The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “How do you feel about the Soo?”

  His face fell instantly and worry lines appeared. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean: what emotion do you feel when you think of them?”

  He swallowed. “I hate them.”

  “Okay.”

  “They killed everyone. I’m allowed to hate them, aren’t I?”

  “I’d be surprised if you didn’t.” He was perplexed, and didn’t know what to say. I went on. “I’m a little concerned. You hate the Soo — all right, that’s understandable. But then you see a species that reminds you of them. And you start researching that species. You spent three days going over everything we have on them. So my question is: do you want to see what happened to the people who lived here happen to the Soo?”

  He looked back at me, far too directly for comfort. “Yes.”

  “You’d be happy to see them all die?”

  “I’d push the button myself.”

  “So… we’re not talking about a random asteroid any more. You’re talking about pressing a button and wiping them out. Does that mean you’d commit genocide?”

  “Didn’t they?”

  This was disturbing, and potentially a very serious problem for therapy. “Have you always felt this way?”

  “Yes,” he said, then caught himself. “No.”

  “Was there a point when you started to hate them?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Pew, it does matter. I want to get to the heart of why you’re suffering. And some of that has to be because of the Soo, and what they did to you. If there was a moment when you realised you hated them, that could be really helpful.”

  He looked around at the room and didn’t answer.

  “Pew?”

  He looked down.

  “Pew, is this something you’d be uncomfortable discussing?”

  He looked back at me. “It was when I escaped.”

  “Okay. Can you tell me about what happened then?”

  He sighed. “They let me go on holiday.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen. I didn’t see it until I was that old. I should have seen it right away.”

  “You were only a child…”

  “I should have known.”

  “So what happened?”

  He looked out at the view through the wall: plants in the garden dusting the tilled earth with green shoots.

  “They said I could go anywhere I wanted. Shan’oui said that, it was her that made them stop the breeding programme. She was trying to protect me again.”

  “So where did you choose?”

  “The Arctic.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “They had a research station up there, they, they hated the cold but it never stopped them… Shan’oui must have pulled some strings to get us there. It wasn’t the place I came from, but… I don’t know. It looked kind of the same.”

  “I suppose you must have missed it. The Arctic, I mean.”

  “I thought I did. Then I got there. I hadn’t seen snow or ice for years. At first I just ran out like an idiot and threw snowballs at everything. But it was so cold. I’ve never felt so cold, not even when I lived there before. And I’d forgotten everything. I tried hunting seal, but I nearly killed myself trying to cut a hole in the ice. I don’t know what I would have done with one anyway…”

  “How long were you there?”

  “It was supposed to be two months. I asked to go home after three weeks. Then another week to arrange a flight. So about… a month. Something like that.”

  “And you didn’t escape while you were there?”

  “No. It was on the way back. We had to stop for fuel. The jet was sitting in the airport and they were talking about me, I heard Shan’oui on the phone to someone about the breeding programme and she was trying to get them to stop, so she wasn’t keeping an eye on me. It was cold outside. I took a parka and walked out. They didn’t stop me.”

  “That’s very brave.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be brave. I don’t know what I was trying to do.”

  “You were trying to get away, surely?”

  “I don’t know. I was more… fed up. Sick of it. I don’t know.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “I was, once I was in the airport. I’d never seen that many Soo all at once. I thought they were going to put me in hard labour any second.”

  “It’s a good thing you had that parka.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. It was just cold. But once I was inside, I couldn’t take it off, or they’d have known I wasn’t a Soo.”

  “Did you get through the airport?”

  “Yes. I don’t know how. I just walked and eventually there was an escalator. I don’t know why they didn’t stop me. After a while, I was in a train station. Then I got lucky again, somebody’d got off a train with a day ticket and was asking people if they wanted it, so I took it, got on a train and went off to the city.”

  “What was that like?”

  “It wasn’t anything like Hub Metro. It was a mess, they didn’t have any parks and it was all roads everywhere. All the buildings were close together and there were so many Soo… children as well, crowds everywhere… I didn’t know you could even have that many people…” He trailed off, still struck by the memory. “I got lost. I was hungry. It was stupid. And then I saw the sign.”

  “Like the one in Kintrex?”

  “Just like the one in Kintrex. It was for a bus stop. And it had a map. The map said ‘you are here’ and showed all the routes. And I saw there was a zoo in the city. So I went there.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t that be the last place you’d want to go?”

  “I didn’t know what to do! I mean I was really lost by then, I wanted to go home, that’s what I thought zoos were, places where Pu lived. I thought if I could get back there, I’d find more Pu and they’d let me stay with them. It was stupid.”

  “You were scared. It’s understandable.”

  He sighed. “I used the ticket and got a bus, I don’t know how I made it, it was packed full of them, I just wanted to crawl out of my skin, but I got there and… I found out what zoos are really for. I couldn’t get in at first, you needed money. So I went round the side and climbed over a fence. And then I figured it out.

