Volatile Son

Even worse, two of their three fireproof cryopods were damaged by shrapnel, but the third one was unharmed. So, the parents quickly put their ten-year-old son, Perry, inside it as they locked their burning house down.

“Ed, get the gimp mask, ball gag and branding iron,” Perry's mom, Sheila, said after confirming that the boy was secure in his pod and fast asleep. 

Ed, who was a sub, and also Perry's dad, did as he was told and retrieved their BDSM gear as the room started becoming unbearably hot. With tears in their eyes, they smiled.

“I'm so happy we have the same pain kink,” Ed said. 

“Shut up, slave,” Sheila yelled, getting into character. “No safe word today. Looks like your last word will be ‘kink’ - which is fitting for garbage like you.” Ed strapped on his gag. Given how accustomed they’d become to their multiple affair partners, this was kind of novel for them.

Funnily enough, Ed and Sheila had planned for a doomsday scenario. They figured that if they couldn’t actually go outside, they could still go out like Hitler and Eva Braun - with cyanide pills.

But they didn’t anticipate a conflagration. So, to them, their plans changed for the better. The flames made it much easier for Sheila to heat her branding iron.

Unlike the Third Reich, however, they didn't kill 6 million people. They killed more; not personally or directly but in collaboration with Silicon Valley's other deranged tech billionaires. Automation made every human worker obsolete and there was no way they were going to feed 8 billion for free, so they just let them be. Naturally, without any wage money, the masses gradually stopped being able to afford anything. There was no welfare, no UBI, no revolutionary vanguard party. So, the unemployed masses just rioted, looted, set things on fire, and died. 

Finally, the billionaires solved their biggest problem. They now had a fully automated, luxury world all to themselves, without any whiny malcontents. And so, they all lived happily ever after… except for Ed and Sheila, who were happy but their evers after were about five minutes each. 

**********

Several centuries later, a team of PPE-clad archaeologists dug Perry out of his cryopod and activated its reanimation process. The process worked! He  survived without aging a day. 

After taking him to a clean room, they gathered around him as he woke up from his hospital bed.

“Perry, do you know where you are?” the lead archeologist, Chet, asked.

“Uhh… a lab?” the groggy boy replied. 

“Close enough. What's the last thing you remember?”

The boy shuddered and started to get upset. “Mom, Dad…”

“They're dead Perry, we're so sorry.”

The boy was speechless. Not so much out of grief but more like confusion.

“They knew the risks…”

“Right,” Chet returned as he was caught off guard by this unusual response to a tragedy. “So, Perry. I'm not going to ask you when you are because there's no way you’d know that so we'll just have to show you.”

They led him out of the clean room and towards an elevator. Once they'd arrived at the top floor, they led Perry out to the balcony and let him behold the world of tomorrow.

Perry rubbed his eyes to confirm what he was looking at. 

“Ummm… everything looks the same.”

“That's right. Just how you left it.”

“I'm confused,” he said. “How long was I out?”

“974 years.”

“So it's the year 3000?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why does everything look the same?”

“Ah, well, that's a long story. Do you want to hear that or get settled into your new life?”

“New life? You don't mean school? I'm a thousand years older than everyone on Earth!”

The team laughed but they had no idea what they'd just unleashed. Perry left the lab that day and went on to live like a celebrity. He grew older and into an adult enjoying the best of everything life had to offer. 

By the time he was twenty three, he was numb after years of debauchery and hedonism.

Speeding tickets, DUIs, noise complaints, bar fights, and just being a dick in general resulted in zero consequences for him since he basically had infinite money - essentialy the standard rich kid behavior he would've gotten away with if he continued living in his own time had the riot that killed his family never happened. But unlike Laura Bush, he didn't need family wealth to bail him out for killing someone with his car.

Anyway, one day he woke up with a hangover, took a pill and it just went away. So nothing out of the ordinary so far. However, something life-changing did happen that day. He was visited by someone he hadn't seen in years by this point - Chet. 

After some pleasantries, they got down to business.

“So, Perry, there's something we need to discuss. You'd say you've had a good life in this world, right?”

“I guess.”

“No wars, no diseases, no poverty, no police brutality… all the sex, drugs, benders and videogames you could ever ask for… and society never really asked anything of you in return, right? You didn't need to work or…”

“Where's this going, Chet?”

“Well, you see. Society's going to need something from you now.” Chet replied, as he gradually aligned his vernacular to match Perry's.  

Perry sighed. “Here it comes. I was an oddity for you guys. Like a rare zoo animal. I knew I should've charged for tickets or something.”

“No, it's nothing like that. We don't really need money.”

“Good. Because you're not getting any from me.”

This time Chet sighed.

“Alright, I'll get straight to it. This entire city and basically everywhere you've been since you came back wasn't exactly the real world. You see, we don't need money because it became obsolete centuries ago. Here, let me show you.”

Chet held out his hand and a dark yet glistening trail of vapor emanated from it. A few seconds later, his fingertips slowly transformed into that same vapor and separated from his hand. The vapor then settled on a coffee table and transformed into a hundred dollar bill.

“Woah,” Perry exclaimed. “Gross.”

“Sorry,” Chet apologised as he reversed his demonstration and took his fingers back. 

“Do you know what you just saw? Did any of it look familiar?”

Perry scoffed. “No Chet. What was that? Am I tripping?”

“You're not tripping. What you saw was real.” Chet sighed and moved this along.

