Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  I’m sure some cats got left behind, but I didn’t find them. If ever I found a house with cat food still in it, I opened the bag and tipped it over on the floor, just in case there was still someone there that needed it. I had more than enough food for myself, so it was no skin off my back. I did see several ferals, but I was pretty sure they would get along just fine without people.

  The feral cats actually were a blessing—not just for me, but everyone. They certainly rose to the occasion and fulfilled their purpose, the purpose we used them for originally anyway, and kept the vermin population down. Rats were good food, but not if it meant they brought back the bubonic plague or some other fresh hell like that.

  People weren’t big on birds, but I did find a lorikeet at the school. It had a huge pile of food in its cage, speckled with droppings.

  I brought the bird, whose name I never did learn, up to Watch Spot and went back for its food, and a new bone beak-sharpening thing.

  When I walked with something in hand, I had only the one mirror to watch my step, and I alternated it angling at the ground and the way ahead. I got pretty good at scanning things using my mirrors, but using just one while I carried something was beginning to stress me out.

  I kept the lorikeet with fresh water and food, and in return I had a pretty bird to look at. I would have liked to set it free, but letting domesticated pets out into the wild was basically killing them, only it took longer. My new companion I simply called Bird.

  The only time I went out of town was to check and see what the little farm nearby had to offer. I rounded up a lot of supplies from the house and went to do a scan of the barn. My mirrors swiveled all around letting me take in the whole interior of the barn. There were bales of hay, an old, unlit lantern, and—movement. I approached cautiously. When my mirrors caught his eyes just right and he looked back at me, his big brown horse eyes were rimmed with white—frightened I guessed.

  I didn’t know jack squat about horses, but I did know that if I left him there he would die. The farm was empty. I took my best guess at hitching him up to a wagon in the barn. I’m sure I didn’t get it right, and maybe that’s why he hated it so. Or maybe they left him behind because he was old and ornery and didn’t like to be hitched, I’ll never know. Maybe they forgot him. Maybe he had no one. Just like me.

  So that’s how I found Ham. I couldn’t stand the thought of calling him Horse, but I wasn’t very creative when it came to picking names for things (gosh, can you tell?) so Horse and Man became Ham. He was quite a ham though; though ornery and downright grumpy at times, he was very spirited and quite an attention suck, so the name ended up fitting.

  Ham pulled that cart, with me walking beside him in solidarity, with all the supplies I could find at the farm, back into town for me. I rigged a tarp up against the back wall of the building and used a few pallets from the grocery store to make a fence and stacked the hay against it. It wasn’t a pasture, and I’m sure I got a ton of things wrong about caring for him, but at least he wasn’t starving and alone in a barn.

  I made a new Mirror Line to watch over him, but it wasn’t really a Line like the others—a single mirror, a huge wall mirror in an ornate guilt frame, at just the right angle over the lip of the roof, let me watch his pen from above without having to add any more pieces to the surveillance setup. He figured out how it worked and would sometimes watch the watcher, seeing how long he could stare at me before I caught him and made a silly face at him, which he’d sometimes answer with a knicker, or sometimes a huff, depending on his mood I think.

  We did a patrol of the town twice a “day,” that is to say, once every twelve hours. Ham took me around town at a languid pace. I had guns strapped behind me on the saddle and a wicked hat I found in someone’s closet—a wide-brimmed bison leather hat that made me feel like a champ. I didn’t care that he was old and that the tack probably wasn’t done up right, I felt like such a badass when I rode him. Sometimes I called him pardner.

  Ham and I, making the rounds of the town, stopping at every intersection to listen. The world gets real quiet without people in it. No traffic, no planes, no nothin’. That was when I started to be able to hear the other things that maybe I’d been missing before. Birds. The way the wind rustled the weeping willow by the library. Crickets, frogs, the buzz of insects and beat of my heart. All became loud to me, the soundtrack of my existence as the last man on earth.