  “It was for animals — it was full of animals. They had reptiles and tropical birds and all the big marsupials. And a polar bear as well, poor bastard. He was sitting there next to a pool and his fur had gone all beige. I didn’t get it. I thought the Pu had to be in there somewhere. I ended up at the primates — chimps and gibbons and a couple of gorillas. I was frantic, I freaked out. I took off my hood and screamed at everyone to tell me where the Pu were. And when they saw me without the hood, they saw I had hair, they saw my nose, they realised what I was. They all backed off. There was this little girl who’d been frightened by one of the gorillas and then she saw me and she was even more frightened. That’s when I knew what they really thought of us.”

  “You hadn’t known before?”

  “I’d never seen what it was like on the other side of the glass.”

  He sighed a deep sigh and put his head in his hands. I poured him some water and offered him the cup.

  “They put me in a fucking chimpanzee cage while they waited for Shan’oui to turn up. And I was happy to see her, like a fool. All the other Soo were treating me like… well, like what they thought I was. I asked her why they kept us in zoos if zoos were for animals, and she said it was for our own good. For our own good they were caging us up!

  “That’s when I started hating them. It was then. When they put me in a cage and I knew it. And I figured out where I’d been all my fucking life. In a fucking cage!” There was more than anger in his voice. There was steel as well, and his hands were trembling. I made him tea, and spent the rest of the session bringing him down from the anger and back to something approaching tranquillity.

  8. Olivia

  “Yo
u’ve been getting on well with Pew,” I said to Olivia as she slurped her coffee.

  “He’s good in the garden. So?”

  “It’s nice to see you socialising.”

  “He’s a good boy. He listens. Unlike some people.”

  “Hm. Well, what I wanted to do today was pick up on a discussion we had at dinner. You mentioned you’d attended a medical school. Does that mean you’re a medical doctor?”

  “I never said that.”

  “But you went to medical school.”

  “Yeh. So?”

  “I know a few people who did the same…”

  “Oh, so you’ve got doctors on Hub? Big whoop-ee-do.”

  “But what you said about medical students is absolutely right.”

  “It’s a law of the universe. No, I’m sorry, multi-bloody-verse. All medical students are bastards.”

  “They do tend to drink rather a lot…”

  “That’s not all they do. Many’s the time I carried a brick in my purse when I walked out at night. Used it once, almost got sent down for that.”

  “How did you become a medical student?”

  “What, are you surprised?”

  “Well, it does sound like your world was rather misogynistic…”

  She snorted. “You don’t know the half of it. Probably looks like the dark ages to girls like you.”

  “But you didn’t accept it?”

  “No I bloody didn’t. They only started taking women the year before and they actually said, get this, they’d let a couple in so they could faint and show all the others a woman could never qualify. Right, I thought, I’ll show you…”

  “That certainly sounds like you.”

  “It wasn’t funny!” she snapped. “They wanted us to fail. They thought we’d get the vapours at the first dissection.”

  “I take it you didn’t.”

  “Have you ever cut open a corpse? All oozing and stinking of formaldehyde?”

  “I can’t say I have. But I take it you didn’t have any problems?”

  “Ah, well. Everyone has problems the first time. Only question is whether or not you’re going to throw up. I didn’t, but it was a close-run thing.”

  “Did they try to put you off?”

  “Oh, gods, everything. Half of ’em trying to propose, the other half thinking I’d sleep with them just because they happened to have a prick going spare. Professors giving their favourites the extra help and none for us. Every bloody deck they could stack they bloody well stacked a mile high. I would have qualified, mind, but I never got the chance, did I?”

  “What happened?”

  She looked at me as though I were stupid. “The first outbreak, what do you think?”

  “I didn’t realise it happened that long ago.”

  “Oh didn’t you? Like you haven’t been working your way round to it, you sneaky cow. I know your game, you want to hear about how I banged my head fighting them and that’s why I’m cranky and objectionable—”

  “Actually, I found one of the other things you said rather interesting…”

  “Oh, and now you’re going to check on my periods…”

  “No. Nothing to do with that. You said something about the way the outbreak made men and women more equal?”

  “Hah! Rubbish…”

  “If that’s not true, why did you say it?”

  “Which outbreak are we talking about?”

  “Any one.”

  “Well I was probably talking about the last one. But now you’ve got me talking about the first one and it didn’t happen then. Hah! The dead were ripping people’s guts out and they still didn’t want precious flowers picking up a gun and defending themselves. ’Course, then the precious flowers’d end up revenning and you don’t want to know how many times some big strapping lad had his windpipe bitten off trying to save ’em.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Huh. Stupid cow. I volunteered.”

  “You volunteered for the military?”

