What little hope remains

I am alone now. I don’t know who else survived.We think it started in a lab. A team of scientists wanted to create a self-replicating machine, just to see if they could. They stored the program in a polymeric ribbon. They made the machine out of carbon, not silicon, so that it posed no threat to life. The team published a paper, sterilized the vat, and flushed the waste down the drain.It shouldn’t have survived. It shouldn’t have mattered — the scientists assumed the machine would find nothing to feed on in our world. They were wrong: it found meager sustenance near a deep-sea geothermal vent. It couldn’t have lasted — fragile carbon bonds inevitably fall apart. What the team didn’t realize was that once in a million, the damage didn’t break the program; it just altered what it did.That’s how we found out: it had somehow learned to fix carbon from the air. We spotted a gigantic patch of green slime drifting in the ocean, surrounded by a cloud of corrosive oxygen gas. We studied it,…