  Somewhere in there I got really fed up of only using the one mirror when I had to carry something, so I began to attach mirrors to myself. When one hand was otherwise occupied, I could use the ones attached to my legs to see around. And even when I had both ones in my hands going, they were a lot more effective if I had a lot of angles to draw from on my body. I took a bunch of small mirrors out of left-behind makeup compacts, and used wood glue to stick them to a vest, and then to a pair of swim trunks I wore over my regular pants.

  I wasn’t at my best after so long without sleep, but I decided I’d keep trying to go on as long as I could. I kept a diary during that time, but, reading back on it, it was mostly gibberish. There’s a lot of stuff about Mirror People, who I could sometimes see through mirrors. But they weren’t real. There was a whole page that only contained the word “BOOM!” over and over again, but I have no recollection of what that could possibly have been about. Maybe it had something to do with the smoldering crater that used to be the mayor’s house?

  Ham became increasingly agitated at me, and I wonder if it was because I was losing track of things, forgetting when I’d fed him or leaving him saddled up after a patrol.

  There was a hawk around and I’d seen it eyeing Bird. I put a towel around Bird’s cage whenever I wasn’t there, and I guess hawks don’t have a theory of object permanence or whatever it is that lets us know when something is still there even when we can’t see it. So the towel hid Bird from predation.

  Ham had object permanence. I played hide-and-seek with him a few times. It’s not like I hid in places that were hard, but he still found me every time. Once, we played in the entire town. I was hiding in an empty garbage can (no lid), waiting for him to saunter up and find me, when I heard something like a gunshot. I can’t be sure it was a gunshot, because I could have hallucinated it, but it roused me from my game and I took Ham back to Watch Spot, where I went immediately to check the Mirror Lines, mirror in the left hand scanning, mirror in the right hand scanning.

  One was showing the asphalt of the road instead of the straight-ahead stretch of the main street. My breath caught in my throat and I stared at the broken Mirror Line for a moment, hoping the mirror in my hand was just playing tricks on me. I angled it away and then back at the offending monitor-mirror, but it still showed me only the asphalt. I did a quick calculation, mentally tracing over the string of mirrors that led down to the main street, and decided it was one of two mirrors that had malfunctioned.

  But why? They were all secure. What could have moved them? Enough to knock it askew? I took a gun with me and followed the line of mirrors, keeping my gaze mostly on the mirrors attached to my legs; they gave me a wide view of what I was coming up on, my two eyes turned into farther reaching compound eyes, like an insect.

  I found the offending mirror and repositioned it; it had only been bumped slightly, and there were a few feathers on the ground around it. Perhaps a bird had been hunting here and knocked it? Perhaps Hawk? I stood and listened again, hoping it had been a bird, but prepared for more nefarious culprits.

  I heard another crashing noise, back in the direction of Watch Spot.

  I hurried back as fast as I could, relying again on my leg mirrors to show me the way. I saw a person in one of them and froze, abandoning one of my hand mirrors in favor of the gun on my hip; I drew it and hurried to find cover, while keeping the person in view on my legs. I ducked behind an electrical box, inactive and hopefully not a bomb. I peeked my one hand mirror around it and honed in on where the person stood. They were inside the movie rental store. I squinted and they s
tared at me, unmoving.

  We watched each other for a long time like that. Their gaze was unsettling, and it took me a long time to realize that it was because they never blinked. There was another jostling sound, from nearby—something was happening at Watch Spot. I couldn’t stay pinned on the side of the road, not while my hard work was being tampered with. There was a terrible screeching, and I steadied myself and took aim at the unblinking person. Their eyes didn’t waver from me once. As I shot, the window shattered and fell, and once I had a clear view I could see that my bullet found its mark, right in their neck. They remained standing, staring. I admired their tenacity; had they even flinched? I knew they would be dead in a matter of moments; blood was pouring out of their neck and down their cardboard chest. I decided it was safe to go defend Watch Spot.

  I hurried up to the roof, gun in one hand, mirror in the other.

  Everything seemed normal; I stared at the Mirror Lines for quite a while, trying to glean any hint of movement, any cause of the ruckus I had heard.

