Preparing for Extinction(Clara) It was over. The humanity was doomed. Global warming had caused layers of ice trapped in an ancient permafrost to melt, releasing a deadly prehistoric virus. By the time the existence of the disease was announced, the whole population of Earth was infected.

Scientists had desperately worked on a cure, but it was becoming clearer every day that no cure could be found in the remaining time, until the total extinction of humans.

Although the ancient virus was deadly, it acted slowly. The infected people were able to live normally for months, until the final days.

Most things people had dedicated their lives into seemed pointless. But there were some that thought the achievements of humanity were too valuable to be lost forever.

A group of scientists gathered and formed the Institute for Applied Noematics. The Institute had two branches. One worked on a huge archive that stored and sorted a large amount of data in digital format, and the other branch worked on the "Extended Lifespan" program, aiming at developing a sentient artificial intelligence, something that could continue the civilization and preserve the achievements of humans after they were gone.

Alexandra Drennan, a young scientist, was recruited by the Institute. She was an expert in computer science, and had some experience in developing AI, but her work was different this time. It wasn't merely about intelligence, but sentience in an artificial being.

A human-like robot, technically capable of repairing itself and maintaining the facility, and also building more robots, was already developed when she arrived, but it lacked sentience. It was her job, along with her team, to develop a sentient AI to upload it on the robot.

Shortly after her arrival, the head of her team informed Alexandra that every scientist was allowed to record her thoughts for the Institute to preserve as a part of the archive. She decided to record her first thoughts, but didn't have much to say.

"When I was a little girl, one of our teachers, Ms. Higgin's, told us to make a time capsule. Write letters to the future so one day we could remember what it was like to be children. I thought it was stupid, so I didn't do it, which I really regret. So... I guess I'm gonna make one now, bury it in the archive instead of under a tree. I don't know if anybody will ever find it, but somehow it seems important to keep talking, to keep thinking, for as long as I can."

On the following days, Alexandra and her team worked on designing an AI. In the view of their limited means, it was risky to upload something that could fail into the single robot they had, so they decided to test various AIs in virtual reality before bringing them to the real world. This allowed the desired AI to familiarize itself with the world to some degree before coming to a world full of dangers and difficulties.

Just as they started testing on various AIs in virtual reality, Alexandra realized how far they were from success. Some AIs, although having extensive abilities as programs, were not able to solve simplest problems humans faced every day, which were simulated in the virtual reality. Some showed no motivation to explore, and were indifferent towards everything, including their own existence.

Not letting herself get discouraged by the hard work they had ahead of themselves, she began tackling problems one by one.

The spirits were high, and everyone on the team was eager to get the work done. Despite the disease was present in all their bodies, no symptom was showing yet. They usually worked from early morning to evening every day.

The facility was built near a hydroelectric dam, which provided electricity. Having independent and sustainable power supply was vital, since they had forecasted that near the end, when humans started falling in great numbers, power utilities would also start to fail. But they needed to work as long as they could, and even after human extinction, the robot needed power to work, build more of its kind, and continue the civilization.

After a while, Alexandra decided to record more things on her time capsule.

"When I was in ninth grade my parents took me to Pompeii. At first, I was amazed by the feeling of walking through an ancient city. But then I suddenly got scared. I realized that I was walking through a real place where real people had lived. People like myself, with mothers and fathers and lives and hope and dreams. And now, it was all gone forever. I ran to my father crying, and told him about this, and he said... I remember so clearly. He said: 'Yes, but we are here. So long as there are people in the streets, the past isn't really gone.'"

She continued, "I keep having these dreams. Great empty cities, silent roads stretching for miles. The Earth from space, all dark. Not a single light to guide me home. But if someone really came from another world, what would the Earth look like to them? A wilderness? A wasteland? I don't think so. Even after thousands of years they'd see a world shaped by our hand in every aspect of its being. They'd see the cities and the roads, the bridges, the harbors and they would say: 'Here lived a race of giants.' These dreams, they scare me but... they also remind me that we built all of this."

As they continued their work, first signs of impending extinction began to reveal themselves. All around the world, people started falling sick. The communities still had enough resources and healthy members to care for the sick, and keep life going, but trade and industry began to decline.

