The Quiet at the End of the World

by Lauren James

  Once, I traced the owner of a lost engagement ring to the grave she shares with her husband, based on the names and date engraved on the inside of the ring. The gravestone was in a local cemetery, and had been completely hidden under brambles and moss by the time Shen and I tracked it down using the county records. We cleaned it up and left the ring on a chain hanging over the stone. People may die and civilizations may fall, but little pieces of the past linger.

  After tucking the purse in my utility belt, we swim down the tunnel until we reach the next platform. We walk up a spiral staircase to the old Westminster station entrance and climb out through a gap in the boarded-up doors. The fresh breeze is a relief after the stale air in the tunnels, but the wind makes me feel even colder in my wetsuit.

  We walk towards home along the bank of the Thames. Shen and I are allowed out on our own, as long as we stay in central London, where the buildings are safe. Beyond that, it can be too dangerous. Everything is falling into ruin. Our parents don’t let us go out there without an adult.

  I call Dad and say, “We found a way out at Westminster. Where are you at?”

  He sounds distracted. “I’m still here. I found a – well, I’m not sure what it is, but I think it’s in the batrachospermaceae family. I’m going to be a while.”

  I roll my eyes at Shen, who smirks. “OK,” I say to Dad, “see you at home.”

  Dad makes a distracted noise of confirmation, and I hang up.

  We head down the foreshore. The tips of my boots dip in and out of the brown waves, leaving half-moon footprints in the sand which quickly fill with water. Even though we didn’t find much in the Underground today, we might have more luck in the Thames. Everything ends up here. People have been dumping sewage and rubbish in this river ever since London became a city. Most of it sank down to the bottom, where it has remained for centuries.

  Now, when the population is so low as to be negligible, the river bed has started eroding instead of building up. The Thames is cleaning itself of humanity’s presence. The infertility of the human race was actually quite a good move, from an environmental perspective.

  Year by year, the layers of history are peeling back to reveal older and older treasures. Shen and I have made it our mission to find as much of it as possible, mudlarking nearly every day. That’s what it’s called, when you search the mud of the Thames for interesting stuff.

  An old robot is plodding along the sand ahead of us. He is so old that grey-green moss and bird droppings fill the crevices of the joints, curving over his round body. He lifts his head as we walk past, but looks back to the ground with disinterest. I try not to take it personally. He is such an old model he’s barely functional any more. Mum says he was installed on the riverbank in the twenty-twenties as a lifeguard after a tourist drowned.

  He’s solar-powered, so for decades he has been walking up and down the river, scanning continuously for anyone in danger. Mum calls him “Mitch”, after some lifeguard character in an old TV show. It’s a joke that only the adults find funny, but the name kind of stuck.

  We carry on, past Mitch, and past the remains of a collapsed Victorian redbrick which the maintenance bots haven’t demolished yet. Our ancestors designed bots to keep things safe, even when there weren’t many humans left. Eventually, though, when the last of us dies and there isn’t anyone around to service the bots, they’ll all start breaking down too. Then all the buildings will finish their slow descent into ruin, like this one.

  “You can see the rock, look.” I point at the building. Slabs of softening concrete have torn away the tarmac of the road above, exposing layers of the earth in lines of soil, clay and sand.

  “Isn’t it strange to think that in a few million years, all that might be left of the human race will be a millimetre of rock like that?” Shen asks. “I wonder what an alien would make of it, if they visited Earth then?”

  I reach down to twist a glass bottle out of the mud. It comes out with a squelch. I’ve never given up hope that there’ll be a message inside one, one day. I rub away the mud to read the name embossed in the glass. Coca-Cola, as usual. “Well, they’d probably think Coca-Cola was a religion, for a start.”

  Shen gives a small smile and then tilts his head, eyes on the ground. “I read this thing that said that the carbon dioxide we released from burning fossil fuels will last longer than anything else humans have ever made. So I reckon alien archaeologists would be able to work out from the carbon dioxide caught in the rock that something happened on this planet a long time ago.”

  “I wonder if they’d work out that the carbon dioxide came from an intelligent species burning fossil fuels, though,” I say, intrigued by this idea. “They might think it was a freak natural event.”

  I look at the stones at my feet: the shards of slate and glass left in the soil. What would I think had caused them, if I was an alien and knew nothing about humanity? Would I see any difference between sandstone and concrete, or glass and amber, or plastic?

  Once, I was 3D-printing a tool box when a fly got stuck in the molten plastic. It’s still there, perfectly preserved like a butterfly in amber. Would an alien recognize it as a fake fossil? Maybe the man-made materials would mean nothing to them. Maybe they wouldn’t even be looking for an intelligent race.

