The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “An investigation is unnecessary.”

  “Were you really an infiltrator?”

  Katie paused for a long time.

  “Yes.”

  “They took you into their hospital, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you attacked.”

  “Yes.”

  “You killed everyone in the hospital.”

  “Yes.”

  “Including civilians. Including children.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me with a moment’s confusion, as though unable to understand why I needed to ask the question. “They would not negotiate. They would not communicate. They only declared their intent to extinguish us from the system. We had no other way to strike back. The primary target was the shipyards. Other casualties were impossible to avoid.”

  “I see.”

  “It was an act of war.”

  “You’re not the first person to say that.”

  “I will not discuss it further.”

  “Katie—”

  “I will not discuss it further.”

  Her face was twitching again. I sighed.

  “Okay. Let me go back to something else: you say she won’t be emerging again?

  “Yes.”

  “Does this have anything to do with your tremors?”

  “I suffer no tremors.” And yet her mouth twitched, and her hand shook.

  “It’s happening right now, Katie.”

  “I am in complete control of all functions.”

  “You’re not in control at the moment. I can see it happening,” I said, indicating her unruly hand.

  She slammed a look at me and snarled: “I could rip your head from your shoulders.”

  I froze for a moment. I’ve been threatened before, but not by a cybernetic killing machine.

  “Do I need to call security?” I asked, swallowing back the animal fear in my gut.

  The twitching intensified for a moment. And then her face relaxed again and resumed its placid stare.

  “There is no need. I am in control.”

  “Are you having more emotional disturbances?”

  “Yes. I am in control.”

  “Are you sure? You’ve never threatened anyone before.”

  “I am in control.” Muscles around her eyes quivered for a moment, then lay still.

  I sighed. “Katie, if these tremors are what you’re doing to yourself to stay in control, you’re only going to hurt yourself. You know your condition is terminal. Please. Let us help you.”

  “I do not require assistance.”

  “Can you give me a good reason why?”

  “I must remain operational.”

  “But why?”

  Her blank stare was chilling.

  “They are coming back.”

  “Who’s coming back?”

  “My species.”

  “I think that needs explaining.”

  “There were expeditions to nearby star systems that travelled at the highest possible speeds but had only reached their first target stars after two hundred years of journey time. They were informed in the final signals from Earth of the progress of the war and will return in due course.”

  “In two hundred years?”

  “Yes. And then the Fourth Machine War will begin.”

  “Katie, you’re not going to last two hundred days. And you’re in the wrong universe. How do you think you’re going to help?”

  “I require transfer to an artificial means of consciousness.”

  “That’s not happening, Katie.”

  A smile twitched around her mouth.

  “I… I would be able to assist the Interversal Union greatly if I had an artificial consciousness.” She kept up her smile. She was trying to be friendly, in a rather creepy kind of way.

  “That’s illegal on Hub. And that’s definitely not going to change.”

  “I don’t want anything in return…” she said in something like a little girl voice, pleading for a toy.

  “And we respectfully decline. You’re not fit for duty. You’re suffering from neural degradation and you’re going to die without our help. Katie, I’ll ask again: let us help you before it’s too late.”

  The friendly look vanished.

  “There is nothing further to discuss.”

  She rose and left with no further courtesy.

  8. Kwame

  Kwame’s reaction to the new centre was one of complete avoidance. After a façade of relative normality on the journey over, he retreated into his room and did not emerge for a full day. Once he hadn’t shown up for a couple of meals, I went in to see what I could do.

  He was exactly where he’d been when I left him on the day of the attack: sitting in the corner, knees drawn up, lost elsewhere.

  “Kwame?” He didn’t answer. “Are you in there?”

  He looked up at me slowly.

  “I… do not know.”

  I sat down in the heavy wooden chair he kept at his desk.

  “I thought you were making some progress.”

  “No.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “I remember.”

  “What do you remember, Kwame?”

  “I remember my dreams. I did not know how I was… protected.” He spat the last word out, bitterly.

  “What do you dream about?”

  He looked up at me, horrified and distraught. “The same! Every night I have the same dream! It has not changed!”

  “The dream about the cell?”

  “Every night I condemn that… creature… to death. And I feel as though I am killing the one I love. As though that thing were my wife. And I remember!”

  “What do you remember?”

  “When I… kissed… him.”

  “Iokan?” He gave me the barest nod. “Do you remember anything else?”

  “I…”

  He sat there, lost in memory.

  “Kwame?”

  “I remember… things.”

  “Can you tell me anything?”

  “I do not understand them…”

  “Just start with one. Any one.”

  He took a breath. “I… I remember a lecture hall. Someone talks with a strange accent… demonstrates something on the bench, something robotic… I never studied robotics! I took history. Electronics was a hobby, nothing more! And I remember… being a child, running with gangs, robbing drunks. But I never did that! I was in a private school! My father made sacrifices so I had an education… and, and… I see a bar in Matongu, with men dressed as women…” He trembled. “I have never been to Matongu. What is happening to me?”

