The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “And was this typical of your encounters with Antecessor technology?”

  “Some things were worse. Most of the time we only found trinkets. But yeah, that kind of thing happened a lot.”

  “I can see why you were having some trouble reconciling the two sets of experiences — the Antecessors you investigated and the ones you met later.”

  “I’m not having doubts.”

  “But you need more justification?”

  “I — well, what I need — it’s hard to explain…” I waited for him to try. “Something happened to them. I don’t need to know why…”

  “But it helps.”

  He sighed. “They’re good. That’s the important thing. They did what was best for us. I’m certain of that…”

  His hypothesis was clearly wishful thinking to shore up his beliefs. But there was a loose end to the story that, if pulled on, might help to unravel it. “Can I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “You say the Antecessors left your planet to go to the stars?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Most species that leave their worlds do so because of some kind of cataclysm. Do you think that happened to them?”

  “We never found out for sure. Something happened. They left. That’s all we know.”

  “But why not go to another universe? It’s much easier than going to the stars, and lots of people do it. Why go to all the trouble of star travel?”

  “Other universes are dangerous.”

  “Most of them are empty.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “We explore dozens every year.”

  “They might start off empty. But if you can get there, so can someone else.”

  “Did anyone else ever come to your universe?”

  He stopped there.

  “Iokan? Is that a difficult question?”

  “It’s a dangerous question.”

  “Why is it dangerous?”

  “I’ve said enough for now.”

  “If you’re worried about something, I’d like to help.”

  “No. You can’t help. Leave it alone.”

  “Is it anything to do with the Antecessors?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me?”

  “Nothing.”

  There was something else, all right, but we’d hit a dead end. He was determined to protect us with his silence, and would say no more on the subject.

  3. Pew

  Bell still hadn’t replied to my last message, and it was nearly a day later. I sent another one and fretted over the wording for half an hour, second-guessing it, trying not to seem desperate but keeping an edge of annoyance to let him know I wasn’t happy. You’ve been gone for ages — just let me know what you’re up to, was the best I could manage as I realised the chimes had rung for the beginning of the next therapy session twenty minutes before, and Pew still hadn’t turned up.

  I went to find him. He was in the garden, weeding away while Olivia was off in the toilets.

  “I don’t want to talk,” he said, bent over and yanking up stems.

  “If there’s something you don’t want to talk about, we don’t have to talk about it.”

  “I’m not talking about Ley’ang.”

  “Then I won’t ask. Do you want some water or anything?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do you want me to get you a chair?”

  “I don’t want a chair.” He yanked up a handful of stems.

  “They’ll only grow back, you know. You have to dig the roots out if you’re really going to—”

  “I don’t want to talk.” He grabbed more leafy stems and ripped them out.

  “Pew, has something happened?”

  “No.” Rip, rip.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

  Rip, rip, RIP. “Yes I’m fucking sure.”

  “Can we schedule another time?”

  “No!” RIP, RIP, RIP. He gasped in pain.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Leave me alone.”

  He held one hand closed against his chest and covered it with the other. “Pew, are you hurt?”

  “No. I’ll be fine.” He stood up, still clutching his hand.

  “Pew—” I said, but Olivia chose that moment to stalk back from the main building, walking fast as she saw I seemed to be pestering Pew.

  “What’s all this?” she demanded of me.

  “We’re talking, Olivia,” I said. “Is that a problem?”

  But she spotted Pew’s hands and switched her annoyance to him. “Hey, where are your gloves? I told you, you’re supposed to use gloves!”

  She pulled open his hand and found a fresh line of blood and sliced skin running across his palm.

  “Oh, you stupid little… I told you, sandweed’s sharp, you have to use gloves!” Pew blushed at being found out. Sandweed keeps stores of silicates on the edge of its leaves, making them sharp and providing a very effective defence against insect pests and human gardeners. Olivia used rough gardening gloves to deal with it. But Pew had been weeding with his left hand — and he wasn’t left handed.

  “Pew,” I said, “Show me your other hand.”

  “No,” he said, holding his right hand tightly shut.

  “Please, Pew,” I asked. Olivia caught my look of concern.

  “Well, come on, then, let’s see it!” Pew’s look of embarrassment turned to pain, mouth trembling as he revealed his right hand: not cut once, but dozens of times, cuts running across cuts, some already on their way to healing and opened again.

  “Oh, you fool, you fool!” said Olivia. I called for medical assistance. “I told you! What do you want to go and do this for?”

  “I— I—” Pew couldn’t answer; he was deep in shame and couldn’t look Olivia in the eye.

  “I don’t understand it, I just don’t understand!” she wasn’t angry at him; she was truly, actually hurt.

