The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “Um. What’s a midden?” asked Pew.

  “Rubbish pit. That’s where they’d drop food waste, broken pots, and so on. Stone age peoples weren’t big on recycling.”

  Pew nodded. As a child, he probably used them himself. “Yeah, okay, I know what you mean.”

  “And heading up, you’ve got some more advanced iron age stuff — for some reason they skipped bronze at this site,” said Ren, setting the platform to slowly rise past unremarkable clay to a blackened layer, “then at some point the settlement was burned to the ground, I mean a total loss, complete disaster. Maybe the city was sacked, maybe it was natural — we just don’t know yet. All we’ve got is this black, flaky stuff here. That’s charcoal from wooden buildings. And then, going up” — he raised the platform again — “you can see they rebuilt — see that line of stones? That’s the foundations of something a lot more serious than wooden construction and it’s typical for the period. Maybe they learnt their lesson, huh? But really, we think the place was mainly military for a while, and all the stone was for defensive reasons. Once you get above that” — he tapped the controls and we rose once more, past the stone layer — “the settlement expands and expands and pretty soon you’ve got a major city again. We think most of it was technology driven — steam, probably — or maybe the politics changed and suddenly they didn’t need to be so scared of the neighbours. Either way, that takes us up into the anthropocenic stuff, which is when people really take charge of the landscape, and we’re not so far down any more so it’s less compressed. You’ve got the underground infrastructure around here, like utility pipes, cabling, all the infill around them and so on. There, you see?”

  He indicated the irregular layer of artificial material, dominated by rust and very red, but clearly pocked by flattened cables and pipes. We had reached 40,450 years before the present. “In fact…” said Ren, pointing out a dangle of glass wires, “you can see they were pretty advanced in some ways. This is a fibreoptic cable. They mostly used copper, we think, but there’s enough of this to show they were likely moving digital information around as well as analogue.”

  “Do you keep that buried there just for tours?” asked Olivia.

  “Nope. It’s the real thing. There’s hundreds of kilometres of it, all over the site.” He raised us all up again, and the readout showed we were 40,420 years before the present. “Above that, you’ve got the ground level stuff. That sticky, crumbly material there is pulverised tarmac. It normally gets broken up by plants and pretty much worn to nothing before the soil covers it, so something must have happened here to preserve it. And that’s the layer above. You see that?” He pointed out a greyish line above the tarmac, above which there were no more artefacts. “That’s the ash layer from the impact. You find that all over the world and it’s pretty thick around here, probably a couple of metres deep when it fell. In fact, it’s responsible for a lot of the preservation of the site — if the city hadn’t been covered by ash, there’d be a lot less left to find. And here’s the interesting thing…”

  He took an instrument wand from the satchel he carried, and wafted the end past the ash layer. A low tone from the instrument raised in pitch as he did so. “It’s still radioactive. After all this time.”

  “The asteroids were radioactive?” asked Iokan.

  “No, asteroids usually aren’t. You get a bit of extra radioactivity in any impact layer because they absorb a lot of stuff from the sun, but this is way too much for that.”

  “Ketan erak tri anno?” asked Katie.

  Everyone looked at her. No one’s systems could translate what she’d said.

  “I’m sorry?” said Ren.

  Katie looked confused for a moment, as though not entirely sure where she was. She looked around. Then back at Ren.

  “What are the levels?” she asked, in perfect Interversal.

  “Oh, we’re safe, don’t worry.”

  “What are the levels?” she asked again.

  He glanced at the instrument. “You’re looking at a dosage of about forty microSieverts a day. You should be fine. You don’t get sick until you hit about four hundred milliSieverts, and that’s ten thousand times higher. The point is, the background radiation around here is three or four microSieverts. It’s not dangerous, but that ash layer is still too high by a factor of ten.”

  “Were there nuclear accidents, during the impact?” asked Kwame.

  “That’s possible, sure,” said Ren. “But the radioactivity is amazingly even over the whole continent. If you had nuclear accidents or even explosions, you’d expect the radioactivity to be greater at the site of whatever happened. So instead, you have to conclude it comes from the widest, most evenly distributed source, which is the ash from the impact.”

  “But you said the asteroids weren’t radioactive…” said Pew.

  “Right. They weren’t radioactive. Or at least they didn’t start out radioactive. But they were when they hit the atmosphere.”

  They paused for a moment. Some of them made the connection.

  “They defended themselves with nuclear weapons,” said Kwame.

  “That’s what we’re thinking,” said Ren. “The isotope analysis backs it up. We reckon they saw the rock coming and tried destroying it or deflecting it with nukes. But all they did was break it up into lots of smaller rocks, and you can see that in the multiple impact sites. And they irradiated them as well, of course. It probably didn’t add up to a dangerous dosage for the survivors, but they had enough problems as it was.”

  12. Leaving

  The group crowded back onto the bus after their tour of the archaeological site. I sent Veofol to find the driver, joking that if we couldn’t locate him, Veofol would have to take us back. He was qualified, but didn’t look like he relished the prospect.

