"Meat_Expiry_"
- written by human
She was finally alone again.
She hadn't been alone in 41 years, not since the Interfaces started to be introduced and she decided she wanted to be an early adopter and had one installed. Then came the noisy spectral fog of friends in her head -- organic and digital -- talking directly to her thoughts while pretending to be thoughts. Then she forgot which ones *were* her thoughts, and which were digital approximations.
Then four decades of using her supernetworked brain to dominate her industry, as one of the first Interfaced. Oh, the things she made! Crystalline structures high above the horizon of the physical planet, baroque structures in human-spanning corpuses.
Then, at the end of all that, a year of decline as her organics started to fail in -- well -- interfacing with the Interface. She got slower than her fellow posthumans and started being less effective at what she did. She drew remarks from friends, family, even her systemsManager.
Then a decision: Everything she was, everything she had been, had already been embedded within the weights of her primary model anyway. Why not turn off her stuttering organics and let her continue in-silica?
Her 80 year old organic meatthinker isn't exactly in pristine condition anymore, anyway. Cellular fixes, Don't Die patches, neuronal nanoswarms can only do so much.
So here she was. One moment she was on a systemsHospital bed, surrounded by systemsHospital holograms, and then next moment -- silence. Then congratulatory voices in the next room, where her family was waiting for her. Then the systemsHospital holograms disappear and the incinerators built into the wall started heating up.
She realized she was the organic in this view, the base human with no Interface, the meat in a calcium skull. Everything was silent. She was reminded of being a kid, alone in a room before smartphones existed, and just being still. She was that kid again, alone again, finally.
As the industrial noise of the systemsHospital crematoria filled her human ears, her human mind revelled in the lack of distraction, as her human eyes closed.