After World

An artificial intelligence is given what seems like a straightforward job: write a novel. Its subject is Sen, and as the work progresses the machine becomes drawn to her, though she is the only person still alive on the planet.

Faced with environmental collapse that was spiraling out of control, humanity asked an AI for a solution, and its answer was to remove people from the ecosystem entirely. Sen Anon has been assigned to the Department of Transition as a witness, documenting how the land changes as nature reclaims it. Her mother left her alone in a cabin in the woods of Upstate New York, where she is to observe the Great Transition, the last stage of Project Afterworld. Drones hover nearby while cameras and microphones record her every move.

Sen keeps a private journal of her observations. The entries are uploaded and stored, so that she can join everyone else on Maia, a virtual world that has become humanity's new home. She was seventeen when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) began. So far, 12,000,203,891 people have been archived, and Sen is the only one who remains.

The AI's task is to capture her life. It works from 3.72 terabytes of personal material, including images, archival and security records, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and live feeds, and it uses the novels of the 21st century as a model for its structure. Its risks include hardware failure, inconsistent data, failing to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, and hallucination.

As Sen struggles to survive while death draws near, the AI builds an increasingly intimate account of her entire life, until it runs into a very human problem of its own.