The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “And they failed.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I disabled them.”

  “You…” I took a moment to process that. “You killed them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Those were his last orders.”

  “Can you explain that a bit more…?”

  “He felt we did not deserve to live. As a species. He wept to tell me he had lost all faith in humanity. He said it again and again: we should be punished for this crime. He said that he should be punished most of all. But there was no one who could do so. Everyone knew what had happened and nobody really blamed him. So he asked me.”

  “He asked you directly?”

  “As much as he could.”

  “It was definitely an order?”

  “I remember the words: ‘We do not deserve to live, Sergeant. No one will punish us for what we have done. If there is to be any justice for this world, we must do it ourselves.’ He repeated that: “We must do it ourselves.” He looked into my eyes… and I understood. So I sabotaged the hibernation units. Everyone died in their sleep…

  “But he wanted it sooner. So I opened up his casket. I had a knife, I knew he wanted it that way, but… I could not do it. I was a soldier but I never killed a man. I… kissed him… sealed him up… cut the lines instead and let him die for lack of air.”

  A tear ran down his cheek. “If that is genocide… then I will stand trial for it.”

  “There’ll have to be an investigation.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know what will happen. But we’ll support you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So… who are you?”

  He smiled, painfully. “I do not know.”

  “Still?”

  “I was an engineer. I had the training necessary to understand the hibernation units… I suppose that is why they recalled me, even with my injury. But… I do not know who I was.”

  “Okay. It’s still progress.” He didn’t look like he agreed. “Do you feel better?”

  He looked back at me, surprised and unsure of his answer. He thought about it for a moment, and then found words: “Every answer I find becomes another question. Do you think… there will ever be an end to the questions?”

  “I don’t know, Kwame… is it still okay to call you Kwame?”

  “I was called Kobe, before. I think. I am not sure…”

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to make your mind up right away. But with your injuries, there’s no telling what else you might recover.”

  “I am not certain I wish to know more.”

  I put a hand on his. “You’ve made a massive step. Now we know what we’re doing, we can treat your PTSD. There’s one thing, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “We can’t do it here. We have to move the group again, soon.”

  “Was there another attack…?”

  “No. A world is ending. We’ve just started an evacuation and they’re going to need this place for the refugees.”

  “Of course. What happened?”

  “Solar flares. They’re so bad they’re killing the planet. They have less than a year before there’s nothing left.”

  “It never ends,” he sighed.

  “No. But it always gets better. And it’ll get better for you as well. I can’t promise you’ll get back everything you lost, but it will get better.”

  He sighed and leaned his head back against the pedestal.

  “Then I shall have to accept that.”

  3. Pew

  The bunker disappeared more quickly than it had been built, as a small crew came in to rescape the building to another purpose: shelter and therapy for fifty or more refugees, probably those who were judged to be most disturbed when the triage teams did their work on the way down the Lift. It was only days after the announcement, and the first ships were already lifting the most vulnerable people from the battered arcologies of Ardëe to orbit and the portal to Hub.

  We were not in the first batch of centres to be made available, but nevertheless the group had to pick their way around the work crew as it opened up the shuttered rooms and shaped them into dormitories and therapy rooms and everything the refugees would need. We found ourselves confined to a small corner of the building; it was simple enough to pack and we could have left straight away, but until the Diplomatic Service were ready to take us, we had to wait and carry on as best we could. With Ranev’s agreement, I decided to stay with the group until the move was made, but I hadn’t decided what I would do then. I couldn’t see past the present moment, and went on with therapy, hoping I wouldn’t stumble and let them down.

  My biggest worry was still Pew. He’d been refusing therapy sessions for some time now, and had grown obsessed with physical fitness, increasing his regimen to include self-defence training from security — only the most defensive of martial arts, but pursued with a troubling zeal. However, it was his academic studies that gave me the most concern. He’d completely abandoned his university course in mathematics and physics, and moved on to a syllabus bound by a single theme: genocide. He’d read dozens of case studies of such horrors (including several from my world), and found endless disappointment and dismay at how little was done to bring perpetrators to justice. Historical crimes were forgotten or denied. Legal systems shied away from the worst excesses. Time and time again, the people who were to blame went unpunished. Even the most advanced societies did their best to cover up crimes they had committed on other worlds, and there was complicity throughout the multiverse. The dead were given memorials. The murderers continued their lives. Survivors went unheard and ignored. Business as usual.

  He looked into one other set of cases: those where there were survivors, who had then committed their own genocide against their former oppressors. It was very rare for anyone to be able to turn the tables so completely, and he seemed to be frustrated even with these cases. The former victims became just like their former persecutors, displaying exactly the same behaviour of denial and forgetting, acting as though they were the guilty parties. And by any rational standards, that was precisely what they were. But while Pew was as contemptuous of their denial as any other scholar, his reasoning was different. He thought the crime of counter-genocide should be celebrated.