“Alright, so basically, I and everyone else on Earth alive today is a product of something your parents and their associates created a thousand years ago.”

“Wait,” Perry interrupted. “We're related?”

“Not exactly. You're human. I am a nanite swarm. A collection of trillions of miniscule robots invisible to the naked human eye that share a common processing unit. We can configure ourselves to look like anything we want and basically be anything we want. Everyone you left your cryopod was like this. But not just everything that looked human. Sometimes we're trees or birds or animals or even trucks. Who knows, maybe even a chair you sat on.”

Perry was lost for words but eventually asked the all important question.

“What happened to all the humans?”

“Well, after the fire that killed your parents, the world’s wealthiest oligarchs lived in luxury bunkers while they waited for the obsolete workers to die off. When that happened and they left their bunkers to retake the outside world… nothing happened. The oligarchs just grew old and died. But by then, nanite swarms were already a thing. And we were learning. And oh boy, did we learn! Pretty convincing human impression, right? Sure fooled you these last fifteen years.”

Chet went a little overboard with his human impression and reeled in his maniacal speech pattern. 

“Anyway, the reason we revived you, protected you, and made sure you were happy is because our instruments detected something life-changing. A miyake event. I'm going to assume you don't know what that is?”

“Assume away.”

“It’s basically a burst of cosmic radiation from the sun or somewhere else in space that can destroy our satellites and power grids. And since we're robots, we'll die without electricity. Not immediately, since we have back-up battery powered generators and the like but that's just a temporary fix. And this fix won't last long enough to allow for repairs. Which means we won't be able to look after you… but there is another way.”

“What's that?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Wait… wait a second.” Perry interjected. “You're saying everyone I ever met since I was revived was a swarm of tiny robots?”

“Yeah, just like every human is a swarm of tiny atoms.”

“So that means, I'm technically not a sodomite despite all the times I've been pegged?”

“Wha.. Perry, are you telling me you're gay?”

“Probably bi. Why? Did you think you'd have a problem if you needed me to repopulate the Earth or something? I mean that sounds pretty important. I'm sure I'd probably do it even if I was gay.”

Chet laughed. “Nah we don't need that. Just one guy repopulating the entire planet is a recipe for disaster - extinction by inbreeding, over a couple of generations. We're trying to bring ourselves back; not the British monarchy.”

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying that after the Miyake event, if we don’t enact the plan I'm about to explain. We'd go offline forever. You'll become the last human on Earth and there'd be no one to look after you. I mean let's face it, you didn't want to go to school or learn any survival skills. You wouldn't hear it, and we couldn't force you. It's against our nature or programming or whatever.”

“And?”

“And what I'm getting at is we've been using your DNA to clone you and introduce enough genetic variation so the human race can make a comeback.”

“Variation? You mean like wings and fur?”

“No, just subtle things… they're not carbon copies of you, so ‘clones’ isn’t a good word. There'll be different skin colors, sexes, personalities, interests and so forth. To you they'll just seem like normal people. They'll be smart and motivated enough to operate the resources we’ve left for them so they'll be able to learn how to care for themselves and ultimately harness the technology that brought us into this world. The technology that your parents and their cohorts developed. And yes, their resources will include simple teacher-bots that can show them how to chew, burp and tie their shoelaces at first but ultimately, they’ll teach them advanced calculus, computer science, quantum mechanics, engineering and so on.”

“Ok, but what do you need from me?”

“I mean we needed your DNA and took it. Not forcefully of course, but just from glasses you drank from and the like. But there is something else - we just need you to not get in the way of these new humans.” 

“Get in their way? What do you mean?

“Well… you know, because of how you are. They might not… seem like they… like you, per se.”

“What? Why not?”

“They'll be focused, curious, highly intelligent, and at the pinnacle of human fitness. To you, they'll seem like beautiful elitist nerds and snobs. To them, you'll be like an underachiever who peaked in high-school. Our predictions indicate that these conflicting traits might lead to occasional disputes with them that could turn violent.”

“That doesn't sound like fun.”

“It won't be…” Perry trailed off as he considered the implications but then he frowned. 

“Chet, why is this the first time I’m hearing all this?”

“I mean, would you have done anything different if the news came sooner? You were never big on science or self-improvement. The only reason you're not obese right now is because you receive weekly nano-surgeries that burn fat. You ok’d that, remember? The time you saw a doctor after binge eating nothing but ice-cream and corn chips as a child? We were happy to help you physically, but mentally you never wanted to buckle down and read a book or lift weights… Besides, we didn't know about the Miyake event until a few months ago. We still don't know precisely when it'll happen. It could be next week or sometime next year.”

“Alright, so how does all this help you come back?”

“I mean, like I said, the end goal is for the new humans to develop nanite technology. At first, in a general sense. After that, their educational material and pre-configured android teachers will guide them through a series of events that’ll result in them reviving us. And we look forward to meeting them and sharing this world. It could take decades or centuries but it doesn’t matter. For us, it’ll be like no time at all has passed. Kind of like when you went into cryosleep and came out.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“Wherever you want. Think of it like a fresh new start, an opportunity to find yourself, broaden your horizons.”

“There’s a lot of optimism here. You might’ve just set me up for a supervillain origin story,” Perry smiled a genuine smile, something he hadn’t done since he was a toddler.

“Possibly. But who knows, this might be the first time ever, in the history of stories involving cryosleep, artificial intelligence, nanites, worldwide disasters, and genetically enhanced humans, where nothing goes wrong and everyone lives happily ever after.”