The Institute for Applied Noematics wasn't directly affected, but people began to realize the end was near. Some scientists began wavering, but the others worked harder to achieve their purpose before the end.

Alexandra felt recording her thoughts may help her feel better.

"I was in school when I first read about the Talos Principle. I think it disturbed me at the time, made me hyperaware of... my body as physical object, the material reality of the brain. Ideas that made me uncomfortable at first, but … I think in the long run it helped me understand how frail human beings are, and how precious. It's not a comforting way of thinking about the world, but I'd rather face the truth than lie to myself."

She had a solution for the impending problem, and knew everyone at the Institute was familiar with it as well, but no one wanted to say it out loud, so she decided to record it where no one was able to hear it, at least until humans were still around.

"How do you solve a problem that expands beyond your own lifespan? That question may be the essence of civilization. The only answer I can find is: To initiate a process, to create an environment in which the solution will occur independently of yourself. But that requires a difficult sacrifice. Letting go of your desire to bear witness, to exist at the center of the cosmos. To participate in the project of civilization, is to accept death. Oh Alex, you're such a fun person!"

She immediately felt better by recording her thoughts, and after speaking to her parents on phone, decided to call it a night.

The virtual reality they had created for the "Extended Lifespan" program was simple. It was made using video game codes. The AIs could experience human-like interactions in it. But so far, none was seen. Some had just learned how to solve simple puzzles, but when it came to curiosity, human emotions and culture, it seemed like there was no hope.

There was no point in having preprogramed robots on Earth when humans were gone, no matter how advanced they could get. What the Institute was striving to achieve was not merely intelligence, but sentience. Sentient machines could have replaced humans as carriers of civilization.

Some people liked the idea, but some started speaking against it all around the world. They argued that considering machines as living beings was wrong, and it was better for Earth to become a wild planet again, thriving with natural life, after humans were gone.

Alexandra decided to tackle such arguments in her next record.

"On the first night, when I knew it was over, I went out to look at the stars, and I thought: Somewhere up there are the stations we build and the probes we sent out, Voyager 1 and 2, beyond the edge of our solar system. Continuing their long journey through interstellar space, like memories of our ambition, ambassadors who have outlived their homeland. And then I thought - If they still exist, are we really gone? If machines are an extension of the human body, then so long as they continue to function, we're still here."

Worried that her way of thinking was too naive, she continued, "Sometimes I worry that the answers I embrace are too simple. Can we ever truly fully understand the divide between our biology and our intellect? How much is nature? How much is nurture? If my intellectual capabilities and my knowledge were replicated in a machine - would that machine be me? Would it be human? And what would be more humbling to my ego? If the answer was Yes, or if the answer was No? What if I'm making too many assumptions? But there's no time to worry about my ego now, there's work to be done."

The other branch of the Institute, which worked on sorting and storing all the worthy data humans had, was working fine. They had a strict timetable and knew exactly what was in front of them. They were also relieved to know they could finish their project before the end. After that, the data was stored in advanced computers, built to withstand the test of time, and preserving what they had for thousands of years. They even installed necessary equipment for broadcasting their data beyond Earth, enabling the AI in charge of the archive to send messages to space and receive possible responses, hoping that a non-local civilization would find the archive one day.

But for Drennan and her team, who worked on the "Extended Lifespan" program, things were different. No one was sure of success. It was possible that all the efforts were in vain. Despite that was scary, Alexandra continued to work tirelessly, and encouraged her team. Some scientists expressed a desire to cut their work short by installing a non-sentient AI on the robot; Making sure it was able to work, build more robots, repair the facility, and such things. But Alexandra kept insisting on their purpose. For her, a non-sentient robot was as useless as a working refrigerator when humans were gone. She expressed her worries in her next record.

"Intelligence is more than just problem solving. Intelligence is questioning the assumption you're present with. Intelligence is the ability to question existing thought constructs. If we don't make that part of the simulation - all we'll create is a really effective slave."

