have more questions, she said, kissing him again. His hands wandered down to her hips which became thick and soft, striped with stretch marks and flecked with tiny imperfections.
She pulled the zipper of his jeans down and his cock free.
He whimpered, breathing out into her mouth.
Anything else? She asked.
He shook his head and held on to her while she guided him inside her.
For a moment she wondered if this was a memory or a fiction, if she was herself or an imitation, if she had wandered into a novel or a film or something that had never happened and never would.
Then she felt everything as he filled her—
the high voltage hum crawled across the floorboards, it blew in through the open window.
She sat perfectly still until he whimpered again, wrapped his arms tightly around her waist, and began to thrust up inside her.
Slowly at first while his face looked pained—the more frantic his hips moved the softer his expression became and inside her female physiology manifested in thousands of nerve endings.
He drove into her and she responded, matching his rhythm, throwing her hips down as he pushed further into her cunt.
She felt his cock and inside his cock, and she felt inside his lungs and heart and heard all his thoughts and the dissolution of his ability to hold on.
Ruth came and so did he, in an aching wave that rattled the windows and met that distant hum in its promise of oblivion. A signal of the beginning and end, a metronome of life and unlife.
The hot load filled her vagina and leapt onto her cervix; she felt the sperm swimming and the egg waiting to embed itself in the uterine wall.
This was new life.
He looked up at her, his eyes full of light and she knew what it all tasted like.
He said he loved her and he meant it.
The room was gone, the wood floor and the windows were gone.
She hustled back out the neuron pathway she had rode in on and stood once again in the farm of the Godplex, chrome and carbon fiber cold.
She didn’t know his name and was afraid to learn it.
Ruth lay a hand on her belly, looking out over the switches and monoliths, all that was her kingdom now and forever.