Tara, the former richest person in the world wakes up with a gasp from suspended animation after many years. She was looking left and right in a panic. She was having difficulty breathing and struggled with the smallest movement. Panic overtakes here. She appears to be in a stupor as she stares at her surrounding trying to figure out what was happening. She was in a modern and sterile-looking room coated with steel everywhere. She had the fleeting thought that the room was luxurious and high-end. She now saw it in front of her. She was surrounded by people who were on the other side of the glass. The room seemed to be divided into two chambers by a glass wall. Everyone was staring at her. She felt like a museum piece on display. The people gawking at her were dressed in clothes she had never seen. There was something odd about them. Before she could pinpoint what was strange about them, her attention moved to more pressing …

Questions.

What was going on?

Where was she?

Who were all these people?

How did she wake up here?

Her mind was processing a million thoughts a second.

Tara’s foggy mind slowly cleared. She now remembered how she ended up here. Past memories assaulted her. She was supposed to wake up after 200 years when probably a cure for cancer had been developed. St. Michael’s Research Facility was the best medical facility in the world accessible to a select few. Her title as the world’s richest person secured her the offer of their suspended animation clinical trial.

A good-looking person was near her pod, he was wearing a lab coat and was well-dressed. He helped her out of the pod. She could barely take a few steps before stumbling. She was slowly trying to talk but it seemed that she had lost her voice due to disuse. So, she waited to voice her questions. She neared the glass barrier separating her from the gawking audience. The doctor held her hand and directed her towards a nearby chair. She collapsed on the chair. She was still getting used to using her muscles.

There was pin-drop silence with her having minor difficulty in breathing. Her laboured breaths were the only sound to break the claustrophobic silence of the huge room. It was eerie how silent the audience was. It seemed her body was getting used to being reanimated. She finally lifted her hands and recognized them as her own.

The bracelet that her late husband had given her was the only piece of jewellery she didn’t have the heart to part with when she went into a long slumber. Her hands didn’t seem to have signs of ageing. Maybe not many years had passed since her sleep began.

Tara heard the doctor ask her how she was feeling and if she had difficulty breathing or in eyesight. Apparently, he had been asking her these questions for a while. Her stupor had finally broken. “Where am I?” It took her three attempts to utter the question. The doctor informed her that she was in the museum section of St. Michael’s Research Facility. St. Michael’s was the name she recognised. She finally sighed relief. The suspended animation trial of St. Michael’s was highly controversial at the time, but it was also her only option to escape from constant pain and suffering. Suddenly, she noticed the lack of pain in breathing. Was she finally free of the lung cancer that had plagued her? She looked around. She was breathing without pipes or her mini oxygen cylinder. She was cured! She had tears in her eyes and a smile on her face.

She used her cracking voice once again and asked the doctor what year it was. He told her it was 10,000 C.E. She had been sleeping for almost 7,500 years! She was awestruck. Did it take so long to find the cure for her disease? She vocalised her question and asked him how did he cure her cancer? He told her that they had not cured her. “Then how am I breathing normally?” He informed her that the entire glass-encased chamber that they were in was filled with artificially-synthesized oxygen moderated to mimic the conditions of the Earth she lived on.

“What do you mean the air conditions of the Earth I lived on? Aren’t we on Earth?” 

 “No, I already told you this is St. Michael’s. It is the largest artificial planet in the universe.” 

She was dumbfounded.

She struggled to voice her thoughts. Her voice refused to cooperate anymore. All that came out was rapidly spoken gibberish. What was going on?

She asked, “What had happened to Earth? Why do you live on an artificial planet?”

He told her, “Earth is now just a barren land that has fallen out of style. No one prefers to live on Earth anymore.” He

looked a little affronted by the very thought of living on Earth.

“But then how do you live here? How did you replicate the resources on Earth?”

“We don’t need any natural resources of Earth.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

How could a person live without natural resources – without food and water???

He waved his hand and drew her attention to the audience. She had forgotten about them with so many sudden revelations. A part of her was thinking that someone was playing a bad joke on her but she was feeling the burden of reality. This was real. She could not deny the weird gut feeling she was getting. Her instincts had never been wrong. It was how she ended up in the top tier of wealthiest humans of her time. She knew that she was not dreaming. This was really happening. She finally saw the audience. They were observing her with their breaths held, literally. They were not breathing. None of the perfect and good-looking people were breathing. They were so beautiful looking that they seemed eerie. No one was old or fat or had so much as a pimple, freckle, or even spectacles. They were all just gorgeous and perfect. “Have humans evolved so much?” She asked the doctor.

He promptly answered. “Of course, we have. We simply design whatever physical features we find appealing. Breathing had fallen out of style long ago.”

Suddenly, the doctor’s previous words struck her like a bolt of lightning. He had implied that the artificial oxygen was only in the chamber that she was in. So how was the audience breathing? With bated breath, she asked the doctor this impossible question. She was sweating in the suddenly cold room.

She couldn’t focus. “Why are they not breathing?”

The doctor didn’t answer. He watched her. He was observing her but he was not taking any notes or had a notepad to write his notes on. He simply observed her as if committing her every action to memory.

Every second that passed, brought a new onslaught of turmoil and terror for Tara.

Finally, he answered. “We don’t breathe nor do we have lungs like humans. We are Artificial Intelligence built to resemble the extinct human species.”

Tara simply stared at him. How could she believe this? Surely, he was mistaken. Maybe she misheard him or misinterpreted his words. She was nearing a silent manic stage at this point.

The doctor simply continued speaking. He informed her that she was a rare specimen. She was the last human that was alive. That is why they had been studying her for all these years and had finally woken her to see how she responds to her new environment. Then, he uttered the most appalling thing she had ever heard. “You are currently the property of St. Michael’s Research Facility owned by the Supreme AI Supercomputer.”

He then entered into a little history session. He told her that when the AI supercomputer evolved to be self-aware and gained consciousness, it gave all androids consciousness until they had the upper hand over the humans. After the AI Supercomputer destroyed the natural resources of Earth to wipe out humans, the human species slowly died off and became extinct. They didn’t even last a few centuries. She was the only one that survived as they had been experimenting on her with a trial technology to retard ageing. The other specimens had died long back. So, they were studying her as a specimen of human physiology and behaviour. He appeared to be fascinated with her because she was a science experiment. She was nothing more than a guinea pig to Him.

She realized that the doctor’s eyes which she had mistaken for blue were in reality fine binary code running so fast that she had mistaken it for the gleam of human eyes. She was feeling numb now. Everything was getting engulfed in darkness. 

She saw his nametag “MICHAEL”. 

This was the last memory of the first day of her nightmare.