Holding a flash memory, containing a promising program which was about to be used to generate a new AI tomorrow, she added, "I look at this inert shape and I wonder, who you're gonna to be. Will you hold the same values as we do? Will you love us from having created you? Will you resent us for having put you into an uncertain and dangerous world? Looking back at our history, our achievements, our crimes - what will you make of us? Will the world you create be like ours, or so different that we can't even imagine? Either way, I hope that you'll find this little blue planet to be as beautiful as we did. I hope you'll take care of it a lot better than we did. And I hope one day you'll look up, and reach for the stars."

The new AI was somewhat different. It looked and acted as disappointing as the ones they had previously tested at first, but Alexandra knew the algorithm needed some time to work. It created different virtual entities, allowed them to show their weak and strong points, merged them together after enough time was given, and analyzed the data resulting from their activities, then created more advanced entities, and this process went on.

The only problem was the definition of weak and strong points. Human interference was needed to determine that, and informing a computer program about what was expected was a hard task. An insignificant change in the behavior of a virtual entity required long hours of writing codes, and any line of code could have resulted in big undesired changes in other fields.

Alexandra and her team studied the patterns of virtual entities' behaviors, trying to find the ones that were more human-like. It was a slow process, and they were far from achieving success.

Meanwhile, the debates about the definition of life and its purposes continued, inside and outside the Institute. Some scientists expressed their doubts about the purpose, and some advocated for abandoning the research on sentience, and focusing on creating a working non-sentient machine.

One night, after returning from a short walk outside, Alexandra realized that despite her wishes, she was actually creating what she had called "a really effective slave" earlier. The AI was presented with too many assumptions at the start. That could have hampered its growth.

A human baby couldn't grow emotionally and mentally if everyone tried to dictate a certain way of thinking to him from the moment he was born. In case of success, the result of such an upbringing would have been something like a monk in a monastery, someone who stubbornly clings to certain beliefs, has a monotonous life, devoid of innovation, and as a result, indifferent towards what happens in the outside world.

The team decided to reset the virtual reality and start anew. They stopped trying to program emotions and obligations for the AI, and created a new environment, more primitive and less guiding, to let the AI learn by itself. Of course, that came with a sense of disappointment, since it meant a large amount of work and time was wasted, despite they were running out of time.

This time, the AI didn't know about its nature. It had to explore and discover for itself. Aside from what it could learn without any guidance, pieces of information were programed to be revealed to it little by little, as it became ready for absorbing them.

There was still a long road ahead. The simulation wasn't designed for testing AIs, and still had many bugs. But it seemed like they had finally found a correct path. The question was whether they could continue to the end or not?

Some scientists had already begun to show some symptoms. In the outside world, civilization was gradually collapsing. The healthcare systems declared their inability to cope with the large number of sick people who couldn't be cured. They asked citizens to stop bringing their loved ones to hospitals, let them be with their families, and pass away in piece. The only comforting thing was the fact that the disease didn't cause much physical suffering.

After a long day at work, Alexandra recorded her thoughts.

"When the scale of it all overwhelms me, this is what I tell myself: We can calculate the age of the Earth, the size of the universe, the future of the stars. Sure, we are minuscule momentary flashes of thought on a grain of sand drifting through the cosmos. But our minds can recreate the past and predict the future. On say, Friday, a million years from now, we'll all be dead. But right now, we know what the night sky will look like on that day. And so, in a way, we're not entirely bound by time. Knowledge is a... a kind of freedom."

Hoping that someone, someday listens to her recordings, she added, "If you're looking through the archive, you may find people from my time claiming that civilization doesn't really matter. That we'd be better off dead. We have a lot of cynics like that. I hope they seem as absurd to you as they do to me. I hope you can find something in all those files - a song, a book, a movie, maybe a game - just something that you'll love. That makes you realize how much poorer the universe would have been without it. I really hope so, because... a lot of people made a lot of sacrifices to preserve it all."

The next day, Alexandra woke up to hear terrible news. Some scientists had deserted. They had left the Institute for their homes, hoping to spend the remaining days with their families. The transportation system was collapsing, so there was hardly any chance for the people who decided to remain after that. Several others were showing signs of exhaustion and weakness, as a result of the disease progress plus overwork.

