The threatening species

Curiosity was a characteristic trait of humans, and yet it was by opening this book that everything began. In this archive room, soulless and seemingly endless, placed in a box carefully stored on a high shelf, this small rectangle with yellowed pages caught Vega's attention. No one had visited this room in a long time, a sort of literary cemetery where all the manuscripts that had once constituted the majority of human knowledge and inventions were stored. It was a dark room, the scent of aged pages filling the air, contrasting with the brightness and sanitized smells of the laboratory where Vega usually spent her time. The lab was spacious, designed for long hours of research, with every centimeter thoughtfully utilized. The workers in the laboratory, commonly known as lab technicians, made up less than 0.07% of the Earth's total population, and an even smaller percentage in the department of extinct species.

Vega had been directed towards her future profession since her conception, a field that had immediately fascinated her. While all her colleagues spent their working days mechanically striving to reintroduce extinct species, Vega had a much greater project in mind ever since she gained consciousness: to recreate a forbidden species.

She had never spoken about this project to anyone. She spent an enormous amount of time studying, gathering information here and there, amassing over the years all the knowledge necessary to recreate a species herself. Not merely cloning a related species, hoping to give them enough common points and identical genetic traits—like her training had taught her during her early years of practice with frogs or various breeds of rats. This time, it was about starting from a simple sample and creating, from scratch, what had once been a fully-fledged being.

There were two species forbidden from reintroduction or reappearance: dinosaurs and humans. The former had disappeared due to natural causes, succumbing to the climate and evolution to which they were evidently not destined to survive. For humans, it was an entirely different story; just after their extinction, they were deemed a "threatening species." In the very first records Vega accessed after her days of absorbing theoretical information, she learned that 357 animal species had gone extinct due to humans, including 86 mammals, 24 reptiles, 5 amphibians, 18 fish, 18 insects, 1 crustacean, 12 mollusks, and 194 bird species. This, of course, did not include the 110 varieties of plants and flowers that met the same fate. From that point on, humans were considered a dangerous, irresponsible, and uncontrollable species, unworthy of a second chance.

When humans themselves became extinct, due to the climate problems they had caused, during the short period from 2190 to 2207, the AIs, which had become fully autonomous and viable without human aid, decided not to bring humans back to life.

But when Vega entered the Department of Human History, finding books cataloged and preserved as keepsakes, she quickly became intrigued by a box placed on a high shelf. AIs were never disorganized or negligent, so it was unlikely that someone had left it there by mistake. After climbing the shelf, opening the box, and reaching inside, Vega made contact with a small book. Without quite knowing why, she hid it in the transfer satchel she carried over her shoulder and took it back to her quarters. That evening, as she prepared to stay up late, she took a few minutes to read it. It wasn't anything particularly special. It was about a complicated love story, a failed revolution, and the strength of human conviction. A fairly simple yet honest depiction of what humanity must have been like at a certain moment. Vega had always found the judgment and decision about humans cruel, but since reading this, the thought that they would never return to Earth haunted her.

She had never understood how a species that had created so much, even being their creator and without whom no AI could claim to exist in any form, could have been responsible for so much damage and neglect in its own environment. Vega believed that dinosaurs had had their chance, and it was nature and evolution that led to their extinction, requiring no injustice or blame. But humans... Maybe it wasn't a collective decision, maybe not all of them were as dangerous to their environment and to themselves as those who caused the extinction of all those species. They deserved a chance, even if it was just to see the light of day again.