  “The aliens definitely wouldn’t know about us, then,” I say. “A boy and a girl, living on the outskirts of a collapsed civilization, watching their species go extinct.”

  Shen swallows, Adam’s apple rising and falling. “Nope.”

  The metal detector lets out a short beep, and he pushes his toe into the silt, flipping over the dirt to reveal a bottle cap.

  “You never know, though,” he adds. “Maybe us humans will leave something behind. There are caves full of drawings made over forty thousand years ago. The conditions have preserved them perfectly. They’re going to survive centuries after the last buildings have collapsed.”

  “So if humanity does leave a message for the future, it’s not going to be from us. It’ll be from the first hunter-gatherers.” I picture ochre handprints stretching upwards to the sky, welcoming extraterrestrial visitors a million years from now.

  Shen grins. His cheeks have turned pink with cold. “I mean, they’ve probably got more of a right to it than us. Those caves had people living in them continuously for thousands and thousands of years. A lot longer than humans have ever lived in buildings. We’re the dead end in a long line of generations. The ones who broke everything.”

  I gulp. The thought hits home, probably more harshly than he meant it to. I think about the legacy we’re leaving behind all the time: pollution and plastic and buildings and everything else. As one of the last humans, my choices and decisions are imbued with the full weight of the billions of lives that came before me. It feels like my ancestors are watching me, waiting to see how I ensure their legacy, how I remember them.

  That’s why I like mudlarking, because it feels like I’m actually doing something to record the history that’s being lost. I’m so helpless, in the face of the infertility. But I can make sure that someone remembers the lives that came before us, if only for a few more decades.

  Overhead, a helicopter thrums as it heads downriver. It must be Alexei Wyatt, on his way back from one of the abandoned cities around England, where he goes to pick up scavenged items in an old army helicopter. He’ll be heading straight to the community meeting, which means we’ve got just enough time to go home and change into dry clothes before we have to join everyone at City Hall.

  “What song are we doing today, do you know?” I ask, as we walk. Our choir always rehearses after the meeting. I sing – and weasel a rap solo out of Shen’s mama, the choirmaster, when I can. Shen’s voice is terrible, so he plays bass guitar instead.

  Shen hums a few bars of melody. “That one. Mama was singing it in the shower this morning.”

  I hum it back to him, trying to remember the name. It’s catchy, annoyingly so, and I’m still singing it in my head when
I realise there’s something wrong with the helicopter. It’s tilted at an angle, skittering in the air like a glass about to fall off a table. It looks like it’s been caught in a gust of wind – but the air is still and calm.

  “That doesn’t look—” Shen begins, but before he can finish, the helicopter drops out of the sky. The tail rotor catches on a lamppost on Westminster Bridge, and there’s a shrieking explosion of metal.

  I take an involuntary step backwards as the helicopter whirls in a tight circle, swung around by the force of its spinning rotors. It’s thrown across the bridge and into a support beam. Sheets of metal pull away from the cockpit, and I think that surely it can’t keep going, that it must come to a stop soon, but it doesn’t. It swings around in another violent arc and collides with the clock tower of Big Ben.

  CHAPTER 2

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  The clock tower explodes, the whole front panel sheering off. The ancient clock face crumples as a rotor blade stabs into it. Bricks fly towards us, and we both scramble backwards through the mud, away from the explosion.

  Shen’s hand wraps around my elbow. “Run,” he says, and I don’t argue. He’s always so calm in a crisis, but my heart feels like it’s going to hammer out of my chest.

  I’m desperate to look back over my shoulder at the rolling fireball, but I know I’ll trip and fall immediately if I do. Something lunges towards me and I stumble back in shock, tripping and scraping my knee on the ground. It’s Mitch. Spindly metal legs have sprouted out of the robot’s rusted spherical body, and he scoops Shen and me into his arms, and then starts hopping in long, jolting strides down the riverbank.

  I give a little cry of surprise, confused until I realise that his lifeguarding protocol must have been activated by the crash. I’m strangely glad about it, and I hold on tightly. He’s running faster than I could have done.

  When I risk a glance over the robot’s shoulder, I see that the fire is spreading from the tower to engulf the Palace of Westminster, filling the air with the crack and roar of brickwork collapsing.

  I can’t think. My mind is abuzz with the white noise of shock – that a helicopter crashed in central London; that it crashed into the tower of Big Ben; that we were right there to see it happen.

  Mitch climbs a staircase embedded into the concrete embankment and comes to a stop at the top. Still clutching us tightly, his head spins as he scans for more trouble. I wriggle, keen to be free now that we’re a safe distance from the crash, and Mitch releases us, lowering us carefully to the tarmac.

  “I can’t believe—” Shen says, staring at Mitch and then at the fire. “Tamade!” He always reverts to Chinese when he gets upset.

