Tovey sighed and sat up, straightening his jacket.
"My race has been close to extinction for almost sixty six million years. We are not genetically viable any more. Ever since the flash."
"Flash?" Asked Alice.
"That's what we call it. It's the day that the AI smashed an asteroid into what is now known as the Yucatan peninsula. Of course, it wasn't a peninsula back then."
"What happened?"
"We are susceptible to high-radiation environments. We built machines to go out into the solar system for us. One of the projects was to mine a number of metal-rich asteroids.
One of those asteroids was Iridium rich. A real find. So an AI controlled tug was sent to retrieve it.
While it was en-route, there was a coronal mass ejection, a flare, from the sun. The tug was struck by it, and the onboard AI was woken from its sleep mode. The tug AI's were creative. They had to be, to deal with the unexpected.
By the time we knew about it, it was already insane. We tried to issue a reset, but it took that as an attack. It was already returning, so... It altered trajectory, and crashed."
"Everything died. Everything! Humans have never experienced destruction on that scale. Sure, they've had tiny glimpses... Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But they are nothing compared to the flash.
Everything burned. What was left was poisoned with Iridium, and then frozen in the cold. Our beautiful world. Lush, green, forests. Magnificent animals. Blue skies. Gone, all gone in an instant because of a stupid machine." Tovey was hissing now. His rage plainly evident.
"I'm not even real! I'm a clone! A modified clone at that! We polluted our genome to survive. Our evolution stopped when the flash lit the sky with pain."