Living to see the '90s again was not something that I particularly expected to be in store for me; yet here I am, despite my best efforts; a relict of the past, still holding on to the 20th century and its ancient ways, even as I'm about to witness it lose its title of "the previous one" to its successor, which I could swear has only just begun. I'm not one to hold a grudge against the passage of time, of course. It's just that, frankly, the new millennium's first century is beginning to get a bit old and tiresome for the lot of us; all 10 billion souls, some in outer space, but most still on Earth. Even though life has changed drastically during my time, everything fundamentally stayed the same. The world got much hotter and much, much more artificial, but luxury and famine are still around, as are cooperation and war, creation and destruction, ecstasy and pointless suffering... life and death. The 21st century used to be synonymous with a bright, enlightened future, with answers, solutions, and improvements, with the withering away of all boundaries. Now it just feels cluttered and entangled by its own rushed utopism; spaghettified into an overwhelming mess.

Knowing I won't be around for much longer, I have given up trying to keep up with the times; still, even I can see that people yearn for something new - and I get it. It's the promise of a new beginning that everyone is so excited about, the same promise that filled the minds of men and women a hundred years ago and probably a hundred years before that as well. I have no patience for optimism; though it does seem that many of the issues that troubled my generation are finally getting close to being solved. There's been some good progress in carbon sequestration, most forms of cancer are now detected and destroyed by AI before anyone ever gets to notice them, and the world human population is about to start falling after two hundred years of explosive growth. It should be happening any day now if the global birth database is to be trusted. But I digress...

As I hunker down on a bench in my favourite park so as to discover anew the simple pleasures in which nature - or, rather, what's left of it - never fails to abound; as I look back on my life; I can't help but wonder about the future of this world - a place I've grown quite attached to over the course of my existence. One that nevertheless still remains to me a mystery. A mystery I wouldn't mind continuing to discover; but alas.

Surrounded by intricate weaves of greenery, I turn off my connection to augmented reality services. The shimmering of signs and banners that had been poking through the leaves disappears, stripping the cityscape off its interface and revealing bare walls patterned with abstract code. Distant sounds of construction work fill the air with screeching whale-song; the sound of a new sea wall being built. I recall that if I stay here long enough, I may be able to spot a delivery vehicle arriving from the mining facilities on the low Earth orbit. For now, however, my gaze remains faithful to the ground.

A young pair enters my field of view, their hands linked together as they stroll along the pathway, busying themselves with a discussion of some personal matters. Their words reach my ears, though I seem to be having trouble grasping their meaning. I glance at the woman; she is reaching for her temple. A surge of tension saturates my skull. It feels like something is trying to pull me away. I try to hold out; but I slip and I fall.

...

"Yes, that's it."

I hear someone speak. The voice seems to be coming from every direction at once. It continues as I battle the sudden grogginess and the blinding brightness assaulting my eyes.

"See how easy that was?"

I try to rub my face, annoyed by my inability to get a hold of myself, but any attempts to move my arms fail. The voice remains loud and clear, which clashes with my impression of its source being very far away. Am I even the one it is addressing?

"Is it ready? The entire batch?"

"Yes. You can take it out now."

Half-conscious, I blink the mental fog away. A great expanse of empty space stretches before me, all white, grey, and blue; but mainly white, and glistening with blurs of scattered radiance. I look to the side, hoping to see my arm. I find it, immobilized within gelatinous vines and a spongy, honeycombed skeleton which gropes me so tightly that I can feel it permeate my body and connect to my veins. My gaze gravitates downwards, making me wish it hadn't. The drop appears astronomical in every sense of the word. But it's not outer space that I found myself in. It's a room; a vast, pearly room.

There's movement - waves of white. I look up; and now the voices are no longer disembodied. Each of their sources reveals itself as a planetary woman, one crowned with wheat gold, the other with earthly brown. The attention of both remains turned towards the wall-like object that firmly holds me in place.

The fair-haired woman extends her arm from her nigh infinitely distant shoulder, reaching for something far above me. Then, her face begins to draw closer, as if it wasn't a face but a moon in descent upon the Earth. It grows in size beyond apparent reason; pulls me in; fills my vision like a zoomed-in frame, making me ever more uncomfortable. She observes me briefly - the size of her pupils ridding them of all expression - then looks away.

"What's going to happen to them?"

"Nothing, really. It was just a test run to show you how it's done."

"It's the autoclave, then, I suppose."

"Yes. We do need to clean up after ourselves."

I force my head away from the vines and hooks of the semi-solid medium. As I look around, I realize it continues in four directions, forming an enormous strip; and it holds people, loads of people; some panicked, others seemingly composed; people of all shapes, ethnicities, and ages, woken up from their lives, from a world of struggles, now futile and illusory, and forgotten like a night's dream by noon; people all around, endowed with knowledge of what it meant to have been, envying the ones who got to live in oblivion and die before the rapture.

"Could you turn it on for me, please?"

"Can't you do it yourself?"

"I can, but I'll feel really bad. We didn't even use them for anything."

"It's a single batch, a drop in the ocean compared to what gets wasted here every day. But sure. Just be prepared that you'll be doing it yourself in the future."

"Yeah. Thanks."

The light has gone out. I feel the saliva on my tongue boil as air gets vacuumed away and pressure drops in preparation for the hot steam's arrival. My consciousness begins to slip away.

"A drop in the ocean, you say... but there's still a lot of them in there, isn't it?"

"10 billion, the usual. That's where the population peaks and the simulation halts."