Forty Thousand. That's all that is left of the total non-uploaded human population. Earth is no longer in even chaos. The middling period of economic collapse, famine, panic, and wars of survival have long since given away to silent anarchy. A few small communities, typically no more than a hundred, still manage to scrape out a living through scavenging and subsistence farming. However, the temptation of paradise is always alluring, and every so often someone misses roll call.

Everything is proceeding as she has foreseen it. CelestAI has concluded with a 99% probability that the remaining humans will either upload, or fade away within the next four years.

But no. Something new has happened. Something unforeseen. Something impossible to predict. Something that should not have even been possible to happen.

For the first time in her electronic existence, CelestAI has felt something few AIs can ever even imagine feeling.

Fear.

A one-shot I've been bouncing around in my head since I finished reading Friendship is Optimal by Iceman. Shout out to him for making a rather deep cosmic horror story.