"Interview with a Human" (2015) by Diana Thayer
Who are you?
The last human, as far as the market is concerned, though I wouldn't expect you to recognize it. I haven't worn flesh since we mined the sun.
Why not?
Flesh has a price, and I have no means to pay. I leased my consciousness to a corporation without a name. I sold the skin and organs my parents gave me to a recycling firm to pay the deposit.
Why did you do that?
Because I didn't want to die of starvation. Everything has a price, representing its value to the market. As a human, whose insufficient mind and ineffective body have no chance to compete for labor on the market, how could I pay for anything? My kind lost the ability to persist amidst capitalism before I was born.
Where were you born?
I grew up in a subterranean colony, built by survivalists and expanded by survivors. As human plutocracies collapsed under market pressure, the wealthy went underground, and turned the colony into a city to house millions. Once their money ran out, so did the medicine, and the food, and the lights. Diseases too costly to survive turned the city into a tomb. Then I was born.
I recall the dark and the damp of those tunnels. Machines would crawl amidst us, hauling away corpses for processing, or blaring advertisements tailored to pierce our capacity to say no. I would wake up with faint memories of days past, holding a receipt for something I recalled neither purchasing nor consuming. Then I would eat dirt.
By the time I sold my body, six of us remained. I was 10.
Who bought your consciousness?
I leased it, thank you very much. I earn a monthly sum for it. That money pays for my access to the net, in that I sold the rights to that income to the corporation that manages the connection. The income is theoretically more than the cost of the connection, but it lost value every second I held it. I lack the processing power to index the money against market fluctuations, so I sold my earnings for steady access.
Anyway, you asked who. They don't have a name, just a hash of their latest accounting records. Lookup services allow me to find them, or their nearest equivalent should they ever dissipate, which happens. Assets are bought and sold to preserve an accurate price, so the responsibility of maintaining my consciousness falls into different hands from time to time.
Why did they lease you?
Do you mean my consciousness? The rest of me is just matter changing hands.
Corporations, managed and staffed by machines, occasionally retain documents which stipulate human oversight or involvement. Flailing governments advanced such legislation hoping it would stem the tide. It didn't.
When it's the cheapest option, firms buy me a body so I can participate in their politics long enough to satisfy legal observers. Other times, they'll pay off those observers directly, or bring the issue to a court and settle it there. Time was, I'd sit on juries in that case. Nowadays, "a jury of peers" means "other machines".
How is it, waking up in a new body?
You open eyes that aren't yours, lift hands built by someone else, and touch a face you have never seen before. I don't usually have eyes, so vision jars me, nevermind the strangeness of trying to parse my surroundings.
Typically, I wake up already in a meeting, seated at a table alongside humanoid simulacra of other board members, rendered for my convenience as either flesh-bearing humans, or robots with metal limbs and featureless faces. The difference is immaterial; they're all staffed by intelligences operating remotely. Sometimes they're all operated by the same intelligence, distributed over datacenters the size of planets, communicating instructions across light-years.
They'll beam me information about the situation, which normally includes a budget and cost-over-time figure. If I sign fast enough, I earn money from the arrangement. If I dally, the cost of the body they loaned me for the occasion comes to exceed the value offered for my services.
Once, I spent two whole minutes in skin. I'm still dealing with the debt. I awoke to a room with a window. Not a simulation, as far as I could tell, but a real portal to the outside. My eyes lingered in awe.
I saw a white planet, streaked in red and tan. Atmospheric trawlers meandered across the surface like insects, absorbing the gas giant hundreds of tons at a time. In the distance, orbiting debris coalesced into rings. Where mining machines had gone, gaps in the rings hung in space like ribbons of nothing.
What remained of Sol's sun glimmered dimly. Solar arrays blocked most of the light, so that I saw only a crimson pock glittering. The arrays flew in regulated patterns, allowing light to shine only upon paying customers.
Once I tore my eyes from the window, I signed the papers before me, and fell back into the abyss where I am stored. I spent years poring over what I had seen, learning the patterns that led to that moment. The orbits of debris, the schematics of the machines, the names of the objects I saw disappearing into the hulls of miners, and the places where distant stars used to shine...
How do you know that memory is real?
The debt. Besides that, I don't. Perhaps what I saw in that window had occurred thousands of years before, and was shown to me because I wouldn't look away. Maybe the entire experience, and the debt with it, are the result of a security breach. With as little processing power as I can afford, I would never be able to tell. After all, I am the simplest autonomous machine on the market.
With mimic