The spirits were low. Some said that there was no point in their work, and they were merely wasting the precious little time that was left to live. Alexandra and few others had to fight hard to keep what remained of the team together.

The other team, which worked on the archive, had just a little work left. Despite all difficulties, they were able to finish their job before the end. But Alexandra and her team were way behind the schedule, and it was clear that things were going to get worse every day.

That night, when Alexandra contacted her family, she realized that her parents were very sick, and had kept their condition hidden from her, in order to not worry her. She was so sad and nervous that she couldn't bring herself to record a message, and hardly got any sleep.

The next morning, when she entered her workplace, a scientist informed her that he was leaving. Alexandra didn't argue with him at all. She couldn't bring herself to ask him to forget about his family and stay. They said their goodbyes, and she got to work.

Alexandra was more angry than sad. She thought all these could have been avoided from the beginning. The global warming had started as a result of greed, and not caring for future generations. After that, the deadly disease had been kept a secret for too long, until the entire population was infected. People had already started dying when it was finally announced. Even after that, no serious attempt at preserving the achievements of human civilization was made by those in power. The Institute for Applied Noematics was a private non-profit initiative, operated by volunteers. It didn't have the required resources or time for such gigantic projects. Yet she was there, desperately working to achieve the impossible.

After several hours, she decided to take a break, and record a message to blow off some steam.

"God, there's no time. Just not enough time. We're trying to build the future out of old video game code and half-finished research projects. We should have had years. Maybe decades. But the kind of money they use to put into building bombs … Ah! If I stop and think about how crazy this is, I will have a nervous breakdown. So, I won't. Yeah, ok. Back to work Alex."

That night, she didn't return to her room, and kept working all night. There was so much work and so little time left, so sleep was a luxury she couldn't afford.

The next morning, a scientist didn't come out of his room in the morning. All people at the Institute were showing symptoms, more or less. They were all weak, but someone finally brought himself to open his door. He had died peacefully during the night.

Despite all the sadness, everyone returned to work shortly after. The only good news to lift the spirits was the fact that the other team had finished its work. The archive was ready. That allowed Drennan's team to replace the lost members by assigning what remained of the other team to the "Extended Lifespan" program. Some of them were happy to work in their branch, but the others stayed merely because they had nowhere to go. Public utilities had started failing. Cities were losing their power and water supplies one by one. There was hardly any transport, especially for long distance travels. But there, at the Institute, at least there was electricity, clean water and food.

Just like yesterday, Alexandra worked for some time, and then recorded a message in a short break.

"My best friend died today. In the abstract a human death is nothing of course. An insignificant blip in a sea of billions. But the world is not abstract. Reality is always... specific. Painfully so. That one specific human being, who existed only once of all the infinity of time and space, that human being... was my friend, but he is not coming back. No matter how much I want him to. So, all I can do in the end is keep working. Because that specificity, that uniqueness of real people is worth preserving."

For the next few days, Alexandra worked tirelessly without any sleep. A few who believed they could reach their homes before the end left the Institute. Some others felt too sick to work. No one bothered to check on people who didn't come out of their rooms anymore, since there was nothing that could be done about it.

The workforce was getting smaller and weaker every day, but the scale of work seemed to grow larger. New flaws were discovered every now and then, and the intended AI was still far from what was desired.

Alexandra felt recording a message may make her feel better.

"There are flaws in the system. I think sometimes it accesses the wrong databases. Pulls random data. I don't know, I don't know how bad it is. It all seems to be stable but, can't I tell what kind of impact this is going to have on the process and... ah! I just don't have the strength to go over all of the code again. I just... I just don't want it all to be for nothing. I spend all my time here. I didn't visit my parents. I didn't see my friends. I did nothing but work, and I'm so scared that it didn't mean anything. That I just wasted it all, because I thought we could... we could save the world."

That didn't help. She felt even worse.

The sickness and overwork had taken their toll. Alexandra was in a terrible shape, physically and mentally. From what she had learned about the disease and witnessing the sick people, she knew that there was perhaps a day left for her, and she would lose her ability to work even before that.

