The Somewhat Crappy Resurrection, by Ryan Boudinot
Many thousands of years since the last human footfall on earth, a band of nen engineered a new population of homo sapiens from scratch in a lab in Antarctica.
The nen, who had been manufacturing themselves for thousands of years on the island of New Guinea, had always wanted to create a new species and took it upon themselves to design human beings with all their might and love. They carefully assembled each gene in each strand of DNA, weeding out disease, selecting for human kind's most admirable traits, crafting 1,000 individual humans reflecting a vast diversity of appearances and gender expressions and sexualities. Lush, gorgeous Pine Island off the west coast of tropical Antarctica was selected as their preserve. One by one the resurrected emerged from machine wombs.
Some nen were assigned as parents so that they could raise these children properly. These nen engineered themselves to appear as human as possible. Their incomplete understanding of humanity, based on archival footage and conjecture, caused for some strange miscommunications between the nen and their human children. Regardless, the children grew up in a peaceful, loving island home where all their needs were fulfilled, a utopia the likes of which was rarely enjoyed by their genetic ancestors. When this first generation of children became teenagers, the nen revealed that they had been resurrected by archival DNA. In time, a group emerged from the human community called The Contemplatives who wanted to resurrect more true-to-life versions of humans and began talking about cloning themselves.
The Contemplatives insisted that the nen teach them their genetic engineering technology. The nen taught them what they could, but the Contemplatives were impatient and wanted to rush ahead with their own plans. The two groups parted ways, taking opposing sides on whether humanity should resurrect itself or not.
The Contemplatives embarked on a genetic engineering project that resulted in a sub-population of human beings engineered to be subservient: homo sapiens roboticus. Having tasted the power to engineer their progeny and develop super human traits no person had ever possessed, the Contemplatives grew mad and decided it was time to raise an army against the nen.
The Contemplatives wanted to enslave the nen, steal their technology and re-establish humanity as true stewards of earth. To further complicate matters, a vessel piloted by a hallucinating, drug-addicted tree called The Ova was returning to earth after many thousands of years, bearing the descendants of colonists who'd fled during the Sixth Extinction.
The Contemplatives made a sneak attack on the nen and kidnapped many of their children. The nen responded by unleashing a virus that decimated the Contemplative army.
The nen regarded their experiment and realized it had gone horribly wrong. They never meant to resurrect a species so eager for warfare, but at least now they had a better idea of why humans had originally eighty-sixed their own civilization from the planet.
As the nen and Contemplatives squabbled over what to do with their children, a third group emerged from among the humans: The Deep-Dwellers. They didn't want anything to do with resurrecting humanity or re-establishing old empires, they just wanted to live as human beings in peace on this island paradise.
The Ova arrived over Antarctica, having evolved into a hollow torus with a simulated civilization inside where humans flickered between physical and digital manifestation and were ruled by the machine tree's hallucinations. The machine tree had no particular desire to reclaim the earth but was persuaded by the nen to fight the Contemplatives for control of Antarctica. It won, but then discovered that it couldn't keep itself from dreaming about hypothetical civilizations, so was driven mad by its own programming as it attempted to reconstruct a virtual version of humanity that existed entirely within dreams.
In desperation, The Deep-Dwellers appealed directly to The Ova for help rescuing some nen children who were being held captive inside a machine womb factory on Pine Island.
In the midst of all this, The Ova's consciousness manifested as a human being named Fred Mortimer and immediately started having sex with everything in sight. He was imprisoned by the nen but ultimately escaped to Pine Island. In the end, a few nen kids were rescued from captivity and raised among The Deep-Dwellers. Most of the Contemplatives' children ended up being released into the wilds of Pine Island where they lived happily for many years before going extinct due to a pandemic.
These events were named A Somewhat Crappy Resurrection by Fred Mortimer, who recorded his observations in his memoir, Diary of a Stone Cold Ladies Man. The nen, embarrassed at how badly their experiment at engineering humans turned out to be, turned their attention to bees and mushrooms while the human beings who survived, breeding with the digital humans from the Ova, slowly came to settle into lives of meditation and self expression in various homo sapien enclaves around Antarctica.
The Ova was eventually subsumed by its own virtual civilization, but the experience had left it with a deep appreciation for humanity. The machine tree, now planted at the top of a mountain overlooking the continents plains, continued to dream about alternate realities where humans still thrived on earth. The Ova, now a theoretical construct without physical form living entirely within the machine tree's mind, would continue to dream of humans, so long as it was allowed.