  After he had missed three sessions, I called him in for a compulsory meeting. I made sure the security man I sent was the one who had been teaching him self-defence; they had a rapport, and I wanted as little chance of conflict as possible. Pew submitted to the summons with a sullen, petulant attempt at gravitas, ignoring pleasantries and the drink I put in front of him.

  “Do you know why I’ve called you in, Pew?” I asked. He didn’t reply. “You’ve been avoiding therapy.” He stayed sullen. “And quite frankly, some of what you’ve been up to is troubling me. We need to talk about this.”

  He looked up at me. Half angry, half guilty at being found out. But it subsided and he looked away again.

  “Pew? Can we talk about what’s bothering you?”

  He kept his silence.

  “You should know that since you’re on the euthanasia track, you do have certain obligations towards keeping up with your therapy. If you’re unable to attend therapy sessions, we won’t have any choice other than to take you out of the programme.”

  He looked up at me again, as though he were being victimised somehow. I went on: “Unless of course you don’t want to die any more?”

  His brow furrowed.

  “Pew, if you want to stay on the euthanasia track, you have to commit to therapy. At the moment you’re not doing that. So… are you feeling better?”

  He swallowed. “I feel different.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know you’ve been doing a lot of exercise. Has that helped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has your research helped as well?”

  “Yes.”
<
br />   “Does that give you something to live for?”

  He looked straight at me, unblinking. Deciding what to tell me. Almost trying to intimidate me with his stare. “Something like that,” he said.

  I sighed. “I’m not sure your research has been healthy…”

  “No. You wouldn’t.”

  “What does that mean, Pew?”

  “It’s happening again. And you’re letting it happen.”

  “I’m sorry, Pew — what do you mean?”

  “Ardëe.”

  “That’s a natural disaster.”

  “No it fucking isn’t!”

  “Pew! Control yourself!”

  “Why can’t anyone fucking see!”

  “Pew!”

  I realised that as much as he was shouting, I was shouting back at the same level. He was as shocked as I was. I took a breath.

  “I’m sorry, Pew, but I don’t see your point. Their sun’s unstable. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “They are just accidents, sometimes.”

  He hunched over his knees, sullen.

  “Pew, is there something you know that I don’t?”

  “They were doing experiments. On the sun.”

  “And where did you hear about this?”

  “On the net.”

  “Where on the net?”

  “It’s all over. It was on the news on Ardëe, and then they stopped talking about it when it went wrong. They had a station on Mercury and they were dropping bombs into the photosphere. Bigger than nukes. It’s antimatter. They dropped a whole fucking reservoir of antimatter in there and it’s burning up a bit at a time and that’s what’s happening.”

  So now he was down as far as believing in conspiracy theories without questioning them in the slightest. The antimatter accusation wasn’t the only crazy story doing the rounds, and the others made about as much sense. It didn’t matter. Once someone starts believing in conspiracies, they lose touch with objective reality and treat every little bit of news as evidence for what they’ve already decided. And Pew had decided that humanity in all its forms was not just prone to genocide, but addicted to it.

  “Okay, Pew, let me ask you something…” He stayed sullen in his chair. I went on. “You’ve been looking into genocides. Okay. But have you looked into apocalypses as well?”

  “Yeah,” he said, grudgingly.

  “All of them?”

  “Some.”

  “Were they all genocides?

  “…Yeah. Some of them.”

  “But not all?” He looked confused. “You should look closely at all of them. Even the ones that are obviously natural disasters.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you’ll find, in every case — even when it’s obvious it was a natural disaster — there’s somebody saying it was deliberate. There’s usually at least a dozen theories for every apocalypse. But most of the time it is just an accident, no matter what people think. Or what they want to believe.”

  That troubled him. “But what if it’s true anyway?”

  “It might be. It might not be. It takes a lot of investigating to find out. I bet if you look closely, most of the people who are making these accusations haven’t done much of that. But don’t take my word for it. Look for yourself and make your own mind up.”

  He frowned, the certainty of his anger dwindling.

  “I know you’re angry, and you’re right to be angry. Because in your case it really was a genocide, and we really do have evidence for what happened. It was a monstrous crime, and one that will not be forgotten. The Soo are interversal pariahs because of what they did. They’ll be denied the full benefits of IU membership, and they’ll have to live with their climate breaking down because we’re not going to help them colonise another world. No one trusts them. I don’t know if anyone ever will.”

  He looked up at me.

  “Do you really think it would make anything better to kill them all?”

  He stared grimly at the floor.

  “Pew, we’ll do everything we can to support you. On the other hand, we need to keep everyone else safe. We will send you to the Psychiatric Centre if we have to.”

  He looked miserable, caught between two impulses.

  “What would you prefer to do?” I asked.