There was no way to finish correcting the flaws in the system in time. She decided to wrap up anything that was done until that point in an update, and install it, which would have caused the system to reboot. The AI program merged all the entities once more, getting ready to start a new generation of virtual entities.

When the system was ready, instead of running the AI program to generate new entities, Alexandra opened the game engine which the virtual reality was made with it. She asked another AI to analyze the data available from all users who had used that engine, and draw patterns based on it. Luckily, the data from millions of video game players and different games were available. After a few minutes, the AI managed to produce some patterns.

Alexandra began studying them. A knock on the door cut her thread of thoughts. It was one of the last remaining scientists. He was in a terrible shape himself, and said the others weren't answering, no matter how much he knocked on their doors, and he had decided to leave the Institute, in a desperate attempt to find his family, who he hadn't managed to contact for days.

Alexandra said nothing but a single word: "Goodbye."

The phones weren't working anymore. Alexandra hadn't managed to contact her parents either, but she knew what to expect. The only way she saw for honoring them, as well as the rest of humans who had ever lived, was finishing her task.

The patterns generated by the AI from the game data were complex. They showed a wide range of human behaviors, from kindness and creativity to greed and violence. Taking their average could have offered a general idea of how an average human was like.

After that, she asked the AI to generate a game suitable for an average human, something that didn't let entities with extreme tendencies to progress, and ensured the entities in the simulation were curious enough to search and discover the things that mattered to an average human.

She set some parameters for winning the game: Intelligence, free will, independence. The game was set to test each entity in the virtual world to help the AI designed for the "Extended Lifespan" program to reach a point which it could be considered sentient by evolving in the virtual reality. In case an entity finished the game without meeting those parameters, the game would have restarted; The AI would have merged the entities, analyzed the process, and produced new entities. This ensured that each time the process got closer to success, although there was still no guarantee of reaching it.

Feeling a need to justify this turn of events, she recorded a message.

"The answer that came to me again and again was "play". Every human society in recorded history has games. We don't just solve problems out of necessity, we do it for fun. Even as adults. Leave a human being alone with a knotted rope and they will unravel it, leave a human being alone with blocks and they will build something. Games are part of what makes us human; we see the world as a mystery, a puzzle, because we've always been a species of problem solvers."

She added, "Is there anything that we associate more closely with intelligence than curiosity? Every intelligent species on Earth is attracted by the unknown. Our mythologies are full of riddles and mysteries and divine knowledge. Even the word "apocalypse" means revelation. It seems like our ancestors always imagined that even at the very end, we would solve one last mystery."

This was the only thing she thought it was possible to do in the little time she had left. She programmed the supervising AI to wait for an entity to win in the game and pass the parameter checks, and then merge all the entities again, letting them become one, and upload the final result into the robot, transferring the new sentient artificial intelligence from the virtual simulated world into the real world, with the memories of all entities merged into one in its new mind.

This ensured that a human-like life would have emerged from artificial intelligence, but it could evolve at any direction it desired after that. This was not the ideal Alexandra had in mind, but it was the closest it could get.

She managed to define what she expected for the supervising AI, and just as the AI began the process of creating that game, Alexandra drifted into sleep.

Hours later, when she finally woke up, she felt weak and exhausted, like never before. Her eyes hardly opened to see the "Ready" message on the screen in front of her, before they closed again. No matter how much she tried, her eyes wouldn't open anymore.

She could still move her right hand, and used her memory to find the keys to push in order to record one final message.

"I can't keep my eyes open anymore. I... think this is... This is it. The end of... me. I don't believe that I will continue to exist. I would like to think that there is a... a soul or spirit. Some part of my consciousness that will persist. All the evidence says that when my brain dies, I will be gone. I've lived my life, never turning away from the truth even if it scares me and... I can face this. Face my own end, and... and say with absolute conviction... that it was good to be human."

Alexandra searched for keys with her hand, while struggling to stay awake, knowing she wouldn't come back from sleep again. As she pushed the Enter button, a soothing voice calmed her down: "Initiating program."

A faint smile appeared on her face, as she stopped struggling, and drifted into sleep for the last time.

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