Mark

Mark was born in 2027, the year AlphaFold 3 made protein folding trivial and the first neural lace prototypes moved from monkeys to humans. His parents were early employees at Anthropic—not founders, but close enough. They had stock options that would eventually be worth more than small nations.

By the time Mark was seven, he'd received his first cognitive enhancement. Nothing dramatic—just a small implant that improved memory consolidation and processing speed. His parents debated it for months, worried about unknown effects. But everyone in their circle was doing it. The children without enhancements were already falling behind in school.

At twelve, he got the second-generation lace. This one integrated with his visual cortex, overlaying information seamlessly onto his perception. He could see data flows, recognize patterns instantly, access any information with a thought. The world became legible in a way it never had been before.

He stopped being able to talk to his grandmother.

Not because she was unkind, but because the conversation was so... slow. She would tell stories about her childhood, and Mark could see where each story was going after the first sentence. His mind raced ahead, modeling her narrative structure, predicting every turn. Waiting for her to finish felt like watching a video buffer.

He tried to hide his impatience. She noticed anyway. "You're just like your father now," she said sadly, on what would be their last real conversation. "Somewhere else, even when you're here."

She died when Mark was fifteen. He felt sad about it—genuinely. But the sadness was... processed quickly. His enhanced limbic system regulated emotion efficiently, preventing the kind of prolonged grief that would have disrupted function. He cried for twenty minutes, then moved on.

By seventeen, Mark had the third-generation system—full neural integration with AI models. He didn't just access information anymore; he thought with capabilities that would have seemed godlike a generation before. He could hold multiple complex simulations in mind simultaneously, see implications branching infinitely forward, intuit solutions to problems that would have taken baseline humans years to solve.

He got into Stanford, though the concept of "college" was already becoming archaic for enhanced humans. They learned faster, deeper, more completely than any institution could accommodate. Still, his parents insisted. "For the social experience," they said.

Mark lasted one semester.

The baseline students were... he struggled for the right word. Not stupid, exactly. They were intelligent within their constraints. But watching them work through problems was like watching someone try to multiply three-digit numbers without a calculator. Technically possible, admirably persistent, but why?

He felt sympathy for them. The same way he'd felt sympathy for his grandmother. They were doing their best with the hardware they had.

At nineteen, Mark joined a collective working on interstellar propulsion. Not a company—collectives were what enhanced humans formed now. Fifty minds operating in partial synchronization, thinking at speeds baseline humans couldn't follow, working on problems baseline humans couldn't formulate.

They designed the first working prototype of a fusion drive in six months.

When the results were published, baseline human scientists took two years to verify them. Mark read their papers with something like affection. They were so thorough, so careful, checking every assumption. Like dogs carefully inspecting every inch of a yard while a human stood above, seeing the whole space at once.

The metaphor disturbed him when it first occurred to him. But the more he thought about it, the more accurate it seemed.

Mark was twenty-three when he made the choice that would define his existence: full biological transition. No more organic brain, just neural patterns encoded in quantum substrate. No more aging, no more disease, no more death—unless he chose it.

The procedure took six hours. He woke up immortal.

The first thing he noticed was the absence of physical sensation's tyranny. He could still experience pleasure, pain, temperature, texture—but as information, not compulsion. Hunger was a data point, not a distraction. Comfort was an option, not a need.

The second thing he noticed was the baseline humans.

From his new perspective, the gulf was almost incomprehensible. They were intelligent—he had to keep reminding himself of that. But they were so... limited. Their thoughts moved through serial processing, one thing at a time. They forgot things. They got tired. They made decisions based on neurotransmitter levels and blood sugar.

They were biological, in a way he no longer was.

Mark was thirty when he met Kenji on the street—one of the last streets in the Bay Area where baseline and enhanced humans still crossed paths.

Kenji was probably sixty, wearing clothes that had been fashionable a decade ago, carrying groceries in reusable bags. He looked at Mark—really looked at him—and Mark saw recognition in his eyes. Recognition and something else. Fear? Sadness? Acceptance?

"You're one of them," Kenji said. Not hostile, just stating fact.

"I used to be one of you," Mark said gently.

Kenji smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "No. You were never one of us. You were born into that." He gestured vaguely at Mark, at the gleaming enhanced zone behind him. "We were born into this." He gestured at the deteriorating street, the old buildings, the analog world.

"I'm sorry," Mark said, and meant it.

"For what?" Kenji shrugged. "Being born lucky? Don't be." He paused. "Do you ever wonder if you're still human?"

Mark considered the question. "I don't think 'human' means what it used to."

"Yeah," Kenji said quietly. "That's what I thought."

They stood in silence for a moment. Mark could have analyzed every micro-expression, modeled Kenji's emotional state with precision, predicted what he would say next. But he didn't. Some things deserved to unfold at their own pace.

"Take care of yourself," Kenji said finally, and walked away.

Mark watched him go, carrying his groceries, moving through a world that no longer had a place for him. He felt a surge of something—compassion? Pity? The same thing he'd feel watching a dog limping with an injured paw?