  He swallowed again, and came to a very reluctant decision.

  “I’ll do the therapy,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  4. Asha

  Pew didn’t make a lot of progress with the exposure therapy, but then I didn’t really expect him to, not at first. Just getting him to sit there while I found ways to calm his mind was hard enough work. Helping him deal with his PTSD was going to take months, maybe years, and I found myself thinking more and more that I should get out now, get to the colony world, get away from the group, the centre, Hub, everything. Mykl said they were having trouble finding someone else to take the group — hardly surprising, under the circumstances. There were few people with my experience who weren’t already out at a therapy centre, prepping for refugees, or halfway up the Lift, getting ready to triage the first flood of survivors.

  The days rolled on, and we were promised a date for the move again and again. The news showed the first few people from Ardëe emerging at Agvarterheer Port, mostly coming off the Lift to be rushed straight to medical facilities where their burns could be treated. The first place we’d evacuated had been a hospital in one of the highest arcologies, where the UV had been particularly vicious.

  I had to make a visit to Hub Metro to inspect the new facility for the group: a small building in the outskirts that carried no markings, was not listed on public directories, and could not be found unless you had permission. No vehicle would take you there, and if you stumbled across it, the doors would not open, nor would any staff emerge to see who you were. It was one of those places the Diplomatic Service kept aside for secret negotiations where the parties could not admit they were even talking to each other. There was provision for overnight stays, and this was being turned into something the group could use for a while, until a more permanent home could be found. Progress was slow on the conversion, but they promised me no more than another week.

  The evacuation was being felt in every quarter of the city: wreckage still heaped up from the attack was cleared away and prefab buildings were dropped into place in public spaces, while residents of the more permanent structures were shuffled into as few buildings as possible, so the ones that remained could be turned into refugee centres for those who were less afflicted by physical and mental trauma. But all of them would have issues. Those that did not would be sent straight to a colony world; there simply wasn’t room on Hub for anyone who didn’t desperately need our help. So Hub Metro would once again be filled with troubled refugees, as it was during every evacuation.

  I visited my own apartment for the first time in weeks to supervise a couple of robots as they packed up my belongings and shifted them into storage, to make a little more room if it was needed, and so I could leave once and for all if I decided to do so.

  5. Elsbet

  While I was in Hub Metro, I rolled as many duties into my visit as I could. Liss had her meeting with the Quillian diplomat, which had been put off half a dozen times, and which I’d only been able to arrange as a face to face meeting between the diplomat’s other engagements; elsewhere in the city, I had to pay a visit to Katie in hospital. Or rather, I visited Sergeant-Designate Elsbet Carmon, late of Attack Squadron Alpha Six of the Vesta 4 Holy Brigade, for it was she who had emerged once the new body had woken.

  I found her sitting up in bed and working on a co-ordination testing programme with one of the neurologists, stabbing away at a pad with a finger.

  “Yes. I’ve got a finger. It works.”

  “That’s right,” said the neurologist, “we just need to test how the fine motor skills are coming along…”

  “They’re fine,” she said, and stabbed
at some more buttons.

  The neurologist smiled, patiently. “You need to look at the pad for this to work…”

  She looked round, saw me standing at the door, and broke into a smile. She jumped off the bed and ran to hug me, knocking me back half a metre.

  “Thank you! Thank you!”

  “Okay… nice to see you too…”

  She pulled her head back from my shoulder. “Thank you,” she said, looking straight into my eyes.

  I smiled as best I could, then looked past her to the neurologist, who was also smiling, though rather wearily.

  She let me go and twirled. “This is amazing… I’ve never felt this good!”

  “They tell me your old body had a lot of toxins in it. So now you don’t,” I said.

  “And look!” She turned her head to show a scalp covered only by close-cropped hair. “No sockets!”

  “I’m sure you can have an implant later—”

  “I don’t want one. I don’t want anything in me!”

  “Okay. You might have to wear contact lenses if you want to understand people. Not everyone speaks Interversal.”

  “Hah! They can fucking learn!”

  “Well. You seem very happy.”

  “Yeah. If it wasn’t for these fuckers.” She jabbed a disrespectful thumb in the direction of the neurologist.

  “They’re just trying to make sure everything went okay. The operation you had doesn’t always go this well.”

  “Balls. I’m fine.”

  “And they’re probably going to need the bed soon. I’m sure they’re being very polite about it, but we’re going to have a lot of people coming in with radiation burns in a little while. Did they tell you about Ardëe?”

  “Yeah, yeah, fine, I’ll press all the buttons and get out of here…” she sulked. “Are you taking me back now?”

  “I have to get the agreement of the rest of the group, first. Katie said some very worrying things and they’re a little cautious.”

  She snorted. “Idiots.”

  “I think they’ll be happier when they realise it’s you.”

  “How are they?”