The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “But you changed your minds later on?”

  “Yes. There was a theory the Antecessors were testing their methods. Most of the victims—” He paused, correcting himself. “Most of the people involved were elderly. There were only about six or seven cases. No sign of interversal interference, just a few people dying oddly.”

  “There’s a memo attached, from later.”

  “Yes. It looked like the same thing as, as what we saw later on. We never knew for sure. If it was the Antecessors, then they’re safe.” He shrugged, helplessly.

  “Let’s move on. Six months later.”

  I let video play: a compilation of news reports. A family had jumped in front of a shuttletrain: the father and two children all had happy smiles on their faces, even as the mother reached out for them, screaming. Three random workers in a skytower had got up from their desks at the same time, walked to a viewing platform and jumped to their deaths. In a research lab, dozens of chemists lay dead after one of them allowed chlorine gas to flood the building. A junior officer had opened the weapons storage lockers at a barracks. Four soldiers took weapons and shot themselves. The news stations switched into crisis mode, cataloguing each new act of horror.

  A chime at the door announced the arrival of Iokan’s chakchuk. I brought it to him as he watched the news roll on. He let it sit before him until I pressed pause.

  “From what we gather, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “They were only reporting the most sensational incidents. A lot of individuals were dying by themselves as well.”

  “Yes,” said Iokan, his attention far away in time.

  “There’s a Department Zero document from this date…” I brought it up. “What can you tell me?”

  He gulped back his chakchuk and rubbed his eyes. After a moment to gather himself, he looked back up at the screen.

  “I remember this. They managed to stop a man from killing himself. He was in a pharmacy, picking up a prescription. He was normal until they handed over the pills, and then he took them all at once. His stomach was pumped and we interviewed him afterwards. It says there’s an artist’s impression of what he saw…?”

  “Yes,” I said, and brought up the next page. A pastel-style sketch of a glowing light: pure white in the middle with a rainbow of refraction around the edges. Subtle shades of polygonal forms at the centre.

  Iokan gasped. “That’s them. It’s one of… them.” A chime came in my ear; my pad showed a suddenly high pulse rate for Iokan. A smile of joy twitched around the edge of his mouth. Then he remembered his surroundings, and reached for his mug to drink. His pulse came back down.

  “There’s a reference to another casefile,” I said. “It’s dated about thirteen years earlier. Your name’s on it.”

  He nodded. “I think I told you before. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen them. We found an ancient machine that made them, and there was an Antecessor trapped inside the system. My commander set it free. When they cross-referenced it with what the man from the pharmacy saw… well, that’s why I was brought onto the investigative team.”

  “Let’s move on. We have some video here. Can you talk me through it?”

  He didn’t look at the screen. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Because I think you need to be reminded of what happened on your world.”

  “I know what happened on my world.”

  “Would you prefer to come back to it another day?”

  It wasn’t in his nature to admit to weakness. “No. Let’s go on.”

  I called up a video. It had been taken through a specialised camera and carried telemetry of various kinds. It appeared to have a high placement, on a building of some kind, but not so high as the skytowers of the city it swept across.

  “This is a test I asked for,” said Iokan. “We needed a way to make them visible…”

  A green light flashed in one corner, and a filter was imposed on the view. The camera swung again to regain a wide shot of the city.

  The sky was full of glowing lights: Antecessors floating above the skyline.

  “They can bend light around them. But they can’t hide the higher energy stuff quite as well, so there’s some x-ray leakage. This is us looking for them.”

  “How did Department Zero react?”

  “We were shocked. There were so many ways we could have been attacked… so many ways we had been attacked. We thought it would be the interversal powers again. Finding out it was the Antecessors instead was terrifying. Some people wanted to give up there and then…”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I wish I had.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at me, incredulous that I had not already guessed. “Because then I’d be with them.”

  “How did you feel?”

  He paused, reflecting. “I had a family.”

  “Szilmar and Ghiorghiu. Your wife and son.”

  “Yes. They’re safe now.”

  “But you didn’t think so then.”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to get them. D0 headquarters was safe. We had an EM cage around the building that could stop them getting in.”

  “How old was your son?”

  “Less than a year.”

  “Had you been with Szilmar long?”

  He shook his head. “A couple of years. We knew each other when we were younger, but we didn’t click until… well. Until I wasn’t an investigator any more.”

  “So… you brought them back to Department Zero headquarters.”

  “Yes. By then there was a cluster of them around the building. We parked on the roof and ran for the door… I made it there but she stumbled… she had to turn round to get up. And she was suddenly… happy. I was calling her in but she walked to the edge… I had to drag her inside. She begged me to let her jump…”

  He finished the last of his drink, unnerved.

  “Ghiorghiu saw them as well. He just shut down. Didn’t cry. Didn’t play. Didn’t sleep. The doctor had to feed him through tubes… it was like he was waiting.”

