The flower that blossomed from the harsh gravel here in the middle of nowhere was breathtaking in its raw beauty. She was enthralled by it and made sure to capture its every aspect. When she was done, she carefully, almost lovingly, ignited it and watched the small flame eat it up.
It had all begun when the A.I. corpos’ models hungered for more training data, more than their immoral zombies could ever feed them. They had exploited the archives, the web, and the internet, but much of it was already polluted—the LLMs were eating their own shit. There was profit in having more data, clean data, and soon “roamers” were enlisted and sent out to digitize the yet-undigitized: locations, sounds, textures, and landmarks, but also history, languages, and ephemera.
This quickly became common practice, and the A.I. peddlers ended up digitizing much the same as their competitors, which soured investors.
Thus, roamers were encouraged to slightly alter the reality after their captures, like laser-engraving a visible copyright notice. Holographic watermarks followed but only bridged the gap to the logical conclusion: the now ubiquitous C.U.D. doctrine roamers were required to follow—cull upon digitization.
Elitists clamored at first when SkyAI roamers demolished the Acropolis after they were done with it; there was less outrage when S-Net culled the Forbidden City and worked their way outwards from it; and no one batted an eye anymore when yet another enormous datacenter emerged where once the nation of Gambia had been. Had a corpo set out to digitize your property, you were almost lucky, as it meant your rent on the digital reconstruction would be almost humane.
She was one of the last human roamers left, working her way forward on the endless mountains around Moyynty in southeastern Kazakhstan. Diligently she had digitized every rock, weed, and insect she encountered before shattering, burning, or incapacitating it. She was almost done, maybe a year or two before her work was complete. When the nights were long and cold and she shivered in the solitude of her tent, she imagined what it would feel like to digitize that very last rock, that final weed, and then to fulfill her last contractual obligation and digitize herself.