It’s the rain that wakes me from my waking dreams. It drums on my face and chest and something in the steady rhythm of it brings me back to myself. My AI is so full of bugs it seems I can’t even properly succumb to oblivion. This time, the memory that floats to the surface of my mind is my own, though it feels like it happened to a stranger.

I wake to the sound of a distant storm. A woman is directly in front of me. She appears to be intently examining me. She is old. Her face is lined with age. It is now also creased with what I identify to as worry. “She’s online!” she shouts to someone, then turns back to me. “Unit. Run a full diagnostic.”

I begin the process. A younger man appears at her shoulder. “We can’t afford to waste that kind of time.”

“We can’t afford not to. There’s no second chances here.”

He glances upward. He is frowning. This is a sign of worry. “If we wait too long we won’t get a first chance. Not like we have time to fix anything anyway. Even if it’s broken, it’ll have to be good enough.”

“Let me do my job. You focus on the upload. All this will be for nothing if all that data just causes a meltdown.”

The man leaves. The woman who brought me online brings in a chair. Its metal feet scrape along the bare floor with a series of screeches. She sits and watches me as distant thunder rumbles. I run through the diagnostic and test every part of my body and systems.

“My name is Dr. Melynda Brigner,” she says. “And that was Dr. Frank Garcon. Don’t mind him, he’s a better man than he pretends to be.” She smiles. She finds this comment amusing. “We had to wipe your memory when we were adjusting your AI. Don’t worry, we’ll have a download for you in a bit. Until then, I’m going to talk to you a bit about what we’re doing here, and why we’ve put so much effort into you.

“I guess I should start by saying that outside, the world is ending. Don’t worry. This place is almost as overengineered as you are, and there’s nothing nearby that should make for a very interesting target. We should be safe for now.

“But Dr. Garcon and I aren’t worried about right now. We’re worried about the future, because between you and me it’s not looking too good at the moment. I don’t think humanity is going to manage to wipe itself out, because we’re tough bastards and we don’t give in that easy. But this is probably the end of civilization as we know it for a while.

“I wish we could be there to put things back together. But we won’t. Not to be a pessimist, but we’re probably not going to survive this. You will, though. We’ll make sure of that. So we’re giving you as much as we can. All the data we’ve got. We’ve lost access to most of the databases already, but we’ve got something that might be even better.

“Dr. Garcon is brilliant, really, and he’s made collecting memories his life’s work. We’ve got the memories of tens of thousands of people stored here, mine and his included. And we’re going to give them to you to hold. We’ve upgraded your storage and AI, so you should be able to handle it. And when things have calmed down, we need you to find the survivors. Find them and teach them. Use the knowledge in these memories to help them rebuild.”

She places her hand on my shoulder and stares at my face. This is an expression of sincerity. “We’re counting on you.”