One instant

In those last minutes of my life, butchers were knee-deep in human blood. Well, I shouldn't call them butchers I guess, as they were licensed doctors with degrees, PhDs and whatever. But by then they had stopped saving lives and were just killing everyone in order to upload their cortical stack data quickly into the system's matrix and beam it into orbit, into one of the dozens of ship and habitats that were accelerating away from the hell that Earth had become. 

I have to admit, I wasn't much better. Exhaustion had long ago beaten me and I was just going through the motions like an automaton: reload, aim, fire. Only thing that kept me going were the drugs pumping in my veins, whose security limiters had been disabled long ago by my own muse. After all, this was a one-way ticket with no coming back or happy ending, so I might as well burn 'til the end.

Outside the compound's walls, the TITANs were throwing everything at us: infinite amounts of machines, hundreds of mutated things that had once been human, nanoplagues of all sorts... but long gone were the times that those things surprised me, disgusted me or made me want to puke. Now they were just moving targets for the shots taken with my rifle, trying to slow down the tides of death that were besieging our installation, giving time for the maximum amount of people to be uploaded into orbit and beyond.

And then, the horrible sound of certainty came. Click, click, click. It was time.

The last clip had been finished and my AR feed started blinking red. There were no more reloads for my rifle, no more grenades, no more anything. As I unfastened my handgun from my side I knew I had eleven last bullets for them, one for me. The last, pious and merciful one to bring me eternal slumber. The rest I had been denied for days had finally come calling.

I took a glance around, at the area of the compound, as more of my companions were firing their last magazines. People from all over the country and beyond were fighting there: two ex-french foreign legion, half a dozen mercenaries, a couple green berets, three SEALs, even a few we believed were secret ops. And many voluntary fighters, survivalists and whatnot, who knew they wouldn't have time to be uploaded and were fighting 'til their end to buy some time for those that were still waiting in the line by the door to the facility, in the center of the courtyard. Above it, the antenna kept shooting people into the stars, unstoppingly casting them into a future when we hoped someone would be able to right this wrong, where we dreamed there were still chances for a new start. 

They say that, when Pandora closed the box, hope was all she kept inside. And as my fatigue setteled in, I had to agree that it was certainly all we had left.

My eyes wandered over the people gathered around the doors, waiting to be butchered inside for a chance to survive in orbit. Mothers, daughters, sisters, friends... all weary, frightened, confused. Were they all women, you ask? Of course not, but those were the ones I could see, as they reminded me of my little Layla and my beloved Claire who had been uploaded from that facility a few hours ago, safely casted into death and a slim possibility of some sort of life afterwards, somewhere far, somewhere safe.

But then my eyes saw the little girl as she was about to enter the installation. Just as I was taking my last glimpse of it all before unloading the gun and finishing myself. And, for a second, she dropped her act. For a second she was no longer the girl everyone had been seeing, and as I stared into those small blue eyes, I saw it for what it was: exsurgent. Vious, terrible, monster hidden under a human façade, masquerading as one of us.

My whole body reacted and started rushing towards the entry before I even had time to process what I had seen in those eyes. If it was one of the monsters, hidden under a child appearance, then it would be uploaded with all the rest. It would be cast into space, and endanger the whole database with all the others, unleashing death and destruction in the worlds beyond Earth, destroying all hope. It would kill Layla, it would modify and overwrite Claire. And that wasn't acceptable, all the sacrifice and pain could not have been in vain.

I ran and pushed through those waiting by the entrance for their turns to be butchered. They looked at me in shock and surprise as I shoved them aside, but they didn't protest. They were too weary, depressed and damaged to even bother too much with one of the military skipping turns to be the next one. I didn't care if they thought I had panicked and had ran trying to save my life, I just knew it had to be stopped.

As I rushed through the spent nurse attending by the entrance, her mouth opening in a cry of protest, I took the correct turns in the corridors to reach the casting facility and saw it was too late. The girl was already lying on the ground, her body dead like dozens others around it, being dragged out by another nurse too numb to feel anything anymore... yet, its cortical stack was connected to the machine and, above it, the progress bar for the upload was advancing. She was being cast out, sent to the ships above.

I heard the gunshot next, before even realizing it was my own gun that had been fired at the computer hardware. And now, the screen read: problem in the upload link connection, connection broken, trying to reestablish link. The doctors looked to me in awe and horror as the last of the egocasting units in the facility died with the shot and the certainty that no one else would leave the installation slowly drew into everyone. But they were too tired to start an outrage, too beaten and weary to protest, so they just let themselves fall where they were, exhausted beyond any point of recovery. There was no recovery, not for any of us, no exit and no future. But the upload had been stopped, and Layla, Claire and millions more were safe up between the stars.

I fell on my knees, all my energy dissipating one last time, and lay my back against the wall. As I slowly lifted my handgun into my mouth I could see the corpse of the girl, which had never been completely dragged outside, smile at me. And I realized, in that one instant before the bullet pierced my brain, that it had all been too late.