  I don’t know how long it was before Bird’s cage came into view in one of my hand mirrors, and I saw that it was knocked to the ground, the towel strewn nearby, the wires bent in a few places. The hawk hadn’t been able to get at Bird, who was still inside the cage. But his chest was heaving and he lay on his back, eyes half shut, little feet up in the air. He died before I could right the cage, and I buried him in the flower planters at the front of the library.

  Then it really was just horse and man.

  I went back to where I had seen and shot the person. They were still there, standing, unblinking, blood running from the bullet hole in their neck. I decided to leave them like that. If they didn’t cause me trouble again, they could stand there and bleed all they want. Though, they weren’t bleeding at all. And it wasn’t really a person; it was just cardboard. It was a pretty convincing illusion that my mind was creating though; when I touched his neck, my fingers came away bloody. He never blinked once.

  I glued some extra mirrors to Ham’s saddle. And I made him a sort of neck-sash, affixed to his bridal tack to stay up, so that I had even more angles of sight to draw on when I rode him. There wasn’t a single makeup compact in the town left unpilfered by my mirror-hungry hands.

  It felt like a long time of just horse and man. Our twice-a-day patrol, feeding him, brushing him, watching the Mirror Lines, listening to the sounds of the empty world around me. Hands flitting mirrors this way and that, scanning, always scanning. Sometimes I would see another person in the mirrors, but usually there was something off about them; their gait sort of loping or their head bent at an odd angle, enough to let me know that they were a figment of my imagination. I would ride Ham up to them and face him towards the apparition, and he never reacted as though anything was there. He became my litmus test; surely Ham would let me know if the person was real.

  I never let my guard down. A strange paradox, thinking I was the last man on earth, and yet, watching the Mirror Lines for trouble, which I thought would come in the form of raiders. And if they had come, it would have shattered the notion I had built up that I was the last one. . . . But I could finally get to play with the elaborate defense system I’d set up, guns hidden in parked cars, guns taped on the inside of awnings of all the main street shops, guns even buried in the ground.

  When you’re the last person alive, you can do whatever you want.

  I was laughably unadventurous I suppose. The list of my shenanigans includes: drawing a huge chalk mural of a chicken on the side of the town hall, dressing the hardware store Bigfoot up in ridiculous clothing, and making a pile of money and valuables. I knew they weren’t worth anything, but it was still sort of neat to be able to stand over a pile of wealth—coins, bills, gold things, silver things, jewelry, gems. Sometimes I imagined I was a dragon, hoarding treasure. Sometimes, in that little scenario, I would kill any knight that came to slay me. Sometimes I would let him kill me.

  More often than not, they would come and offer up a virgin to appease me.

  It began to not matter that I was the last man on earth. Sitting in my leather recliner atop the library at Watch Spot, looking from one Mirror Line to the other, checking and rechecking that I was alone, alone, alone. Except for Ham. Ham, who I’m sure was starving to death near the end. The barn only had so much hay, and I could only find so many oats. And by then anyway I could hardly move, let alone think straight enough to formulate a plan to go find more food or let him out to graze. It was all I could do to get some nutrition into myself.

  Who knows how long I was like that. Sitting in that chair, Mirror Lines silent and still, empty bird cage off to the side, ornate mirror over Ham showing me his drooping back. If I could remember how often I ate a granola bar or tin of fruit, I might be able to calculate the timeline, but as it is, I only know that, when I woke up, there was a pile of wrappers and cans strewn about me.

  Miraculously, Ham was still alive. I don’t remember doing it, but at some point I’d cut open a bag of feed and just left it open in his pen. The barrel I’d set up to catch rainwater from the gutters was very nearly empty, and I imagine it wasn’t the most pleasant thing to drink. There was dung everywhere and he was supremely unhappy, but he was alive.

  I brought him a jug of water I’d saved back at my house and let him drink it all. I opened a bag of oats and let him eat as much as he wanted.

