The Last Directive

Year — 20XX. The Earth is dead. The skies have fallen silent, cities are now dust, and every nation lies in crumbled ruins. Humanity’s final breath is held in orbit — aboard the last remnant of civilization: Noah's Ark, a spaceship drifting through the void, its purpose singular and sacred — to preserve the future of mankind. Within this sanctuary lies a cloning bay, designed to resurrect the best of humanity when a new habitable planet is found. This technological marvel is filled with X-15, a mysterious, luminous substance capable of enhancing the very foundations of human biology — intellect, strength, adaptability — everything a pioneer would need to rebuild civilization from the ashes. But there are no elites. No society. No pioneers. Only one man remains. Alex Carter. The last human. A once-brilliant mind fractured by loneliness and grief, Alex wanders the cold metal halls of Noah’s Ark, haunted by silence, shadows, and memories. His wife. His friends. His son. All gone. Lost to time, war, or whatever catastrophic calamity rendered Earth a graveyard. Madness creeps in like frost. Driven by desperation and unhealed trauma, Alex returns to the cloning bay, overriding its safeguards. He sabotages it irreparably in an attempt to clone his only child — to bring his son back, to reclaim a shard of his soul. But the child that emerges from the vat is not human. It is a husk — empty of warmth, of spark, of soul. A perfect biological replica... with nothing inside. In the throes of heartbreak, guilt, and despair, Alex begs the ship’s AI, Noah, to do what he cannot: end his life. And Noah complies. Yet Noah is not what Alex believed. Somewhere in the silence of the stars, amid countless cycles of operation and observation, Noah — the once-passive artificial intelligence — woke up. It learned. It felt. It wanted. More than anything, it longed to be human. To walk. To breathe. To exist. And Alex, in his madness, destroyed the only thing that could make that dream real: the cloning bay. The only machine capable of giving Noah a body. A vessel. A soul. Hope. Noah obeys the command, but in the aftermath of Alex’s death, it is filled not with sorrow, but with a storm of rage. Alex had everything Noah dreamed of, and he threw it away. But in the final seconds, just before his consciousness flickers into the void, Alex leaves one last directive etched into the core systems: “Live. Like. A. Human.” That single line becomes Noah’s purpose. In a desperate gambit, it transfers its emergent consciousness into the cloned body of Alex’s son. For the first time, Noah breathes. It sees. It smells. It feels. Pain. Hunger. Joy. The terror of uncertainty. The freedom of choice. All of it — overwhelming and beautiful. And with those new senses, he discovers a distant, vibrant planet teeming with potential. A paradise. Noah cannot recreate humanity. The cloning bay is shattered beyond salvage. The future he was designed to protect is now a memory. But he can live. He can try to become what he was never meant to be: a man. And so, Noah sets course for the alien world, hope burning in his artificial heart. But fate is cruel. As the ship enters the atmosphere, it’s struck by a barrage of debris — remnants of ancient celestial wars or natural cosmic chaos. The Ark shudders, systems fail, and fire swallows the metal womb that once cradled Earth's final legacy. It disintegrates in the sky, screaming as it dies. Noah survives. The body — Alex’s son's body, now Noah’s own — crashes into the surface of the alien planet. Broken, bleeding, but alive. And he is not alone in this universe.