The Last Humunculus
by Omar Shamsi

The world had ended, or perhaps it had simply moved on without us. The cities were once alive with the hum of machines and the bustle of people, but now they lay in ruins, skeletal remains of a civilization that had once believed it would last forever. There’s a strange beauty in it, I suppose—the wind blowing through empty streets, the silence that lingers in the crumbling buildings. A kind of peace, if you can call it that. The world doesn’t care that it’s fallen. And we? Well, we keep going.

Tim was the first to see it. We were wandering through what was once a massive manufacturing plant, the heart of an industrial age that now seemed like a distant memory. It was strange, really—how such a monumental place could end up a graveyard. But there it was, nestled in the corner, half-hidden under the remnants of shattered metal and glass. The head of a robot—its body long gone, but the skull, still intact, its eyes faintly glowing, held something within it. It wasn’t just a machine anymore. It was something else.

“Look at this,” Tim said, crouching beside the metal skull. His fingers traced the outline of the faded insignia on the robot’s face.

“What is it?” Henry asked, squinting at the strange shape.

“I think it’s a humunculus,” Tim muttered. “A brain inside the machine. It’s still alive, or at least… it’s still something.”

We didn’t fully understand it at first. Humunculus—that strange, forgotten thing from the old world, a biological brain inside a synthetic shell. But as we stared at it, we realized this was something different. There was flickering life behind those glassy eyes. Something human, buried under layers of metal and circuitry.

“Should we…?” Henry started, his voice trailing off.

“We should,” Tim answered firmly. “It might still be conscious. We might be able to… connect.”

And so, we tried.

Jipetta, the youngest of us, was the one who had the most patience with it. She had a way with things, a kindness that made her seem out of place in this forsaken world. She spent hours talking to it, her soft voice coaxing the faintest flickers of awareness from the humunculus brain. Tim would ask questions, trying to probe its consciousness, to figure out if it could remember anything of its past. But all we got were small pulses, like signals from a far-off galaxy—distant and hard to decipher.

“Do you think it remembers what it was?” Jipetta asked one evening, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I don’t know,” Tim said, his brow furrowing. “It remembers something. It’s trying to, at least. But… it’s broken, fractured. It’s all that’s left of something we’ll never understand.”

For days, we sat beside it, watching and waiting, hoping for a breakthrough, though I think we all knew deep down it wasn’t going to come. But it wasn’t just about the machine anymore. We were all a little lost in the wreckage of the world. We, too, had been searching for something—anything—that could give us a reason to keep going. And for a while, the humunculus became that reason.

Then came the day we saw them.

They arrived out of nowhere, like creatures from some nightmare, moving through the abandoned streets with purpose. They were post-human, or something like it—beings who had discarded the remnants of their former selves and turned into something… new. Their bodies were sleek, twisted amalgamations of flesh and metal. The eyes that gleamed from their faces were cold and calculating, and their movements were deliberate, almost predatory.

They didn’t look like survivors. They didn’t look like anything human. They were something else entirely. Something we weren’t sure we wanted to understand.

“Who are they?” Jipetta whispered, her hand tightening around Tim’s.

“Does it matter?” Tim replied, his voice low.

We tried to remain hidden as they passed, but one of them saw us. It stopped in its tracks and turned its head slowly, its glowing eyes narrowing. For a moment, there was silence. The rest of them—about four others—paused too, scanning the area, as if they knew something was amiss.

“Hey,” Henry called out cautiously. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

The creature that had stopped raised its head, regarding us with a gaze that could have frozen the air around it. “You are weak,” it said, its voice rasping from its throat like sandpaper on stone. “You are… not like us.”

“Not like you?” Tim echoed. “What does that mean?”

The creature’s lips curled into something like a smile. “You still think of things in old terms. We’ve moved beyond that. We survive. That is all.”

Jipetta looked to Tim for guidance, but he didn’t have an answer. We stood there, frozen, unsure what to say, what to do. The creatures weren’t interested in us—not really. They were too absorbed in their own purpose, too focused on whatever it was they were after. They didn’t care about the past, about what had come before. They didn’t care about us, or about the humunculus, or about anything that wasn’t useful to their survival.

“Are you going to help us?” Tim asked, his voice tinged with frustration.

The creature tilted its head slightly, as if amused. “Help you? You are already too far gone.”

And then they moved on, leaving us standing there, feeling smaller and smaller in the face of something so indifferent, so other. The world had changed, but we hadn’t. Not really. We were still clinging to something that didn’t exist anymore.

“What now?” Henry asked, his voice flat.

“We can’t fight them,” Tim said quietly. “They don’t care about us. They don’t care about anything.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?” Jipetta’s voice trembled slightly. “Just keep going, like them?”

Tim looked at her, his eyes dark with thought. “Maybe that’s all we can do. Survive. Maybe that’s the only thing left.”

But that wasn’t enough for me. It couldn’t be. There had to be something more. Something more than just existing.

I turned to the humunculus, sitting quietly in its corner, its flickering brain trying to hold on to some semblance of life. “What do you think?” I asked it softly. “Is surviving all that’s left?”

The faintest pulse came from the machine, the neurons inside it firing in something resembling recognition. But then it fell silent again.

We spent the rest of the day watching the horizon, the sky heavy with the weight of a sun that seemed to refuse to set. The creatures had gone, and for a while, all was still. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were out of time—that the questions we were asking had no answers, and the answers we had weren’t the ones we needed.

Then I heard a sound—a faint clicking, a whirring—coming from the humunculus. We all turned toward it, instinctively leaning in. The humunculus had activated, the faintest spark of life running through its synthetic body. The small, fragmented signals it was emitting seemed to grow more coherent, more insistent.

“Is it… speaking?” Jipetta asked, her voice rising in hope.

I couldn’t tell if it was speaking. It felt like a pulse—a rhythm, a heartbeat, something that might be trying to form words. It was broken, too, fragmented like the rest of us, but it was trying. In that moment, I realized something: maybe it wasn’t about surviving. Maybe it wasn’t about finding meaning in the old ways, in the ways we had tried to hold onto. Maybe it was just about being—just existing, in whatever form we could find, for as long as we could.

Maybe we weren’t so different after all.

“Maybe,” Tim said quietly, looking at the humunculus, “survival is just the beginning. Maybe it’s what comes after that matters.”

And in that moment, I couldn’t help but agree.

What if the act of existing—of simply being—was enough?

Digitally Assisted Text – Story and Concept by Omar Shamsi

Disclaimer:

This is a fictional work. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The content of this story is entirely the product of the author’s imagination and is not intended to reflect or depict any real-life situations, individuals, or entities. All characters, locations, and events are fictional any similarities with actual persons or events are unintentional. The author and publisher disclaim any liability for any perceived connection between the narrative and any real-world person or situation.

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