  “And Szilmar?”

  “We had to restrain her.”

  “How did you feel?”

  He looked down at his empty mug and wiped his eyes. “As though my heart had been ripped out.”

  “How did you feel about the Antecessors?”

  “I hated them.” He shook his head, mourning his foolishness. “I didn’t understand…”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “I…” He struggled between memory and later conviction.

  “Okay. Let’s keep moving. I’ve got some records here of the response to the Antecessors.”

  He looked up at the screen, relieved. A scatter of pages came up.

  “Can you join the dots for me?” I asked.

  “Okay…” He stood up, went to the screen and pulled a group of reports together. “These are observations of Antecessor behaviour. Here’s the analysis… there was information going from the Antecessors to the people who saw them. Transmitted visually, somehow. These are records of brain activity from a volunteer: she saw more than just the Antecessor, she saw… something amazing.”

  He smiled, then turned to a surveillance video, showing an Antecessor floating above a corpse in the street. “And they were doing something to people’s minds as they died. We couldn’t see the process, it was too fast… but two Antecessors would leave the body behind. The theory was that it was a kind of reproduction.”

  The process really was fast; just a flash of x-rays, and then there were two.

  “And here’s our response…” He pushed the other materials aside and gathered up a series of reports. “Lots of attempts to communicate. Signals in every frequency. Appeals on the media. Billboards, even. Nothing worked. But there was a cluster around D0 headquarters, so they knew who we were. In the end, we sent someone out to talk to them.”

  “That was suicide, surely?”

  “Yes. But we didn’t have a
lot of time. You see here?” He pulled up a graph. “This shows how long we had left.” He point out a series of lines running across the diagram. “That’s the level of population needed to sustain cities. That’s how many we needed just to keep civilisation going. That’s how many we needed to avoid extinction.”

  “It would have taken a few years, then.”

  “At the rate they were going then. But we expected them to speed up. So we sent out a man with the best psych record we could find, and gave him a message. Just that we needed to talk to them. He killed himself. But one of them came to us an hour later.”

  He tapped a video. One of the camera feeds showed the sudden appearance of an Antecessor in visible wavelengths. The air about it shimmered with pressure waves; and text appeared on the screen. Analogue Audio (language): Please state your concern.

  “We told it they were killing us, and causing unnecessary suffering. It said they didn’t want to hurt anyone, they only wanted to take us to a new stage of being. We begged them to postpone, order a truce, anything. It said they would scale back their efforts and try to make the transition easier. We just wanted time to find a way to stop them. We thought they’d bought it. We thought it might be over…” he trailed off into silence.

  “What happened?”

  He sighed, and went back to the screen. He dug through the files until he found a report with video. It showed multiple surveillance views of a sporting stadium shaped like a circle with a small playing field in the middle. Perhaps twenty or thirty thousand people were there — the stadium was half full.

  “A lot of people were staying at home but normal life was still going on. Until this kind of thing started happening.”

  A light illuminated the stadium. Cameras swung up to find the Antecessor: much brighter than any seen before. Other cameras showed the crowd, suddenly transfixed. The players in the field laid down their bats and took off their helmets. Everyone stared upwards.

  More lights came from above. A starfield of Antecessors.

  On the pitch, the slaughter began. Some of the players picked up their bats. One removed his helmet and bowed his head while another struck him on the skull. An Antecessor descended to him as he died, and two rose back up. The crowd queued up to be executed in an orderly fashion. When police arrived, they too saw the Antecessors and joined the queue — or else used their weapons to start a new queue.

  “They didn’t scale it back, did they?” I said.

  “No.”

  “They found a way to make it happen faster. Working on crowds rather than one at a time.”

  He nodded.

  “They lied.”

  He looked up at me, appalled. “They… you can’t judge them… they’re…” He looked back at the screen. People kept on dying.

  His objection withered away, and he nodded. “They lied.”

  “I’m glad you see that.”

  “But they had reasons!”

  “Perhaps. Do you still think they gave everyone a choice?”

  He looked back at the screen. One of the players handed his bat over to a young woman, knelt down and had his own brains bashed out before a light descended and took him. Then she handed the bat to the next person, and was killed in turn. The queue stretched back to the stands.

  “No,” said Iokan. He turned away from the screen. Tears were in his eyes. “Can you stop it? Please?”

  I stopped the video from my pad and whisked it off the screen. Iokan leaned on the back of a chair. I got up and offered him a tissue. He wiped his eyes.

  “Let’s go on,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  He turned from me, went back to the screen and found more records. “We recalculated the graph. The time we had left came down to about six months, depending on whether the new ones could take people as well.” The lines shifted on the graph, showing mortality curves tightening.

