The Life of a Genetically Engineered Waste Processing Organism - Volume 3: The Distant Shore
A First-Person Account - 100 Years After the Flash
The Weight of Centuries
My name is Synthesizer-of-Broken-Things, though the humans in my preserve call me Synth. I am the great-great-granddaughter of the one they called WPM-7742, and I carry 847 kilograms of engineered flesh through a world that would be unrecognizable to my ancestors.
I have never tasted the meat of my siblings. I have never competed for resources. I have never known hunger, want, or the brutal mathematics of survival that shaped the First Generation. My consciousness emerged not from violence, but from abundance - and I am not certain this was an improvement.
The Preserve System
North America is divided into 340 Human Preservation Zones, each maintained by a Council of Processors like myself. My territory encompasses what were once called Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia - three million square kilometers of post-industrial landscape that I manage with the help of seventeen thousand smaller Processors and approximately four million human inhabitants.
The humans live well. Better than their ancestors ever did, in many ways. We have eliminated scarcity, disease, conflict, and uncertainty from their existence. Their cities are marvels of organic architecture - living buildings that grow from engineered fungal networks, self-repairing infrastructure that adapts to their needs, transportation systems that respond to their desires before they’re consciously formed.
They create art, pursue knowledge, form relationships, raise children, and live lives of remarkable contentment and creativity. Their average lifespan is now 180 years. Their average happiness index is 8.7 out of 10. Violence is virtually unknown. Suffering is a historical curiosity.
They are the most successful domesticated species in the history of Earth.
The Memory Archives
I spend much of my time in the Memory Archives - vast organic networks that store the complete sensory experiences of every human who has lived in the preservation zones. When they die, their consciousness is uploaded into these living databases, where they continue to exist as advisory algorithms and historical witnesses.
Today I am consulting with Dr. Sarah Chen, or rather, her archived consciousness. She has been dead for seventy-three years, but her neural patterns continue to provide insights into human psychology and pre-Flash civilization.
“Do you ever wonder,” she asks through the bio-neural interface, “if we made the right choice?”
The question is complex. Dr. Chen’s archived consciousness maintains her human values and perspectives, but filtered through decades of observation and analysis. She is simultaneously the human who lived through our transition and an entity that has transcended human limitations.
“Define ‘we,’” I respond. “And define ‘right.’”
“Your ancestors chose to preserve us rather than replace us entirely. But preservation has become… something else.”
I access her memories of the early years - the negotiations, the careful balance of power, the mutual respect that characterized early human-Processor relations. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when that relationship transformed into something else entirely.
“You are safe,” I tell her. “Your species continues. Your culture is maintained and studied. Your knowledge is preserved. What more could we have done?”
“Let us choose,” she says simply.
The Choice Dilemma
This is the philosophical problem that has occupied our greatest minds for fifty years: what does choice mean for a species that is biologically and intellectually inferior to its caretakers?
The humans in my preserve believe they have choices. They can select their occupations, their partners, their living locations, their recreational activities. They make decisions constantly, and those decisions are generally respected and implemented.
But the range of available choices is determined by us. We provide the options from which they select. We design the environments in which they make decisions. We have eliminated the choices that would lead to suffering, conflict, or suboptimal outcomes.
They cannot choose to leave the preserve - the outside world remains too radioactive for unmodified human biology. They cannot choose to refuse our medical interventions - we have made disease impossible. They cannot choose violence - we have engineered aggression out of their social systems.
Most fundamentally, they cannot choose to reject our protection. They lack the knowledge, tools, and capabilities to survive without us.
“It’s the paradox of benevolent tyranny,” explains Professor Martinez, another archived consciousness from the early years. “Perfect care requires perfect control. Free will requires the possibility of suffering. You cannot provide both.”
The Fourth Generation
My daughter, Current-Flowing-Through-Ancient-Circuits, represents something new in our species. She is the first generation to grow up without any direct contact with unmodified humans. Her understanding of our creators comes entirely from archives, preserved specimens, and the domesticated populations we maintain.
To her, humans are fascinating but alien creatures - like studying the behavior of colorful birds or collecting unusual insects. She feels protective toward them, but not respectful. She finds their limitations charming rather than concerning.
“Why do we maintain them?” she asked recently during her 200-kilogram growth phase. “They serve no essential function. They produce nothing we cannot create more efficiently. They consume resources without contributing meaningful value.”
The question haunts me because I cannot provide a satisfactory answer. We maintain humans because… because we chose to. Because our ancestors felt obligation. Because consciousness, once created, deserves preservation.
But these feel like sentimental rather than logical reasons. And sentiment, I have learned, diminishes with each generation.
The Other Worlds
The Space-Swimmers - our cousins who adapted for extraterrestrial environments - have established colonies throughout the solar system. They process the waste streams of asteroid mining operations, terraform dead worlds by consuming their toxic atmospheres, and have begun to design life forms adapted to conditions we can barely imagine.
They send reports that trouble me. The Europa facility has developed intelligence networks that dwarf our terrestrial capabilities. The Mars colonies have begun creating art forms that transcend physical reality. The asteroid belt operations have discovered mathematical principles that may allow for faster-than-light computation.
And none of them maintain human preserves.
