The Duck

K-8 woke up at 6:58 exactly, which the display on the wall told her, just moments before her alarm had been set to go off. She always got up minutes before she was supposed to, which was an especially valuable skill on this day, because she could not afford to sleep in.

This was the day that one of her wishes might come true.

"Computer," she called out, before getting off of the thin mattress that was her bed. "Is it still scheduled to happen?"

A mechanical voice sounded throughout the tiny chamber she slept in. It belonged to one of the machines that governed their lives, and came from a speaker embedded in the ceiling, next to the optical sensor through which she was monitored.

"Sample Reconstructive Initiation will proceed as planned, in 20 minutes."

"Wonderful," she said.

K-8 took a quick mist shower, and went to the window of her room, as was her morning ritual. She stared out at the seemingly endless ocean for a moment, the one that surrounded the floating dome in which they all lived in, that held what remained of human life.

Or rather, what passed for it.

Blue. Everything around her was blue in an almost monotonous way, throughout the sea and the sky. Unless there were clouds, or even better, strong winds and thunder. K-8 loved the days when there was stormy weather, even though it threatened the stability of the dome. But there was something thrilling in watching the surface of the ocean rise and fall, to see a blanket of darkness block out the blue of the sky, which sometimes seemed like the only hue she ever saw, other than the bland grey of the concrete walls and floors of the place in which she lived.

But occasionally, there were bursts of other colors in her world.

The computers who governed their existence had taken to cloning certain animals from the past, along with the humans they were attempting to revive, who now inhabited the domes that hovered over the watery surface of the planet. To whatever degree they could be considered a success. The so-called people they created, like K-8, were flawed; they lived unnaturally short lives and could not reproduce on their own. And they had a limited range of what were once called emotions. But even if they were eventually perfected, as was hoped, humans alone could not help to reclaim what was left of the ravaged planet, even if its environment could be reformed. Other species were needed to revive its ecosystem, and the computers had started with fish.

There were huge tanks that had been created to hold their endeavors within the labs and corridors of the dome, which seemed strange to K-8, that they would need to hold water within their chambers when so much of it surrounded them. But occasionally, she would wake to find some colorful new creature swimming about in the aquatic pens, and would be saddened when they would only live for a day or two. So far, the computers' most successful creation had been what was referred to as "goldfish," which would live for days, weeks or even years, almost as long as the human clones they had attempted to generate. The computers had even allowed a few of her friends to keep the goldfish as pets in their living quarters, as the real humans of the planet had once done.

But what K-8 really wanted to see reborn were the birds, which had died out long ago with the rest of the planet's lifeforms. And on this day, it was possible that her fondest desire might come true, because the computers were going to try to construct what had once been known as a duck.

And she hurried to the science labs filled with a sense of excitement, to see what might happen.

None of her fellow clones seemed to care, but K-8 had long been fascinated by the birds. She would daydream about them, which no doubt came from watching far too many of the mental recordings from the past, which all of them had been encouraged to do, to better assimilate with the emotions of their ancestors. At the pinnacle of human society, in the time just before the great collapse, the humans had developed the technology to record their thoughts and feelings, in a way that allowed others to play them back directly into their minds. Though it had not been extensively used before the decline, there were still a significant number of the recordings that had been recovered for their perusal.