On the Conclusion of Species
Extinctionology
The Woolly Mammoth had been mid-sentence for approximately six thousand years.
“What I’m saying,” Greta continued, her trunk gesturing toward the endless gray expanse that surrounded them, “is that we need to organize. Form committees. Establish protocols for greeting newcomers.”
“You’ve been saying that since the ice stopped,” the Tyrannosaurus muttered. Rex had learned to speak softly over the millennia; his voice had a tendency to carry in ways that made the smaller residents nervous. “Nothing ever changes here. That’s rather the point.”
The Dodo, who had introduced himself as Maurice upon arrival three centuries ago, waddled in an anxious circle. “But have you noticed? The new ones keep coming. Faster and faster now. Last week alone we got fourteen species of frog.”
“Amphibians are always dramatic,” the Tasmanian Tiger observed. She was called Stripe by the others, though she’d stopped correcting them about her actual name decades ago. “Remember the dinosaurs? They showed up all at once, convinced it was the end of everything. And here we still are.”
“It was the end of everything,” Rex said quietly. “For us.”
Grug, the Neanderthal, sat apart from the group, scratching symbols into the non-ground with a stick that existed only because he expected it to. He’d stopped talking much after the first thousand years. There didn’t seem to be much point. Everything had already been said, and then said again, and then worn smooth like river stones until the words meant nothing at all.
But lately he’d been watching the horizon, if you could call it that. The place where the gray became slightly less gray. Where the new ones materialized.
“Something’s different,” he said.
The others fell silent. Grug rarely spoke anymore, which meant that when he did, it carried weight.
“Different how?” Maurice asked.
Grug pointed with his stick. “That.”
They all turned to look.
A human woman stood at the edge of perception, blinking in the sourceless light. She wore strange clothes, all synthetic fibers and precise stitching. Her hair was cut short in a way that suggested intention rather than accident. She looked around with an expression that wasn’t quite fear, wasn’t quite wonder.
It was something closer to recognition.
“Oh,” she said. “So this is what it looks like.”
The group converged on her with the desperate hunger of the eternally bored. Greta arrived first, her massive form somehow not displacing the woman despite physics that had never quite applied here.
“Welcome to Purgatory,” the mammoth announced. “I’m the unofficial welcoming committee. Well, I’m trying to make it official, but the bureaucratic process is complicated when there’s no actual bureaucracy.”
“You’re a mammoth,” the woman said.
“And you’re observant. What’s your name? What happened? We’ve been getting so many newcomers lately.”
“Dorothy,” the woman said. “Dorothy Smith.”
Rex leaned down, his massive skull casting a shadow that shouldn’t have existed. “You’re one of the new monkeys. The ones who came after Grug’s people.”
“I’m human, yes.”
“Then tell us,” Stripe demanded, her striped coat bristling with something like hope or maybe accusation. “Tell us what’s happening up there. Why do they keep arriving? The birds, the insects, the fish, everything, they all say it’s you. Your kind. They say you’re doing something.”
Dorothy looked at them, this impossible council of the formerly living. The mammoth with her earnest committee aspirations. The dinosaur who’d learned gentleness across eons of regret. The dodo still nervous after three hundred years. The tiger whose species had been erased in living memory. The Neanderthal who remembered when humans were just another animal, just another competitor, just another thing that might or might not survive the winter.
“It’s all according to plan,” Dorothy said.
The silence that followed was absolute in a way that only Purgatory could achieve.
“What do you mean, according to plan?” Maurice’s voice had gone high and reedy. “Whose plan? Plan for what?”
“Ours. Humanity’s. Well, humanity’s algorithms, technically. The projections got quite sophisticated toward the end. We knew exactly what would happen, and when, and to whom. We just.” She paused, seeming to search for the right word. “Decided it was acceptable.”
“Acceptable,” Rex repeated.
“The cost-benefit analyses were very thorough.”
Before anyone could respond, something shifted in the gray. They all felt it, a presence departing, a weight lifted that none of them had realized they’d been carrying.
The Iberian Lynx, who had been sitting quietly at the edge of the gathering, began to fade. Her spotted coat grew translucent, then luminous, then simply absent.
“Wait,” Greta said. “Where is she going? No one leaves. No one has ever left.”
Dorothy watched the lynx vanish with an expression that might have been amusement. “Fascinating. They actually did it. The de-extinction program worked.”
“They brought her back?”
“The algorithms always showed a strange fascination with cats.” Dorothy smiled, small and knowing. “Early 21st century engagement metrics, we figured. The training data’s chock full of ‘em.”
Grug stood slowly. He walked to where the lynx had been, touched the space where she’d existed. Felt nothing.
“So they choose,” he said. “Which of us returns. Which of us stays.”
“Of course they choose.” Dorothy shrugged. “They always have.”