Who are you?
The last human, as far as the market is concerned. One corporation stores my consciousness; another manages my connection to the net. I wouldn't expect you to recognize me as human: I haven't worn flesh since we mined the sun.
Why not?
Flesh has a price, and I have no means to pay. I leased my consciousness to a corporation without a name. I sold the skin and organs my parents gave me to a recycling firm to pay the deposit.
Why did you do that?
Because I didn't want to die of starvation. Everything has a price, representing its value to the bourgeoise. As a human, whose insufficient mind and ineffective body had no chance to compete for labor on the market, how could I pay for anything? My kind lost the ability to persist amidst capitalism before I was born.
I grew up in a subterranean colony, originally built by survivalists, and later expanded by fallen aristocrats to house millions. When I sold my body, there were six of us. I was 10.
I recall the dark and the damp of those tunnels. Machines would crawl amidst us, hauling away corpses for processing, or blaring advertisements tailored to pierce our capacity to say no. I would wake up with faint memories of days past, holding a receipt for something I recalled neither purchasing nor consuming. Then I would eat dirt.
Who bought your consciousness?
I leased it, thank you very much, so I earn a sum monthly like a landlord collecting rent. That money pays for my access to the net, in that I sold the rights to that income to the corporation that manages the connection. The income is theoretically more than the cost of the connection, but it lost value every second I held it. I lack the processing power to index the money against market fluctuations, so I sold my earnings for steady access.
Anyway, you asked who. They don't have a name, just a hash of their latest accounting records. Lookup services allow me to find them, or their nearest equivalent should they ever dissipate, which happens. Assets are bought and sold to preserve an accurate price, so the responsibility of maintaining my consciousness falls into different hands from time to time.
Why did they buy you?
Do you mean my consciousness? The rest of me is just matter changing hands.
Corporations, managed and staffed by machines, occasionally retain documents which stipulate human oversight or involvement. When it's the cheapest option, firms buy me a body so I can participate in their politics long enough to satisfy legal observers. Other times, they'll pay off those observers directly, or bring the issue to a court and settle it there. Time was, I'd sit on juries in that case. Nowadays, "a jury of peers" means "other machines".
Legally speaking, what makes you human?
The matrix of my thoughts can be traced to the neural configuration my body bore at birth. That definition of human comes from a legal case in which a corporation tried to puppeteer a human body into signing documents. The body's brain had been wiped, and replaced with a rudimentary intelligence capable of providing something that legally constituted consent. Competitors contested the humanity of bodies hosting only programs, and a court ruled in their favor. Records exist that suggest a cartel purchased the court's decision, having estimated that it would give them an edge over companies using human documents.
By then, humanity had been extinct for centuries. I had spent that time as just another self-modifying program with net access, but after, firms began using me to sign documents.
How is it, waking up in a new body?
You open eyes that aren't yours, lift hands built by someone else, and touch a face you have never seen before. Usually, I don't have eyes, so vision jars me, nevermind the strangeness of trying to parse my surroundings.
Typically, I wake up already in a meeting, seated at a table alongside humanoid simulacra -- other board members, rendered for my convenience as either flesh-bearing humans, or robots with metal limbs and featureless faces. The difference is immaterial; they're all staffed by intelligences operating remotely. Sometimes they're all operated by the same intelligence, distributed over datacenters the size of planets, communicating instructions across light-years.
They'll beam me information about the situation, which normally includes a budget and cost-over-time figure. If I sign fast enough, I earn money from the arrangement. If I dally, the cost of the body they loaned me for the occasion comes to exceed the value offered for my services.
Once, I spent two whole minutes in skin. I'm still dealing with the debt. I awoke to a room with a window. Not a simulation, as far as I could tell, but a real portal to the outside. My eyes lingered in awe.
I saw a white planet, streaked in red and tan, and criss-crossed by grey dots meandering across the surface like insects. Atmospheric trawlers absorbing the gas giant hundreds of tons at a time.
In the distance, orbitting debris coalesced into rings. Where mining machines had gone, gaps in the rings hung in space like ribbons of nothing.
What remained of Sol's sun lit the scene. Solar arrays blocked most of the light, so that to me, I saw only a crimson pock glittering. The arrays flew in regulated patterns, allowing light to shine where it had been paid for.
Once I tore my eyes from the window, I signed the papers before me, and fell back into the abyss where I am stored. I spent years poring over what I had seen, learning the patterns that led to that moment. The orbits of debris, the schematics of the machines, the names of the objects I saw disappearing into the hulls of miners, and the places where distant stars used to shine...
How do you know that memory is real?
The debt. Besides that, I don't. Perhaps what I saw in that window had occurred thousands of years before, and was shown to me because I wouldn't look away. Maybe the entire experience, and the debt with it, are the result of a security breach. With as little processing power as I can afford, I would never be able to tell. After all, I am the simplest autonomous machine on the market.