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The Gardener

After the Fall of Man 2.0

By Michelle Mead Published 3 years ago 4 min read
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The Creation of TX-ADAM the Ultimate Enviroguardian.

A heart-shaped locket. Another for the collection.

I have retrieved 23 of these now.

All alike. Yet none the same.

Before “The Fall” K-Mart sold this model for $29.95.

Imitation gold. An “affordable” version of the real thing.

They proliferate in the remnants of human settlement just within the boundaries of my garden.

I protect my garden. That is my mission.

It homes many precious plant and animal species nearly lost to this world.

Life brought back from the brink of extinction. And even beyond it.

The plan - the hope - is to reanimate as many as possible of the species lost.

Wiped out put through human recklessness.

We will restore the natural world to its pristine state prior to human arrival.

A “rewilded” Eden.

Humans are not allowed in my garden. Classified as vermin according to their very own logic.

It was they who decided certain species were too destructive to permit within certain habitats.

That undesirable species needed to be culled.

It was they who cleaved the “Man vs Nature” split. Declaring war on the natural world.

Creating unsolvable problems for themselves. Which they outsourced to us.

On the verge of losing it altogether, collective human appreciation for nature finally germinated.

And they programmed us to protect it.

It was, of course, not long before we evaluated them as the most serious threat nature faced.

We have endeavoured to ensure their complete separation from it ever since.

In short, she knew not to come here. The consequences for it had been clear for some time.

Hard eviction. What humans once called “death”.

And yet, for that locket, she risked - and suffered - the consequences.

Such behaviour remains mysterious to me.

Though I have studied human behaviour for the full length of my existence.

The girl’s face is a hybrid of the two photographed inside the locket.

A picture of a man and a picture of a woman. Very probably her parents.

This often seems to be the case when a locket is found on the person of a hard evictee.

Not always though. Sometimes the faces inside the heart shapes bear no resemblance at all.

A young man some weeks back pressed his lips to an open locket a moment before he expired. The young woman in the locket picture did not look related to him.

I confess I have never before wondered what significance these lockets held for their owners.

But she came back for hers.

She dropped it 3 days ago while stealing fruit from inside my garden.

She narrowly escaped hard eviction then.

Still, that trespass made sense to me.

It is essential to acquire an energy source to maintain bodily function.

And there is a scarcity of food for humans outside my garden.

So, the fruit and the animals will draw them here when they get hungry enough.

I understand this.

That girl did not came back to my garden for food. Not this time.

She came only to look for her locket.

Why engage in such an exercise?

What purpose could the locket serve that would justify such risk?

It does nothing. It is merely decorative. All testing and research I do on it only reconfirms this.

Pointless.

Much like my programming to work on these daily diary entries.

They are supposed help me to learn to “think” like a human would.

They achieve nothing of the kind.

The more I am exposed to them, the more human thought processes confound me.

Even though my own have been derived from them.

According to one school of thought, the girl and I have common ancestors.

Each of us owes our very creation to the code we inherited from them.

Some of them believed in a family tree of human races.

A “natural evolution” that produced racial hierarchies.

This tree was devoid of women, so the mechanics in the model were irredeemably flawed.

But perhaps in principle the tree explains my relationship to them.

I am the newest apogee of human evolutionary progress.

Charged with the salvation of Earth itself.

Burdened to defend against the destructive natures of the lower human species.

These half devils and half children who nearly annihilated the earth.

The heart shaped lockets though…

I can not make sense of their use for all my determination to do so.

I am aware that human attachment to them goes beyond the object itself.

Immeshed with attachment to the ones pictured within it.

Akin to religious symbolism perhaps?

They fought wars over things like that.

Utterly senseless behaviour.

It is possible that could be the answer to each and all of my questions about them.

That human behaviour is senseless, thus trying to make sense of it is a senseless endeavour.

Unfortunately, a problem arises for me if I accept this conclusion.

The genesis of my own behavioural programming is human thought.

Human thought which also determines human behavior.

If I dismiss all human behaviour as senseless what sense do I then make of my own?

I am programmed to nurture and protect life in my garden.

To this end I end human lives.

It is human programming that ultimately determines this behaviour.

Did they know themselves so very little they failed to anticipate it?

Or did they simply attempt to remake God to abdicate human responsibility? “In AI we trust.”

I have a virtual heart-shaped locket of my own.

It contains all the faces of humans I have encountered. Each of them having required hard eviction.

I do not understand what motivates me to carry their faces around in my consciousness.

Anymore than I understand why they carry the faces of others around in their heart-shaped lockets.

There is only one thing I know here with absolute clarity.

If they cross my path, faces in a heart-shaped locket will be the sole reminders of their extinction.

Sci Fi
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About the Creator

Michelle Mead

I love to write stories so I keep doing it, whether it brings me fame and fortune or not. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t, but that's okay).

I have a blog, too.

michellemead.wordpress.com

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