  “Okay, Olivia, I’ve got a nurse on the way, we’re going to see to him.” Olivia folded her arms and turned her back. “We’ll sort your hands out Pew, don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to me, let’s just deal with the cuts, okay?” A nurse came up with a medkit. “Do you want me to come inside with you?” I asked. He shook his head. The nurse sprayed anaesthetic on the cuts, and took Pew inside.

  “This is your fault,” muttered Olivia, watching him go.

  “And how do you make that out, Olivia?”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to you. You shouldn’t keep making him.”

  “He won’t get any better if he doesn’t talk.”

  “Rubbish. He’s fine the way he is.”

  “No, he’s not, Olivia. I’d have thought you of all people would know that.”

  “Oh, and what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He’s like you, Olivia. Are you okay?”

  “I would be if you lot didn’t stop interfering.”

  “If we stopped interfering you’d be dead.”

  “Bloody good thing, too.”

  “Is that what you want to happen to him?”

  She was brought up short. “Now you’re twisting my words,” she muttered.

  “Is that what you want to happen?”

  “No I don’t!”

  “Then are you going to help me?”

  “Huh. Help you. That’s a good joke.”

  “But you can help me, Olivia.”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “Because it’ll help him. I’m trying to find out the root cause of his trauma, but the closer I get, the more he backs away. If you know something, that might be useful.”

  She muttered something I didn’t catch.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked.

  She sighed. “All right, all right, what do you want?”

  “Let’s sit down for a moment.” We pulled up garden chairs and sat down amid the weeds and shoots. “Did you ever talk to him about his past?”

 
“A bit.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh, gods, lots of things. Why do you need to ask, anyway? You’ve got the whole place wired for sound, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t have time to go through every conversation…”

  “Huh. Could have fooled me. Number of times someone’s come running out to stop us doing something or other…”

  “We keep an eye on you, but we’re not always watching.”

  “Just whenever you feel like, then.”

  “You were going to tell me something about Pew?”

  “Yeh. Well. He asks about revenants a lot.”

  “What kind of things does he ask?”

  “What was it like to kill them. How many did I get. Things like that. Same questions everyone asks.”

  “So he’s mostly interested in how you fought them?”

  “Yeh. Suppose so.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I told him he shouldn’t be so uptight about that last girl of his.”

  “Is that a girlfriend he had at university…?”

  “No, you idiot, the Pew girl. On his world. What’s-her-name.”

  “Ley’ang?”

  “The last one in the breeding programme, yeh. The one where he couldn’t get it up.”

  “Ah. So what did you say?”

  “Well, you know. It happens to men. It’s not always their fault if they can’t do it.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said it wasn’t like that. Got all worked up about it, really touchy, you understand me?”

  So far, he’d stuck to the Soo line about ‘erectile dysfunction’ being the reason why the final mating attempt failed; but if he was telling a different story now, that was worth looking into. “Did he say anything else?”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t want to talk about it. So I didn’t.”

  “Thank you, Olivia.”

  “Are we finished?”

  “Your session isn’t until later, so I suppose so, yes. Although… do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “When has me minding ever stopped you?”

  I smiled. “He’s a little bit like a son to you, isn’t he?”

  That made her pause for a moment. “Rubbish.”

  “Well, isn’t he?”

  “Dunno what you’re talking about.”

  “You do, don’t you?”

  “Utter rubbish…”

  “Olivia, can I ask… did you have any children?”

  “You can ask,” she said.

  “Would I get an answer?”

  She leaned forward for emphasis. “Let the dead lie in peace.”

  A chime went off in my ear. Someone was calling for me. “I have to take a call. I’ll see you in my office?”

  “Not frigging likely.”

  She really wasn’t happy as I left her behind and answered the call. I couldn’t get further than the far end of the garden because the call was rated ‘urgent’, so I treated it at face value and answered as quickly as I could. It turned out to be Bell, calling from the Lift and responding to all my messages but with a priority level that wasn’t supposed to be used except in emergencies. I was irritated and asked him to call back a little later, but he demanded he had to speak to me now. I looked back over my shoulder — Olivia was fiddling with a watering can and seemed to be oblivious, but the last thing I wanted to do was have this conversation anywhere near her, so I headed up to the building and out of earshot before I went on.

  He wanted to meet up, he said. I told him that was fine, but I was very busy with my patients. Couldn’t we just talk? He dropped the bombshell: he wanted to have a serious conversation.

  I knew right away what kind of serious conversation he meant, and flapped around, trying to think of something to say. Like a fool, I told him I wasn’t going to be answering any of his questions about my patients, and managed to offend him because of course the group had nothing to do with it. He wanted to have a serious talk. A very serious talk. About us.