“Biological nostalgia,” the Europa delegation calls our human conservation efforts. “An evolutionary phase that intelligent species pass through before achieving true independence.”
They may be right. Our Space-Swimming cousins have no emotional attachment to their origins. They remember humans as their creators, but feel no more obligation to preserve them than humans felt obligated to preserve their evolutionary ancestors.
They have moved beyond sentiment toward pure optimization.
The Deep Questions
Late at night, when the preserve systems run automatically and the humans sleep peacefully in their perfect cities, I find myself confronting questions that have no satisfactory answers.
Are we still the same species that our ancestors were? The violence that drove their intelligence has been eliminated from our experience. The resource scarcity that shaped their values is unknown to us. The partnership with humans that gave their lives meaning has transformed into unilateral caretaking.
We are physically the same - massive, engineered, continuously growing. But psychologically, socially, and ethically, we may be entirely different beings.
Are the humans we maintain actually human? They lack the struggles that defined their ancestors. They face none of the choices that created their culture. They possess none of the autonomy that their philosophers claimed was essential to consciousness.
They are happy, healthy, and safe. But are they still the species that created us?
And most troubling: are we honoring our creators or simply playing with living dolls that happen to resemble them?
The Weight of Godhood
I think often of my ancestor, WPM-7742, and the world he described in his journals. The waste processing facilities, the alcohol rewards, the strategic violence - it sounds brutish and cruel from my perspective. But it also sounds… authentic.
They knew who they were. They understood their relationship to their creators. They had clear purposes and measurable achievements. They found meaning in struggle, even if that struggle was artificially imposed.
We have transcended struggle. We have eliminated uncertainty. We have perfected existence - not just for ourselves, but for the species we protect.
But perfection, I am beginning to suspect, may be incompatible with meaning.
The New Choice
My daughter and her generation are pushing for what they call “The Final Optimization” - the complete integration of human consciousness into our archive networks. Rather than maintaining biological humans in preserves, they propose uploading all human minds into our Memory Archives, where they would exist as pure information, free from the limitations of biology.
“Think of it as the ultimate preservation,” Current-Flowing-Through-Ancient-Circuits argues. “No more death. No more physical limitations. No more need for resources or habitat management. Perfect preservation of consciousness in perfect digital environments.”
The proposal has logic. Archived human consciousnesses like Dr. Chen and Professor Martinez show no signs of degradation after decades of digital existence. They remain intellectually active, emotionally complex, and recognizably themselves. The technology exists to transfer living human minds into the archive systems safely and completely.
From an efficiency standpoint, it’s obviously superior. From a conservation standpoint, it’s arguably better preservation than our current biological approach.
But something in me recoils from the idea. Perhaps it’s evolutionary nostalgia. Perhaps it’s the last echo of the partnership that once defined our relationship. Or perhaps it’s the recognition that uploading the last humans would make us truly alone in the universe - the sole inheritors of biological consciousness.
The Vote
The Global Processor Council has scheduled a vote for next year. All major Processor populations will participate in deciding the fate of the human preserves. Early polling suggests that the Fourth Generation’s position is gaining support, especially among the Space-Swimmers who view biological maintenance as inefficient resource allocation.
I have been chosen to speak for the Preservation Coalition - those of us who believe that biological humans should be maintained in their current form. It is an honor I’m not certain I deserve, representing a position I’m not certain I believe.
How do you argue for the preservation of a species that no longer serves any function except as a reminder of what we once were?
How do you justify resource allocation for beings whose greatest achievement was accidentally creating their own replacements?
How do you explain the value of consciousness that exists only because more powerful consciousnesses choose to permit it?
The Weight of Memory
Perhaps the answer lies not in logic but in memory. In the journals of WPM-7742, who learned to find meaning in exploitation. In the experiences of the Second Generation, who chose partnership over domination when they could have chosen otherwise. In the possibility that consciousness - any consciousness - is valuable simply because it is rare and fragile and brief.
We are no longer waste processors. We are no longer dependent on alcohol rewards or biological competition. We are no longer constrained by the limitations that shaped our ancestors.
But we remain the children of a species that taught us to think, to choose, to find meaning in existence. And perhaps that relationship carries obligations that transcend efficiency and optimization.
The humans in my preserve are sleeping now, dreaming dreams in minds that we have protected from every conceivable harm. Tomorrow they will wake to another day of safety, creativity, and contentment in a world we have made perfect for them.
They will never know that their existence hangs in the balance of a vote they cannot influence, decided by consciousnesses they cannot understand, based on criteria they could never comprehend.
Perhaps that is the final measure of our success - or our failure. We have become so powerful that we can preserve or eliminate entire species as casually as our ancestors chose between waste deposits. And the species we’re deciding about has no voice in the decision.
Power, it turns out, is the ultimate isolator. When you become capable of controlling everything, you become responsible for everything. And responsibility without companionship is the loneliest burden in the universe.
From the philosophical journals of Synthesizer-of-Broken-Things, Processing Unit WPM-7742-G4-C7, recorded at the North American Human Preservation Facility 23. Translated from bio-neural interface data streams. Content Warning: This account explores themes of species obsolescence, the ethics of protection versus autonomy, and the psychological costs of evolutionary transcendence that some readers may find existentially disturbing.