  “We fought back. But nothing worked…” He showed a quick series of videos of weapons tests: the first one showed a coherent energy beam hitting an Antecessor and bursting it into a shower of light; but the next one showed the Antecessor reforming afterwards, and further tests had little or no effect.

  “The existential threat notice went out.” He brought up the document: an animated picture of an Antecessor in the corner of the page, and a warning to seek shelter unless the reader was able to fight back.

  “We advised every government to get under cover. Then this started coming on every channel…” A brief video ran: an Antecessor glowed on the screen while an ethereal voice assured people the process was brief, and, once transformed, they too would be Antecessors. “They couldn’t touch people’s minds through the screen. The frame rate didn’t work. But that was when a lot of the public realised what they were. And we’d all been praying for deliverance for so many years, after so many attacks from the interversal powers…” He shook his head. “Can you understand that? Our gods came back. What would you do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Once the church got hold of it they started broadcasting as well and told everyone it was the Antecessors, they could trust them, and…”

  “And it sped up.”

  “Yes. They couldn’t have done it so quickly if people hadn’t co-operated.” He pulled up the graph: it changed again. The mortality curves took an exponential dive. “Just a couple of weeks, in the end.”

  His hand hovered over another file. “There’s more video of what happened in the churches…”

  “It’s okay, Iokan. I’ve seen it.” I could understand why he didn’t want to play it: church officials handing out knives, final services before the altar that ended in wrist-slitting. Kindly nurses with anaesthetic cream for the children. I hadn’t slept after I watched that.

  He pushed the video icon away. “Thank you.”

  He brought up another file: a daily status report with estimated human population remaining. He spread out fifteen of them: fifteen days of the crisis, with every report progressively worse. “After a week, the only survivors were just the odd few hiding out. We lost touch with our own government after nine days. Then the only people left were under EM cages. They went dark one by one.”

  He brought up the last report. “The day after this was when our own EM cage failed. That was the end.”

  He stepped back, as though that was everything.

  “But not for you,” I said.

  He looked round helplessly. He was reaching the most painful memories.

  “You survived longer. What happened to you, Iokan?”

  He looked back at the screen just to keep from my gaze.

  “I…”

  He searched for words.

  “I denied them.”

  “You denied them? Why?”

  “They took my family.”

  “Can you talk about it?”

  “They took everyone. The cage failed. They came in and… that was it.”

  “Just like that?”

  “I tried to save them.”

  “How?”

  “I had a weapon. I modified it. I stayed with them. Tried to protect them. Szilmar was strapped down in a cell. Ghiorghiu was… sitting. Then it came. I never even had a chance to fire.”

  “But you didn’t kill yourself?”

  “They touched me. They… showed me heaven. I told them no.”

  “You resisted?”

  “I wasn’t the first. A few people were able to hold out. Training helped… but…”

  A long, long pause. I waited.

  “When I came back to myself, Szilmar and Ghiorghiu were dead. And everyone else was gone as well.” He turned back to me. “So I went outside.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really remember what happened next. There wasn’t anyone else left. Just bodies. It could have been weeks. Days. I don’t know. But they stayed with me. They were patient. And in the end when I was dying… I opened my heart.” His expression recalled a joy from memory; a joy tha
t was swiftly clouded. “And then you came. And then I was here.”

  He sat down.

  “Do you remember how you felt when you denied them?”

  “I was angry.”

  “How do you feel about them now?”

  He thought about it.

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I just… I don’t know.”

  8. Asha

  I locked myself in my office for a while after letting Iokan go. I felt cruel and heartless for crushing his faith; it needed to be done, but it took its toll on him, and on me. I dimmed the lights and lay down, trying not to see the bodies of children piling up in the church, so similar to the corpse-piles my parents tried to hide from me.

  But I could not. The image remained. And that nightmare from childhood, in the weeks before evacuation, when people were dying so swiftly they could not be buried or cremated or even named. The hospitals piled the human remains in the car park. When I fell ill and my parents panicked and took me there, they recoiled from the sight, realising the hospital had become a place for the dying and little else. They ignored government appeals to stay put, and made for the evacuation centre the next day. My fever put them and me on the priority list and gained us admittance to the refugee camp. But that ended in a pile of corpses, too.

  I opened my eyes. Was it always the same? Was it always like this? Mountains of human remains on every world?

  I found my pad and pulled images up on the wall. The orbital surveys of Iokan’s dead world had reminded me of another, and I sought out the latest pictures of my own all-but-perished Earth.

  There was a ship from the Refugee Service in orbit, listening in for appeals from the last few survivors, appeals that no longer came. We knew they were hiding in bunkers, especially in the great military cavern at Cheyenne Mountain, wearing uniforms of a country that no longer existed. There was only a tiny hope they would respond to our offer to save them, but still, we listened. And as well as listening, we watched, and those images were available for anyone to see.