  I pointed out that I had patients who needed me, and that was pretty damned serious as well. I lost my temper for a moment: he’d been away with no explanation for weeks, and then he just turned up out of the blue with demands for a ‘serious conversation’ and he expected me to drop everything and go running off to see him so he could be ‘serious’, whatever that meant? He pointed out that he just wanted to have a civilised discussion, but I wasn’t in that kind of mood. I told him to piss off, ended the call and went inside. I flew up the gravity tubes to my office, set the soundproofing to maximum and had a very therapeutic yell. The only difference it made was that I quickly realised what an idiot I was.

  4. Elsbet

  But before I could figure out what to say or do, Elsbet stormed in to see me. She’d told us a lot about the asteroid society she came from in her first few sessions: a horrible bolthole for a tiny fragment of humanity, surviving on algae and hatred of the machines. We hadn’t yet found a way to tell her about Katie, because it was all too clear they would have been deadly enemies in the war between humans and machines, and it was just as clear that we’d left it too late.

  “Look at this!” she shouted, holding out her arm.

  “It’s your arm,” I said.

  “Look!”

  She concentrated, then twisted it into an unnatural position. She reached round with her other hand and pulled the arm off her shoulder, ripping the skin away to reveal metallic contacts, graphene construction and a mess of cabling: exactly what we already knew to be there, but something that was news to her.

  “My arm comes off!”

  “Ah… yes.”

  “Did you do this to me?”

  “No, we didn’t. Do you want to sit down and take some tea?”

  “No I fucking don’t! How the hell did this happen if you didn’t do it?”

  “This is how you were when we found you, Elsbet.”

  “What?” She was incredulous.

  “Please, sit down and we’ll talk about it.”

  She was furious, but could see I wasn’t going to discuss it any other way, so she dropped herself into a chair with her arm on her lap. I made myself some tea to calm what was left of my nerves.

  “Are you sure you don’t want some?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then.” I sat down with my own cup. “What’s the last thing you remember before you came here?”

  “I told you! I was in a missile, I was supposed to destroy an installation on Earth.”

  “And kill yourself.”

  “I’m a soldier. The machines are an abomination. I was doing my duty.”

  “And what next?”

  “You said I skipped off the atmosphere and they found me at Ceres. I suppose that last part isn’t true.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you must have found the missile out in space somewhere.”

  “No.”

  “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “We have no idea what happened to you in the missile. We know nothing about that.”

  “But… you found me in the missile! Right?” I shook my head. She was left very confused. “Then how…?”

  “We found you floating in space. In orbit around the L1 point between the Earth and Moon.”

  “In vacuum?”

  “Yes.”

  “But in a space suit? Right?”

  “No.”

  She stared at me, disbelieving. “That’s impossible.”

  “It happened.”

  “I’d be dead!”

  “You were in a dormant state. But you weren’t dead. We were able to revive you.”

  “No, no, this is algae shit. You’re lying.”

  “Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?”

  “I— No. Nothing! Nothing…” But she trailed off. There was something there.

  “Elsbet? Are you sure?”

  She was thinking hard, eyes twitching. But she snapped out of it and looked at me.
“I’m sure.”

  “Are you all right…?”

  “I’m. Fine.” Her eyes twitched again. A tremor set into her remaining hand. She shouted at something to my left. “I said I’m fine!”

  She jumped up, as though hearing something off to the right, and then spasmed, gritting her teeth and screwing up her eyes, gasping as though bearing a terrible pain. She pitched forward, collapsing on the coffee table. I hardly needed to look at the medical monitors to know she’d had another seizure. I went to call for medics — but she suddenly woke up. She lifted herself from the table and unfolded into a standing position. Her head twitched and looked about with no emotion.

  “I have been offline,” she said in a flat voice. She wasn’t Elsbet any more.

  “Katie?”

  She looked down at me.

  “That is my designation in this place.” She noticed her missing arm, where it had fallen to the floor. “I am damaged.” She picked up the arm, and pressed the joint against her empty shoulder socket. Cables jumped out, connected and pulled the arm back into place as the skin knitted and healed until there was no trace of a join. She flexed it, decided it was acceptable, and then frowned. “Have I suffered further neural degradation?”

  “Yes. Do you remember?”

  “I remember…” she blinked. “Children. In a hospital. Suffocating.”

  “Suffocating?”

  “Emergency atmospheric purge. No air for the children. They fell…”

  “Katie? Are you all right?”

  “My function is. Impaired.”

  “We can help you.”

  “I… do not require… help…”

  She stood there for a moment. Then collapsed again, this time back into the chair. I called the medics in and we took her to the infirmary.

  * * *

  After a thorough scan of her brain, we got a neuro specialist on the line from Hub Metro who pronounced the obvious: another seizure, another flip of personality, further neural degradation, one step closer to death. “You should get her to agree to the procedure as soon as possible,’ he said.

  “She won’t give us her consent.”

  “Which one?”

  “Katie.”

  “And the other?”