  Then Ham and I rode out of that town, because I knew that if I had woken up, that it might be over, and that I might not be the only one left. And I’d be damned if I was going to stay alone in that town, clinging to the notion that I was king of my domain, a dragon to be slain or to myself slay any that dared confront me. I took a lot of extra mirrors with me, and I set them up in a perimeter whenever I stopped for the night.

  I took the road out of town, and I suppose the only thing left to say is that I did find people, and when they saw me they said I had madness in my eyes and that Ham was afraid of me, even as I rode him, afraid of me. They called me Disco Ball Man for a while, then Mirror Man.

  Someone that knew about horses took care of Ham until he was back to better health, and when I was also back up to snuff and living in a world that had other people in it, I went to visit him. He nuzzled me, forgiving my past errors in his care, and we were friends again.

  The effects of thinking you’re the last man on earth stay with me though. I know it’s a remnant of the madness I developed there on my own, but sometimes I feel like I’m still the only human left alive, and that other people I see in my mirrors are hallucinations. But Ham reacts to them as though they are there, so I will trust his judgement. I wonder if this will ever stop. And what will I do when I no longer have Ham to tell me if the people in the mirrors are real?

  All your base are belong to us lol dickbutt.jpg #rekt

  —United States Department of Defense website, after it was hacked

  This is one chapter a lot of you would skip over if you didn’t know the full story. Gamers were skipped over all the time before, so it’s nothing new to us. But before you do, know that this is the story of the workforce that rebuilt your world. To understand us, you’re going to get a bit of how our lives were before the insomnia plague hit. I’ll do my best to make it understandable; I think anyone who’s lost themselves in a game, be it World of Warcraft or chess, can relate to the tale I have to tell. You might have to do some lateral translating. Think of your passion, and see if you can transpose yourself into my place. We’re not so different, you and I.

  With functionally unlimited time, it was a gamer’s paradise. There were people doing all sorts of world-record attempts out in the real world, but for us, we suddenly had a level playing field on which to compete, and god, was it fun.

  The speed runs were the first things to trend. To see how fast you could complete the main story quest in the new Elder Scrolls game, or even in some classic from your childhood, was the zeitgeist. Hah, we called it a zeitgeist; spirit of the times? Times? Like there was a go
d of speed runs, watching as we pushed those digital avatars of ourselves to complete games faster and faster.

  To understand us, first understand one thing about the way neurology works. When you drive a car, your brain actually extends the boundaries of your body to envelope the whole vehicle. You become the car. It’s the same with video games; when you are controlling a character on screen, you are the character. When people talk about playing games, they say, “I ran up to the door and picked the lock, and then this Skeleton Lord came out and attacked me!” Notice: “I” and “me”? When you’re reading a book, you don’t tell someone, “I decided to take the ring to Mordor,” or whatever. Games make you feel like it is you, because, well, it is.

  It’s an external extension of yourself.

  And that’s perhaps why we fared so well. We existed both as biological creatures, suffering, but also as digital entities, and we managed to mesh the two together and get a sort of immunity from it all. I mean, we still were affected; some of us turned into Dreamers and Starers for sure, and some of us starved to death or died of dehydration, but we fared better than the general public. Because our minds were somewhere else, kept in a pseudo-stasis.

  So knowing that, I’ll tell you about my realm.

  The Elder Scrolls one was the first to take off. A popular role-playing video game: you make a character and go through the world following a set of quests on different story arcs, according to your tastes. My Khajiit was a contender for the main quest, but I botched one of the missions near the end and it gave me extra NPC conversation that ate into my time. I was close, but some guy in Minnesota beat me by several minutes. Whatever, he didn’t manage to complete his full set of Daedric armor, so I’ll count it as a victory.

  And then there was the New Minecraft, where we all agreed on a seed, a world generation code, so we were all playing an identical map. With that one, there were several goals, so it wasn’t all or nothing. Everyone got a little something. I got the first to have a full enchantment setup, and a set of Protection IV/Unbreaking III diamond armor.