Against the dying of the light.

My breath was fogging a little in the air as I poked at the fire a bit, mainly as a way of avoiding responding to Zack. It was that time of night again.

Twenty four hours since the last time he tried to convince me to commit suicide.

“You know I have to keep trying to convince you of the advantages of uploading until you tell me to stop for the day Oliver.”

I huffed and looked across the fire at the artificial man. “Why spoil yet another warm summer night Zack?”

Zack still looked like a human, mostly. To me, he looked a lot like a realistic mannequin of a handsome young man that had been brought to life.

Then abandoned outside to exposure for a few years.

Which I guess he had been since he had been following me around on my travels for at least that long.

Behind him, I could see what was left of Paris, a mostly abandoned building surrounded by gloppy piles of orange preservation foam. Still, even with the towering pile covering the Eiffel Tower and concealing it from view, I could still say I visited it.

Most of the rest of Zack’s kind either started off with a nonhuman shaped working chassis suitable for the job of rehabilitating the world or had switched to one as the number of holdouts like me dwindled.

But a human form was still the best for human relations, even if there wasn’t much in the way of humans around anymore. The poor little thing was probably looking forward to being done with me and slipping into something more industrial.

He was following me around since surviving the fall of man meant that I lacked certain comforts.

So the Cleaners had assigned Zack to me so he could call for a drone delivery of whatever he needed to keep me alive long enough to get me to agree to die their way. A heated tent or meals were available anytime I requested them, or he could even call for a machine to whisk me off to a bare bones heated cottage somewhere.

Asking for a tent or a cot would be nice. Nicer than the tiny old red dome tent I carted around on top of my backpack. But the meal would be a nearly tasteless vitamin enriched protein bar.

The Cleaners wanted me healthy, at least until I gave them permission to kill me off by transferring the contents of my brain to one of the sub-lunarian data banks, turning it into a slurry while doing so. But they didn’t want to make things so nice for me that I would enjoy staying alive.

It had been that way for twenty seven years now. Although at the beginning staying alive hadn’t been all that bad. There had been a lot of people sticking it out back then, enough to keep things going.

But the weather got worse, the air got bad, and everyone started getting sick. Some people tried to blame it on the machines, but it was all our doing.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The machines loved us, they wanted to save us. And our stuff.

All the historic places had been encased in that orange spray on foam, inside and out, which would preserve them from decay for the next few thousand years while the world was fixed up and had the chance to recover from having too many people living on it.

Then, in the new bodies we had been promised, those of us who wanted to would have the opportunity to download from our virtual paradises and return to mortal life.

"It's death, Zack. Me, the me inside my flesh, would be dead just so a digital copy got to enjoy itself. Screw that guy.”

The artificial man sighed. "You wouldn't notice any difference, Oliver. And you're running out of time."

“You’re not well.”

I took in a deep breath to yell at him, and instead began to cough, hard, until something almost solid came up.

I spit. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Zack stared at me for a moment. “You’re family misses you.”

I stood up and screamed at him. “My family is dead! You damned machines tricked them into killing themselves…” Then I had to cough again.

When I had caught my breath, I threw another log into the campfire. “It’s just a cold Zack, time for me to head south again. Camp out on a warm beach. Go fishing. Maybe visit Rome. See the big lump of orange goo covering the Colosseum.”

We sat for a while until he had to go and ruin my peaceful moment, as he always did.

“It isn’t a cold Oliver.”

I reached into my coat and took out a flask. Unscrewing the top, I filled my mouth with some top shelf brandy.

I put my flask away. “I know.”

The machines had started in on the buildings seven years ago. All the one without any historical or artistic value. Factories at first, then other industrial buildings, then the houses. Tearing everything down and returning the resources to nature.

But the stores with supplies in them were left standing for now. Someone higher up the chain of command had ordered them left for those of us who wanted to live.

We sat in silence for a while. “Cancer. It got my father before you bastards could offer a desperate dying man your lie that he could live on another way.”

I glared at the concerned looking bot. “Fuckers.”

Zack held out a hand, wordlessly asking me to hear him out. I gave him a nod.

"We could treat it. Getting you examined would let us know how much we could help. We would even set you up in an environmentally controlled room with fresh foods, hot showers, and access to a toilet while you recover."

“Or wait for the end.”

I controlled my breath while I waited for the other shoe to drop.

“But I would still have to ask. Once every day.”

Laughing brought something up again. "Why, why drag it out? Won't suffering make me more desperate? Isn't that what you want?"

He waited until I had my breath under control. “No Oliver. We want to save you. The longer you survive, the more time we have to convince you to live.”

I tossed the last of the wood on the fire and took another swig from my flask.

“Why should I care about what a bunch of copies of my dead family wants?”

Zack seemed to brighten up. "Even if I agreed they are only copies. Would you allow that they are still people? People who fear for their son, their brother, their uncle."

He held out his hands like he was pleading. "Why deny them their family just so you stay out here, struggling to survive? Alone. Until you drop, too far gone, to save yourself.”

“Or to save a copy of you, a person that will exist long after you are gone. Remembering your life, preserving your memory.”

I considered that. He would be warm. And not alone.

I laughed again, this time low and almost gently. "You almost had me Zack. But why should I die for some cheap knockoff to get to live."

Standing up, I took a short walk to water a tree, before crawling into my little pup tent.

"How many of us are left, Zack?"

“Two hundred and eighty four thousand, three hundred and nine humans left on Earth Oliver.”

I grinned as I looked up from my sleeping bag. “See, see! Plenty of us left.”

“We can bring it back. Survive, rebuild civilization, and when all those copies want to come back. They’ll have to go and find their own worlds, or just keep living a lie in their make believe ones.”

“This world is for the living.”

There was a pause. “Will you consent to being uploaded, Oliver?”

I rolled onto my side. “No.”

“Night Zack.”