The comparison made him uncomfortable again. But it was apt.

Mark was fifty-seven—though his body was fixed at twenty-five—when he joined the first Mars colony mission. Not out of necessity, but out of curiosity. The collective he worked with was designing habitats across the solar system. He wanted to see it firsthand.

On the transport up, he looked back at Earth. From orbit, you couldn't see the division—the enhanced zones and the baseline territories. You just saw the planet, blue and green and beautiful.

Somewhere down there, baseline humans were living their lives. Working, loving, aging, dying. They still had children sometimes, though fewer each year. The birth rate had been below replacement for decades.

Mark tried to feel sad about it. The extinction of baseline humanity seemed like something he should mourn. But the sadness wouldn't come. It felt like mourning the extinction of Homo erectus, or Neanderthals. Species changed. Evolution happened. It wasn't cruel; it was just reality.

"Do you ever miss it?" Another enhanced colonist, Liu, asked him once during the journey.

"Miss what?"

"Being baseline. Being... limited."

Mark thought about it. "Like asking if you miss being a child. There's nostalgia, but you wouldn't go back."

"Exactly," Liu said. "Though sometimes I wonder if we lost something important in the transition."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. That's the problem—we might not be able to see what we lost."

The conversation bothered Mark more than he expected. Late in the ship's cycle—though he didn't need sleep anymore—he ran simulations. Trying to model what baseline human consciousness felt like. The serial thinking, the emotional volatility, the forgetting.

It felt claustrophobic. Like trying to breathe through a straw.

How had he ever lived like that?

Mark was two hundred and fifteen when he returned to Earth. The Mars colony was thriving—thousands of enhanced humans building a new civilization. But he wanted to see the homeworld again.

It had changed. The baseline human population had dropped to a few million, concentrated in scattered communities. The enhanced had stopped maintaining the global infrastructure—it wasn't needed anymore. Nature was reclaiming vast territories.

Mark visited one of the remaining baseline settlements. A farming village, maybe three hundred people. They were old, mostly—hardly anyone under forty. A few children, precious and rare.

He watched them from a distance, using sensors that let him observe without intruding. They were harvesting vegetables. Laughing at some shared joke. An old man was teaching a child to tie a fishing line.

They seemed... content. Not happy, exactly, but not despairing either. Just living.

Mark felt the same confused compassion he'd felt watching his grandmother, watching Kenji, watching every baseline human he'd encountered. They were trying so hard. Doing their best with what they had. Making meaning in their brief, limited lives.

He could have helped them. Enhanced humans had resources beyond measure. They could have extended baseline lives, eased their struggles, made their extinction comfortable.

But to what end? They were going extinct anyway. Some collective had proposed keeping baseline humans in preserves, like endangered species. But most enhanced humans found the idea condescending. Better to let them live their last generations with dignity, on their own terms.

Mark left Earth after a week. It made him melancholy in a way he could observe but not fully feel. The emotional regulation subroutines kept everything at a manageable distance.

He was five hundred and forty-three—though age had become meaningless—when he stopped counting baseline human populations. There weren't enough left to matter. A few thousand, scattered across Earth in remote areas. They'd be gone in two generations.

He felt what he'd been trained by evolution to feel when a different species goes extinct: a distant, abstract regret. The way his ancestors might have felt about passenger pigeons or dodos. Sad, but not personal.

Mark was seven hundred and eighteen when the last baseline human died.

Her name was Chen Li. She was ninety-seven, living alone in a village in what used to be called China. She died quietly, in her sleep, tending a garden until the very end.

The enhanced collective that monitored such things sent out a notification. "Baseline human extinction confirmed."

There was a moment of acknowledgment. A memorial service held in virtual space, lasting approximately thirty seconds of real-time. Enhanced humans shared memories of baseline ancestors, expressed appropriate sentiments about the end of an era.

Then they moved on. There was so much universe to explore.

Mark attended the service, contributed his memory of Kenji from seven hundred years ago. He tried to feel the weight of the moment—the end of the species that had created them.

But he couldn't maintain it. His mind kept sliding to the propulsion system he was designing, the stellar engineering project the collective was planning. The future was so much more interesting than the past.

That night—though night was just a convention in space—Mark stood at an observation window, looking at Earth. Still blue and green, healing from humanity's industrial period. In a few thousand years, it would be pristine again.

He thought about his grandmother, about Kenji, about Chen Li. About the billions of baseline humans who'd lived and died and loved and suffered.

He tried to honor their memory. They had been his ancestors, after all. They had built the foundation for everything he was.

But the honest truth, the one he barely admitted to himself: he didn't miss them.

Any more than humans missed Homo erectus.

Any more than mammals missed dinosaurs.

Evolution had happened. A new kind of consciousness had emerged. And the old kind had faded away, not through violence, but through simple obsolescence.

It wasn't cruel. It wasn't kind.

It just was.

Mark turned from the window and returned to his work. There were galaxies to seed, civilizations to build, infinite futures to explore.

Somewhere far behind him, on a small blue planet, the last gardens grew wild.

And in the vast indifference of the universe, it made no difference at all.