  No one in the group seemed to want to talk, least of all Katie. Iokan, however, had other ideas — ones I would have preferred to pursue myself at a later time.

  “What was that language you were talking earlier?” he asked.

  “I spoke Interversal,” she replied.

  “Not all the time. You said something else in the trench, what was it… ketan erak tri anno?”

  “I did not say those words.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “You are mistaken.”

  “Okay. So what did you say?”

  She paused. Was that the slightest sign of a furrowed brow?

  “Iokan,” I said, “there’s no need to pester her.”

  “I didn’t mean to pester, I was just curious…”

  “If she doesn’t want to talk about it, she doesn’t have to.” I turned to Katie. “Katie? Is there anything you’d like to tell us?”

  “Their tenacity is admirable,” she said.

  Pew looked round at her. “Uh… you mean the archaeologists?”

  “No. I mean the former inhabitants of this world.”

  “Can you expand on that?” I asked.

  “They did not have the technology to fully address their extinction. But they did everything they could to survive. They did not wait to die. I consider that to be admirable.”

  Pew looked away. He’d grown a little grim during the tour. Iokan, though, failed to notice this and replied to Katie.

  “Well, if that’s what you were saying… I have to agree. I think overall there’s a lot of positive things you can get from this place.”

  “How do you make that out?” asked Olivia. “They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

  “But they went down fighting. And okay, so they didn’t make it. Some things are too big to survive. Even so, life didn’t end. Look outside: it’s only, what, forty thousand years since it happened? Look how green the place is. There’s plenty of time for something else to evolve.”

  “Yes,” said Katie. “The ecosphere will recover. New life will emerge. A new race of sapient creatures will evolve and move into space. Biological life is almost impossible to eliminate entirely.”

  “Except
yours,” said Pew. “Your world’s gone, isn’t it?”

  “That is true. Nevertheless, biological life still persists.”

  “Really?” asked Iokan.

  “I have disclosed all that is necessary,” she said, and did not speak again.

  13. Street Scene

  After the archaeological layercake, Ren took them to a broader, shallower excavation, only a metre down into the earth. It bit another metre into the side of one of the mounds, and exposed the edge of an ancient building along with the pavement and road.

  “So over here we’ve got a part of the site that hasn’t been compressed as much as the rest. We’ve been able to uncover an almost-intact street scene for visitors to look at.”

  ‘Almost intact’ for an archaeologist translates to ‘virtually destroyed’ for most people, but nevertheless you could make out the traces of an ancient city street. Looking down into the trench, we could see a cracked tarmac road surface lying next to a wide pavement of stone slabs, some of which had been replaced by tarmac repairs at some point in the city’s life.

  “So here in the road you can see one of the railways,” said Ren, pointing down at deep grooves running through the remains of the road surface, containing what seemed like pitted, rusted metal bars. “The rails there have corroded a lot, but you can still see what they used to be. That’s pretty good stainless steel they had there. It’s got a high titanium content. So with that alone, we know they were well past the first industrial age. ‘Course, we’ve got plenty of other evidence, but steel’s always a good marker for tech development.”

  The group looked rather less impressed than they had been with the deeper excavation. But Ren had more than just a road to show. “The best part of this trench, though, is the street furniture…”

  Further along, there were a variety of corroded stumps in the pavement, and a signpost standing tall above all the rest, raised up so the top poked up high above ground level. “So you can see a whole heap of stuff here, but it’s the signpost everyone wants to look at. It was flat on the pavement when we found it, completely broken away from the supports, but it was nearly intact, so we raised it up. And we got a pretty nice surprise, I can tell you! The plastics they were using really lasted, and you can still see most of what was printed on it.”

  The ‘signpost’ was quite broad, and stood three metres high; the plastic surface was pitted and warped but had markings all the way to the top. “We’re pretty sure this was something to do with the transit system, that light rail thing embedded into the roadway. This might have been a passenger stop, or maybe an interchange point. That symbol at the top there” — he pointed out a faded insignia at the top of the sign, that looked a little like ‘IXI’ — “we think that’s the symbol or the logo for the whole thing. You see how it’s up high enough that you can see it from a distance? The idea is, you can see the stop from a long way away, and then when you get closer you get more and more information. So the writing below it that you’re not getting a translation on, because we haven’t properly worked out the language yet, we reckon that’s the name or location of the stop. The coloured vertical bands running on the side are something to do with the particular lines the stop’s on. And then there’s the map, of course…” A simple design that showed the surrounding streets and buildings, and a line running from a dot on the map to words you could easily imagine saying ‘you are here.’

  “But if you look on the other side — it’s the advertising for the transit system that really brings it home.” I’d seen it before on screens, but seeing it in real life had rather more impact: a photograph of a host of faces that were so very nearly human despite the strange eyes and ears, clustering round the entrance of a tram, smiling and waving while a driver looked on with a kindly gaze.

  “Those are real people,” said Ren. “And they’ve been dead for forty thousand years.”