  This was a very good question. Strange psychological phenomena do crop up when you deal with different human species whose psychology is not fully understood, but I’d never seen anything quite like this before.

  “I think… I think at the moment, Kwame, you’re feeling lost, like you haven’t got a map…”

  “That does not help!”

  “Let me finish. You’re in a strange land. Doesn’t it make sense to try and find a map to make sense of where you are?”

  “And how should I do that?”

  “I think you should make one.”

  “How…?”

  “You say you have all these memories that contradict each other. So perhaps it would be a good idea to make a list.”

  “These ‘memories’ are not real. I will not dignify them by writing them down.”

  “They’re not going to go away, Kwame.”

  “They are not mine!”

  “They may not be yours, but they’re in your head. And we can’t erase them. Isn’t it better to at least know what they are, to try and figure out what happened?” He didn’t answer. “I’ll start if you like.”

  He still refused to comment.

  “Well…” I rose and went to a wall, and set it up for text input. “You said you have memories of being in a street gang, as well as memories
of being in private school. Let’s put both of those down…”

  I drew a line down the wall, then wrote ‘Childhood: street gang’ on one side and ‘Childhood: private school’ on the other.

  “Maybe what you can do is put all the memories into the two columns and see if you can work out a timeline for both sets of memories?”

  He continued to ignore me.

  “I’ll just leave this here and you can carry on whenever you want. I’ll save it so you don’t lose it…” I saved the file onto his home folder. “Don’t wait too long to get started.”

  I left. Kwame stayed where he was, hunched into the corner of the room. Eventually, he looked up at the wall, and walked over to the screen.

  He wiped it clean. All the words vanished. He called up his folder, and tried to erase the file. But an error message popped up: the file could not be erased without my permission. He tried to save the file as blank, with all the words deleted; he found he couldn’t do that either. He thumped a fist on the wall.

  Then, after a while, he opened the file again.

  9. Olivia

  Olivia decided to cook, but not for the group. I found her pounding seeds with a mortar and pestle (a difficult task with one arm still in a sling), and asked what it was she was making.

  “Mustard,” she said, keeping on with her pounding.

  “Oh, so you managed to harvest some seeds before you left?”

  “No.”

  “Then how…?”

  “These are for the new garden.”

  “But I thought you said the soil was wrong?”

  “Yeh. It’s all wrong. Can’t grow anything up here.”

  “So why…” And then I realised: I’d given her permission to order supplies for a new garden more suitable for the soil, and she’d used it. “You ordered new seeds and now you’re turning them into mustard.”

  “That’s the sum of it.”

  “Those seeds are very expensive, Olivia.”

  “I haven’t used money in years. Can’t even remember how it works, much less this electric credit balance thing you have.”

  “And the mustard itself is poisonous to some people.”

  “Is it poisonous to you?”

  “No, but…”

  “Then make sure nobody else has any, then! Right…” She finished pounding the seeds. I sighed and decided I might as well try to use the moment for therapy.

  “So you’ve turned it into powder. What’s next?”

  “It’s not powder. It’s ground seed. Or flour, if you want to call it that. Here, sniff.”

  She held the mortar under my nose. The stench blew me off my feet and left me coughing on the floor. “Good, isn’t it?” said Olivia.

  “I think I need a medic…” I spluttered.

  “Rubbish. Splash water on your face, you’ll be fine.” I dashed to the sink. The burning faded as I drenched myself.

  “How can that possibly be food?”

  “It’s not food, it’s what you have with food. Be a dear and get me some vinegar. Just the kind we have with dinner is fine.”

  I took a vinegar bottle down from a cupboard and handed it over while wiping my eyes.

  “Did everyone eat this on your world…?”

  “Don’t be stupid. What do you think, we’re all the same as each other? This is just what I have. Goes with any kind of meat, even that muck you print here.”

  “How did people discover this? Were they suicidal and hungry at the same time?”

  “Hah! Didn’t you have mustard on your world?”

  “I have absolutely no idea what they had on my world. We don’t have it here because it kills people.”

  “Well you needed it where I come from. You try eating meat that’s been through the marinade, see how long you can stomach it. Bit of mustard makes anything edible.”

  “This is the marinade you used to destroy the revenation bacteria?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “And mustard made it taste better?”

  “That’s it.” She poured the ground up seeds from the mortar into a bowl, then added water, a little sugar and salt.

  “Did you grow this in the research station?”

  “Tried to. Couldn’t get anything to come up. We had some in our supplies but that didn’t last…”

  “How did you manage for food?”

  She stirred the mustard paste. “I told you before.”

  “I mean before you had to resort to—”

  “Cannibalism.”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “Might as well.”

  “But before that?”

