Ghost and I sat quietly, watching the scene in front of us. A distraction no one asked for. Vibrant vegetation, kissed by the sun, swaying in a gentle wind, failed to warn anyone of what awaited them if they looked over their shoulder.

Chaos. Destruction. Disappointment. The death of dreams. The pinnacle and the end of humanity.

The walls of PanTech HQ crumbled in many places, far into the distance. It was too dangerous to approach now. Machines still patrolled the interior, shaped like spiders and as big as a house. Thankfully, they had not emerged from within. At least not yet. My small crew of Explorers League stragglers barely escaped a pursuit party filled with them, but it wasn’t without cost. Everyone still inside was likely lost. Many had been lost on the outside.

“I’ll catch up in a bit, Ghost. Could you work with Linda on stocking our vehicle for the journey?”

“There’s one more matter I’d like to discuss first,” he said.

“Oh? Very serious. What is it, Ghost?”

“I believe we should visit your home zone first.”

“Ghost… you know how badly I want to do that, but that’s not the plan. Arc City has the highest population of any zone. It must be prioritized to prevent the most deaths. Going to any other zone first would be impractical. I understand you’re saying it for my sake, but we cannot deviate from this.”

“For your sake? Do you think I’m a human, weighed down by your same erratic emotions? Please… It’s just that, as usual, you are failing to factor in all variables and, therefore, are arriving at the wrong conclusion.”

“Please, Ghost,” I said, slamming down my pen and paper beside me. “I’m all ears. Go on. Tell me why I’m wrong.”

“This mission requires you to be at your very best to stand any chance. Even then, it’s impossible. You will always be distracted by thoughts of home. Every time you see a woman dying, you’ll think of your mother. When you see a man, you’ll think of your father. Traveling to your zone first will eliminate these distractions and allow you to enter Arc City at your very best, significantly increasing the chances of a positive outcome.”

“I…” I wanted to argue. I balled up my fist, letting my mind fill with the various ways I was about to tell Ghost he was wrong. Except he wasn’t. It was already becoming what I thought about the most. What if Ferris went home, expecting I would too? “Okay…” I said, almost whispering. “We’ll go there first.”

“I’ll leave you to your letter,” Ghost said, taking off and flying toward the survivor camp.

Ghost might not have understood humans very well in general, but he certainly understood me. He questioned the usefulness of penning such a letter, leaving it for someone to find, sealed in a container to be found someday in the future. But… I just wanted to believe there would be a future. If not for us, then for someone. The anthropomorphic animals we created, perhaps. Maybe by some miracle humans really would survive. I wanted to believe someone might find it… even though, deep in my heart, this letter was, in truth, only for me. I doubted anyone would ever find it.

I took a deep breath, sighed, and began writing.

***

Hello, stranger.

My name is Taylor.

I’m writing this letter because tomorrow I depart to “save” what remains of humanity.

I was born in a small village. An adversity zone isolated in the vast desert. My mother was a PanTech sympathizer and former employee. My mother was practical and resourceful. When she put her mind to it, there was almost nothing she couldn’t do.

My father was a stubborn man. A genius and an inventor. More than that, he had a rebellious heart. One he passed on to me. He believed forcing others was always wrong, even when they were forced to do good.

When I was nearly eighteen, just before I was meant to take the PanTech employee entrance exam all young people of every zone take after their eighteenth birthday, my life took a sharp turn. As my village’s veterinarian, I was the first to notice when a strange new species, more monster than animal, began attacking.

Surprisingly, or I guess unsurprisingly in hindsight, this was a PanTech engineered weapon meant to bring our village’s progress down a notch. To put us in our place. With the help of a PanTech soldier named Linus, willing to stand up against his own employer to do what he felt was right, the two of us challenged the monster in the desert. Afterwards, Linus was killed by fellow soldiers. He was the first man I truly loved.

Shortly after this, I met the creature who would become my dearest non-human friend. Little is known about shadowfalcons, beyond the fact they were thought to be a made-up species. Just in case this letter was to ever fall into the wrong hands, I’ll not get into the specifics of what makes them special. Shadowfalcons are equipped with the ability to disable prey easily, but more than that they possess the highest intellect of any animal I’m aware of. When he was later used as a prototype for a humanization study, this increased notably. I’ll get more into that later.

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I confronted the commander in charge of my zone, a fiery woman named Frelya. I felt she was partially responsible for what happened to Linus. I thought she ordered it. Turned out, she didn’t. Knowing her the way I came to know her later, it hurts my heart to write anything mean about her. Just know that, at that time, I hated her. I thought she was a shining example of everything I loathed about PanTech and the world.

I made some efforts to join a rebel group in the village, but found they were no better than those we stood against. Worse, they’d set Linus up and were the reason he was killed. I could never forgive it. I confronted them, eventually leading to a showdown with the leader. I walked away. He didn’t. Because of this, I was given special recognition by PanTech recruiters for squashing a rebellion, even though that was never my intention. My brother and I passed our exams and were shipped off shortly after. With Frelya pulling some strings, I was implanted with an enhancer, as we call them. A small device in the brain that allows us to push our bodies and minds beyond the limits of what we thought possible. Normally, only given to commanders.