  “You must be joking! No, I volunteered for the Coroner Corps. They wanted every physician in the country to join up so they could figure out who was dead and who wasn’t. Not like it was hard to tell but no one knew a damn thing then. So they started with coroners and pathologists and whatnot and made ’em go house to house checking on people with the cholera, to see if they were revenning. Then they found out there weren’t enough, so they got doctors in as well. And they still didn’t have enough people, so I volunteered. They told me to report to the local hospital and be a nurse instead, as though I wasn’t already there covering for the doctors who were off with the Corps, or the ones who were too damn busy with the cholera. Couple of weeks later they came back begging. If they tried it now I’d tell them where to shove it… you really are sneaky, you know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You start off asking about medical school and here I am talking about revenants and I don’t even know how I got here!”

  “You’re the one that did the work, Olivia. I think you want to talk.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “I think you like proving your point. And you proved your point in the outbreak, didn’t you?”

  “Didn’t do me any good, did it? I’m still bloody here, aren’t I?”

  “I’d like to find out more about what you did…”

  “Nah. Let’s talk about veg.”

  “Vegetables…?”

  “Yeh. Let’s talk about the garden. You like me doing the garden. So let’s talk about that. Those tomatoes are never going to come up…”

  She spent the next half an hour complaining about the quality of the local soil, the genetic modifications to the seeds, the lack of adequate rainfall and everything that was morally wrong with the garden. As a diversionary tactic, it was extremely effective; but at least we’d progressed a step further towards the outbreak.

  9. Iokan

  Iokan was the last of the three I regarded as a suspect for the breakout. He was still recovering from the injuries he suffered when his world ended, so I wasn’t sure if he was physically capable — but then, given the way in which his body had clearly been modified, I couldn’t say for certain what his physical abilities might be. And there was one lingering question: his military experience, which was conspicuously absent from his biography as given to the triage counsellor when he came down the Lift.

  “Good afternoon, Iokan,” I said as he came into my office, wearing his usual robes.

  “And good afternoon to you,” he said. My implant told me the words I was hearing were not a translation from Iokan’s language, but spoken in Interversal.

  “That’s rather impressive,” I said. “Have you learnt any more phrases?”

  He took a moment to grasp what I was saying; he wasn’t wearing his contact lenses. “I have learn some of more words…”

  “That’s not quite correct,” I said.

  “Ah,” he replied. “I perhaps use should lenses.” He had a think and tried again. “I perhaps should use lenses?”

  “I think you should,” I agreed. He sighed, took out the case, and popped them in. “Sorry about that,” he said in his own language. “I thought I knew a bit more than I did.”

  “It’s still very impressive. You’ve only been learning for three weeks, after all.”

  “I’m good at taking in new information.”

  “Yes. You have a number of interesting abilities.”

  “Is that what you’d like to talk about today?”

  “There’s a few things I’d like to go over. First of all, Katie.”

  He looked a little shamefaced. “Ah.”

  “You spent some time in privacy with her.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Did she say something?”

  “She said you were worried about what your wife might think.”

  He fell silent.

  “Are you concerned?” I asked.


  “I don’t think it’s really any of your business.”

  “If you were trying to provide Katie with therapy, then it is.”

  He thought for a moment. “I think Szilmar would want me to help…”

  “I hope that’s the case. But I’d like you to think about it next time. You’re not a trained counsellor, and Katie has a very unusual psychological makeup. It’s hard to say what may or may not help her.”

  He didn’t look happy, but at least I’d made my point. “Were we going to talk about anything else?” he asked.

  “I’d like to talk about your military career.”

  “I see.”

  “We weren’t previously aware you’d had one.”

  “It’s not something I really want to discuss.”

  “Why is that?”

  “We don’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “We just don’t.”

  “Hm. Well, at the risk of seeming unsympathetic, I have to ask: who’s ‘we’?”

  “The people I served with.”

  “And where are they now?”

  He thought about that. “With the Antecessors, I suppose.”

  “Along with the rest of your military.”

  “…yes. That’s a very good point.”

  “So why is secrecy so important?”

  “It used to be for our protection…” he mused. “But I suppose you’re right. They don’t need to be protected any more.”

  “So you could talk about it if you wanted to.”

  He smiled. “I could, couldn’t I?”

  “So let’s start.”

  “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  “Just a sketch outline, to begin with.”

  “I went in when I was twenty. Dropped out of university, went down to the recruitment centre and signed up. They were happy to see me.”

  “Why was that?”

  “People weren’t joining up as much as they used to.”

  “So it was a purely volunteer force?”

  “Oh, completely. And we didn’t even need that, really, we stopped fighting real wars a long time ago. There were just a few brushfire conflicts every now and again…”

  “I’m sorry, can we backtrack: you say you’d stopped fighting wars?”

  “By and large.”