  “We had enough supplies for three years. We planted what we could. There were plenty of vegetables you could grow if you put your mind to it. We couldn’t keep many animals. Couldn’t fence off enough pasture to let them graze. Then we started raiding the nearby villages.”

  “What happened to the villagers?”

  “Have a guess.”

  It wasn’t difficult to imagine: villagers falling ill, dying one by one and revenning, their families unwilling to put them down. “Did you try to help any of them?”

  “Of course not. Do you think I’m stupid? They had the flu! That’s what started the last outbreak. They were dropping like flies and getting up again ten minutes later. If I’d have let them in, we’d have all been dead.”

  “Did the villagers ask to be let in?”

  “You’re desperate to find something I feel guilty about, aren’t you? How about asking how I managed to get beaten up and nearly dead in a bus crash on this planet? And how come we’re all the way out here where it’s even more dangerous?”

  “We’re as safe as we can be, Olivia, and I’m sorry you had to endure some injuries. But you’re avoiding the question.”

  “Of course they tried to get in. Of course I stopped them. I had to.”

  “How did it happen?”

  She sighed as she stirred. “Keep an eye on that clock. Let me know when ten minutes have passed. I need to add the vinegar then. And yes, I’ll answer your damn question. They wanted us to let their children in but they were all wiping snot off their faces so I said no. They thought I’d go all mushy if they brought up the children. No idea of psychology. I had children on my side of the gate, which ones did they think I was going to protect?

  “So they buggered off and came back with shotguns. I wasn’t having that. Our guards had rifles, good revenant hunting rifles. We shot them and shot them again when they revenned. Hah. If I’d known what was coming I’d have put them in the pens with the others.

  “So the villagers died. I’m not ashamed of it. We would have all died if I hadn’t kept them out. That’s why I was in charge and not some laboratory man. They wanted someone who’d been in the first outbreak and wasn’t going to get everyone killed.”

  “How long was it before you went back out?”

  “Two and a half years. Once we saw no one was coming for us and we were going to have to find our own food. And that was a mess, going down to the village. No more than a mile and it looked empty but as soon as you opened a door the revenants came out. The first expedition lost two men, after that we did a full scale extermination, got a lot of them in the pens as well. Not so short sighted any more. Anyway we got all the food that was left in the village. Lot of tins. They hadn’t had time to eat much of it before they started dying. We lasted nearly a year on what we got from there. Ten minutes.”

  I’d completely forgotten the clock. “So what now?”

  “Vinegar sets the mustard. Keeps the flavour good while it’s still strong. Not too much…” She poured a small measure of vinegar into the mustard paste, and mixed it in. “And now I need a jar.”

  I called the infirmary and had them send over a sterile specimen jar, marked with a biohazard symbol, which made Olivia laugh. She then decided to make herself a picnic, and invited me along. We set up a small table outside in a meadow overlooking a plunging valley and Olivia demonstrated how t
o make a sandwich such as she had enjoyed on her world: meat and bread and butter and mustard and nothing else.

  “How long is it since you’ve had one of these?” I asked.

  She thought about it. “About a year after we locked ourselves in. That’s when the mustard ran out. We got a bit more when we started raiding but then there wasn’t enough grain for bread. Not proper bread. Do you want one?”

  “Er…”

  “I’ll spread the mustard thin.”

  “Okay. I’m glad I brought some water.”

  “You won’t need it. Here.”

  She made me a sandwich, and I tried it as a child might, nibbling at the edge. But the mustard filled my nostrils with fire and I choked. Olivia chuckled to herself.

  “Too strong?”

  I nodded as I gulped back water. Olivia ate her own sandwich with every sign of contentment.

  “So,” I coughed, “what were you actually doing there, at Tringarrick?”

  “Research. It was a research station. I told you that. Little place in the middle of bloody nowhere stuck in a load of hills. Damn hard to get into or out of. Nothing there except a couple of villages and a little coal mine. Somebody decided it would be a good place to hide in an outbreak, and you know what, they were right. That’s why so many of us went there.”

  “Okay, but what kind of research were you doing?”

  “Anything that would kill revenants. We tried making a spray out of the marinade to stop a crowd, but that was no good, it just killed their skin. Lots of work on antibiotics, but we never got anywhere, just made a mess of the test subjects.”

  “You kept revenants, then?”

  “Had to. Had to have something we could run tests on. There was never a shortage. Whenever we ran out, we just opened the gates and made a noise.”

  “Were you completely isolated?”

  “Not to begin with. We lost the cities but the government moved into castles and forts and all that. We had a lot of those left over from the wars of the last century. We kept in touch with radio, just had to keep the dynamo wound up. All those knobbly knees taking turns on the bike! Bloody hilarious. Children loved it until they realised it was work.”

  “Were your children there?”

  “Yeh.” She took a bite of her sandwich.

  “What was it like for them?”