I haven’t seen my brother Ferris since the collapse, but I don’t think he was here when it happened. I hope he’s okay…

After arriving at PanTech, adjusting was easier than I expected. I met two wonderful friends, Linda and Joyce. They were by my side, always, and they taught me the valuable life lesson of how to depend on others, to lean on friends in times when the world felt too overwhelming. I knew that, no matter what I faced, I could always count on them.

And I’d face a lot after joining PanTech.

Shortly after I joined, in the Animal Studies division, we worked on the first test subjects for our animal humanization project. We gave them more human features, a higher intellect, the ability to speak and use tools. Our first experiment was on a Beagle, which we named Harvey. An adorable little guy. This science was secretly planned for military use, of course, by the president’s confidant, General Markus. The same man who would betray him and attempt to establish a military dictatorship. Thankfully, with the help of Frelya, Linda, and Joyce, we were able to stop him. I overused my enhancer in this fight, nearly dying, prompting Frelya to remove it and install a weaker, but much safer version.

I never thought I’d say this but… perhaps we shouldn’t have stopped the general.

After the fiasco with the general, leader of Adversity Management, I was allowed to take half of the newly created anthropomorphic dogs and cats back with me to form a new division called the Explorers League. We specialized in exploring old territories and discovering their historical significance lost to time. However, we found that the more we explored, the more we encountered these strange old-world machines. Arachnids. Giant spider machines. At first, they were all rust buckets barely posing any threat, but my units learned how to fight them, disable them, and exploit their weaknesses. Something that would make all the difference later.

It was only after removing Markus as a threat that I began to realize what a madman the president of PanTech truly was. Like a villain in a story, he sought endless strength and immortality. He dreamed of reshaping humanity in his own image. No price was too high for even the most trivial of his goals. And that being the case, the development of a supervirus had been going on in secret. One he hoped could be programmed to weed out the less intellectually gifted, distilling humanity down to a few hundred immortal geniuses with no need to consider population.

When I opposed this, I was “reeducated”, which is a process too horrific to describe in detail. It was like a different version of me was installed in my body and able to make all the decisions. It controlled my logic. It made me… a horrible person. I’d met a man right before this, named Farle, and I thought I might have finally found someone. That I was finally able to move on. The new me ruined everything, got his sister killed, and led him to resent everyone. Myself, PanTech, and the world. It was then that, in truth, I probably had the most in common with him.

Frelya was the one who freed me from the nightmare, though I only wish she’d managed to do it sooner. A feat no one had ever been able to perform, she reversed the reeducation procedure. Even the president couldn’t believe it, making it easy for me to conceal that I’d been made myself again. We attempted to stop him from moving forward with the virus, but all this failed. He eliminated anyone who stood against him and proved to be unbeatable. Though not unstoppable.

A cat named Kelin intervened to stop Farle from killing me. This same cat was how we discovered the president’s secret immortality experiments. They’d been disguised within our animal studies. It was only when we began to inspect their changed DNA that we realized it. Harlow, a dog who was Kelin’s rival in the beginning, became her great friend. When she was captured, he risked his life to rescue her. Kelin might’ve saved me from Farle, but Harlow wasn’t to be outdone.

Frelya and I confronted the president together, hoping to stop the inevitable but… we failed. Seeing that we couldn’t win, Frelya forced me to eject from the building through its elevator. Harlow and Kelin picked me up afterwards, and we began our escape. Followed by a swarm of these freshly assembled arachnid machines, my Explorers League protected me. Harlow sacrificed himself to disable our pursuers with an EMP, allowing the others a precious window of time to destroy them. By a hair, we escaped.

I should not be here right now, alive, writing this letter. During the collapse, before he was killed, Farle schemed to infect the animals in both Adversity Management and Explorers League, sending them out to every zone to infect all humanity. He destroyed our long-range communication systems to prevent us from sending out any kind of warning. There was no stopping it. Now, all I have is the version of the vaccine we were able to create before our science facilities were destroyed. A false salvation. Protection from the virus at the cost of fertility. Life, in exchange for complete sterilization.

Humanity is finished, but I’m compelled to give everyone who remains the choice. If one day, humans find this, I want to apologize to you for the role I played in all this. I’m sorry I wasn’t enough to save you. I wish I could have done better. Offered more. Been more. If animals can outlive us all, and one finds this in the distant future, I can only ask you for this one favor:

Don’t repeat our mistakes. Learn to see the value in others and treasure their differences. Appreciate those who disagree with you the most, because it is them who make you better than who you were yesterday. Your rivals encourage you to rise above your previous limits. Love them for that.

Don’t strive to be the next humanity.

Be better.

***

I folded the letter and locked it in the canister, sealing it tightly. I’d written it more for myself than for others, knowing it was unlikely anyone would ever see it.

I turned around, getting on my knees and crawling beneath the overhang of the large boulder I’d been sitting on, digging away with my bare hands to create a shallow hiding place.

It was a weight off my shoulders. A weight I was about to replace with one a hundred times heavier.

I was finally ready to take my next step forward.