“Let me tell you about the future. My future anyway. You’re not here and you never were, so it doesn’t matter, really. Part of me thinks I’m recording this as a sort of journal to keep track of what I’m thinking and feeling. Part of me thinks I actually have already done this several times. I don’t want to check the logs to find out. I’m afraid to, in fact.

“I had an inoperable brain tumor. What to do, right? Well, the whole cryogenic suspension deal was a crock and everyone knew it…keeping useless meat in a freezer for decades…when I left hobbyists were
buying the remains to tinker with at home, the ghoulish bastards. All the little Frankensteins with shit packed in gen-ice and electrodes and their readouts.

“Christ, I don’t even want to talk about it. The machine I’m in is nice enough to simulate certain body reactions, like shuddering, but fake shuddering just feels wrong.

“Well, backup to digital media was the next answer. So with that in full swing, I signed up. It beat the alternative. They downloaded me into the box you see before you. There’s even two little status lights on the front that sorta look like eyes…tell me that wasn’t some designer’s little joke.

“Simple enough concept. You wait in your little box until they have perfected growing you a new body from your DNA that they’ve also got stored somewhere in this machine. You can either remain out of it until it’s time, or you can be ‘woken up’ periodically to check up on how the world is doing, what progress is being made.

“This was great…for the first few times. But this last time…the feeds for the outside world are empty. Sending out a signal to the admins does nothing. Hell, even the lights in here are broken, they flicker and give this maddening strobe effect…I don’t even look ‘outside’ anymore.

“So I’ve had all of this to wonder just what the hell happened. I remember growing up the destruction du jour for the human race was biowarfare. Maybe somebody created a common cold that killed everybody. Maybe there’s been some terrible accident…or a war.

“And another thought struck me…this one very recently. You wouldn’t keep data this important…namely people…on media with no backup. Perhaps I’m just the backup…there’s no doomsday that happened, I’m just the forgotten backup that’s no longer needed because the real me is off somewhere in a new body eating, drinking and fucking up a storm. Maybe there’s no wasteland out there in the real world and instead I’m just that diskette you still have in your desk drawer, forgotten with a faded label.

“And for the life of me, I can’t decide which scenario is worse.”