  While it hit me hard, it hit the others harder still as they went round to look. Kwame turned away, hiding tears with a shaking hand. Olivia scowled at it. Liss looked unusually serious. Iokan sighed. Katie looked closer, to satisfy whatever curiosity she had.

  Pew didn’t look at the advert. Something else about the sign affected him, something about the side with the map. He turned and stumbled away, and fell to his knees in the grass, gasping hard. I went to him and asked what the matter was.

  “Think there’s too much pollen… around here…” he said, loosening his collar, trying hard to catch his breath. I looked up at Veofol. Both of us knew that Pew didn’t suffer from hay fever. This was more like a panic attack.

  I directed him to take deep breaths and calm himself. He gasped and blowed and found control over his breathing again.

  Olivia looked over at us and seemed about to make a remark. I glared back at her and she got the hint; she left Pew alone and looked back at the sign. “Silly buggers,” she muttered, shaking her head.

  Pew soon said he was fine, and willing to go on. But he didn’t want to talk about it there and then.

  Ren took me aside. “I guess that hit you guys harder than most people. Do you still want to see the rest of the tour?”

  “I think we should,” I said. “But let me ask them first.”

  14. Leaving

  Veofol came back to the bus and reported that the driver was using the rest facilities, so we had time to continue the discussion.

  “Pew, are you feeling any better?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Bit better.”

  “You had quite a reaction earlier on,” I said. “Would you like to discuss it?”

  The group looked at him. At first he seemed uncomfortable. But he made the effort. “It was the map.”

  “The map?” asked Kwame. “Not the advert?”

  “I’ve seen maps like that before,” he said. “The Soo had maps like that in their cities.”

  “I thought you never went out?” asked Olivia.

  “I escaped once.” Now that was interesting. “The maps were all I had to work out where I was. They were just like that, on that kind of sign. Exactly the same.”

  “It’s a common solution to a basic problem,” I said. “Most cities need to help people find their way around.”

  “I mean they used the same colours, and the same shapes, and… it was like…” He swallowed. “It was like standing in a Soo city. As though they were all dead and gone.” He said it with an undercurrent of approval that troubled me.

  “How does that make you feel?” I asked.

  He saw my concern and clammed up. “I don’t know. It just looked familiar.”

  Kwame missed the subtleties of Pew’s tone. “I believe you are right,” he said. “This place is familiar. It is a graveyard.”

  “A graveyard? With no bodies?” asked Iokan.

  “It is a graveyard for more than people,” said Kwame. “It is the burial place for their world. They should have rested here, undisturbed. We should have left them alone, not dug them up to point at their misfortune.”

  “But isn’t there something to learn from how they lived?” asked Iokan.

  Kwame smiled bitterly. “I have learned that some people have no chance to survive, no matter what they do. I did not need to rob a grave to know that.”

  15. Excavation

  The group was willing to go on, and Ren’s final part of the tour took us to the pride and joy of the whole site: an excavation inside one of the hills that had revealed a number of intact rooms within. The group was again issued with helmets at the entrance, but these were of the kind that would function as survival systems in the event of collapse.

  “Okay, so this place is pretty safe and we’ve put a lot of gravity control in there to make sure the roof stays up, but I don’t want to see anyone taking these helmets off. I said this earlier and I’ll say it again: keep your hands to yourself, stay inside the designated paths and don’t touch anything. Okay?”

  The group assented, and followed him into a tunnel with lights on the ceiling at close intervals
; the walls were simple earth, supported by gravity modules on the ceiling and sides. Before long, we emerged into what our ears immediately told us was a much larger space, but the pool of light from the tunnel didn’t extend far inside.

  “So here we are, and if I turn the lights up…” Ren ran a finger across a pad, and lights several metres above glowed into life. Insects scattered and found safety in crevices all around. Liss gasped.

  “Don’t mind the critters,” said Ren. “They only eat each other. Real problem for preservation, though…”

  But she took no notice of the insects, and instead blurted: “It’s an office!”

  The lights showed a reception lobby, marble-walled and designed to impress. There were wide windows that once faced out onto a street but which had long since burst under the weight of soil. We’d walked in through one of those windows, and the path ahead ran on floating boards above the tiled floor.

  “That’s right,” said Ren. “It’s an office building. We’re in the lobby right now, you can see they had real human receptionists once upon a time…” He pointed out the plastic skeleton of a reception desk. “This was a pretty fancy place, back in the day, and that’s why it survived in here. A lot of the construction is stone and that lasts better than anything. Come on and I’ll show you the rest.”

  He led us in past reception, where the building opened out into a broad, single room, filled with partitioned desks that sheltered insect nests. The floating platforms followed along one of the aisles, furthest inside and away from the outside wall, where more earth had piled up from breached windows. “Of course, it’s mostly plastic and glass and some metal that’s survived,” he said. “Anything even remotely organic is long gone. But as you can see from that heap of plastic over there…” He indicated the inside of a room whose door had long since rotted away, where a freestanding boxlike device stood with a smashed glass top, about half the height of a human. “They had something I guess most of you won’t recognise. That’s a photocopier, a kinda thing they used to transfer information between sheets of paper…”