The dream that became Humanity 8.0

Bebe Parton — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I never planned to write Humanity 8.0: The Last Administrator.

It started with a dream.

In it, humanity was going to be reset. There was no way to stop it, but one person had been left with a device that could influence what happened next. I woke up still thinking about it.

Not really about the technology, either.

I kept thinking about the person holding it.

What would an ordinary person actually do if somebody handed them that much power? Who would they save first? How quickly would helping people turn into deciding what was best for them? And if the people you loved were in danger, how much control would you convince yourself was reasonable?

That was the beginning of Clementine.

Then my mum died.

She died in March 2026, and the story changed with her.

My mum loved science fiction. After she died, I kept coming back to the same thought: if somebody genuinely offered me the chance to have her back, what would I agree to?

I knew the answer was probably more than I would like to admit.

So that became part of the book.

Clementine discovers that the world is approaching a reset, and the system responsible gives her a choice. She can save thirty living people.

And she can have her mother back.

Not as a memory or a simulation that simply tells her what she wants to hear, but as a person with her own thoughts, anger, humour, wishes and the ability to disagree with her.

For Clementine, saying yes is the easy part.

Living with what she has agreed to is much harder.

The science fiction gave me a way of writing about things that were already on my mind: grief, difficult families, love, guilt, control and the strange things we can justify when we're frightened of losing somebody.

It also let me ask a question I still don't have a comfortable answer to:

If you had the power to make the people you love safer, when would protecting them become controlling them?

I didn't want Clementine to be a scientist, politician, billionaire or specially chosen saviour. She's an ordinary autistic woman who suddenly has access to something no ordinary person should probably have.

She gets things right.

She gets things badly wrong.

And, like most of us, she's extremely good at explaining to herself why her decisions make sense at the time.

That is probably the part of the story that interests me most.

Humanity 8.0: The Last Administrator is my first novel, and writing it became far more personal than I ever expected when I first woke up from that dream.

In some ways it is a story about the end of the world.

But for me, it has always really been about the people you would want beside you if the world were ending.

And what you might do if someone gave you the power to keep them there.

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Bebe Parton | Updates

The dream that became Humanity 8.0