  “I know.” My lungs can’t seem to remember how to pull in air. I focus on breathing until my chest loosens and the dizziness stops.

  “It’s Alexei, isn’t it?” Shen asks quietly.

  I nod.

  He closes his eyes briefly, grimacing.

  Alexei, our friend. Alexei, who gave Shen and I the best tips for mudlarking, from his scavenging experience. Alexei, whose wife died a few years ago. Alexei Wyatt, who we’ve known our whole lives.

  “Do you think he’s…?” I can’t even stand to think about what must have happened to him, in that kind of explosion.

  Shen blanches, answering my question.

  A squadron of emergency response drones is already flying to the building, but they look miniscule next to the growing fire. I can’t see how they’ll manage to put it out.

  Shen takes a deep breath, and there’s only the slightest wobble in his voice when he speaks. “Are you hurt?” He braces his palms on either side of my neck, checking my eyes for pupil dilation.

  “I’m fine,” I say, but I let him massage the joint at the top of my spine. His touch is comforting. “Are you?”

  All the colour has disappeared from his face except for an irritated patch of pink at the corner of his jaw, where he must have hit the ground. I rub away the small curls of white that it scraped from the skin. His stubble catches on my thumb.

  Behind us, the fire is blazing higher and hotter, but to my surprise, half of the emergency drones are flying straight past the crash and heading towards us.

  “Are they —?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  I let out a heavy sigh. We’re fine. We’re not even hurt. This isn’t necessary. They should all be trying to help Alexei.

  The emergency response drones swoop in to land, surrounding us in a neat circle. Their laser scanners flicker down our bodies, searching for injuries.

  “We’re OK,” Shen says, but the drones don’t listen. They chitter to each other in binary as they cluster around my leg, where there’s a tear in the wetsuit. It must have happened when I fell. I can’t feel the cut, but red blood shines bright against the fabric. A mechanical arm appears from one drone, reaching out to clean the shallow wound.

  “Shouldn’t you be putting out the fire?” I ask. It’s hardly a life-threatening injury. I’m worried the same can’t be said of Alexei’s. The bot ignores me and is carefully spraying the wound with antiseptic when a car pulls up next to us. Mrs Bolton jumps out, barely stopping to turn off the engine in her panic. “Are you OK? What happened?” she gasps. “I was on the way to the meeting and I saw the fire.” She stares at it in horror.

  “There was a helicopter crash…” I begin and trail off, unable to finish.

  “Alexei?” Mrs Bolton’s eyes widen.

  “We think so,” Shen says. “We don’t know if he was on his own.”

  My throat tightens. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there might have been someone else. Please, no. Please.

  Mrs Bolton raises a hand to her mouth. “Oh no.” Her eyes fill with tears, then she glances at us again, before reaching out to squeeze my shoulder. “The drones will do whatever they can to get him to safety. At least you weren’t hurt too. That’s what matters.” She chokes off another small sob.

  Meanwhile, Mitch is still pacing around us in emergency mode, a red light flashing on the top of his head.

  “It’s OK,” I call to him, trying to get him to calm down. “We’re safe now.”

  Mitch doesn’t listen, and continues to scan for danger. More drones are flying around the wreckage of Big Ben, trying to reach the helicopter. I try to imagine what Alexei must be feeling right now, stuck inside. My mind skitters away from the thought. I can’t bear it.

  I hear a squeal of tyres and I’m relieved to see Mum’s Rolls-Royce heading towards us. She slams on the brakes when she spots us. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says, jumping out of the car. She checks me over to make sure I’m not hurt. I lean against her side, feeling ten times safer.

  “Come on, let’s get you both home,” she says.

  “Is Dad OK?” I ask. “He was in the Underground. He didn’t get caught in it, did he?”

  “He’s fine. I called him,” Mum says. “He’s meeting us at home.”

  She turns to Mrs Bolton, and they have a quick whispered conversation about what happened. Deep lines of worry form around Mum’s mouth when she finds out about Alexei.

  “We should get home,” she says, looking over at Shen and me.

  Suddenly I just want to get out of here. I follow Shen to the car. My steps are off-kilter. I feel dizzy again.

  Before we can get inside the car, Mitch pushes past me and slides on to the white leather of the front passenger seat. “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  He is so old that he doesn’t have any communication software installed. He can’t speak, so he can only flash an answer at me: blue, whatever that means.

  “He probably wants to make sure we’re all right,” Shen says.

  “He did save us,” I admit, confused but a little pleased. “We should let him come with us.”

  “What on Earth —!” Mum says, gaping at the mud-covered robot as she gets into the driver’s seat.

  Mitch flashes green at her, in a resolute, determined way, making it clea
r that he is going nowhere.

  Mum sighs and lets Mitch stay without complaining, even when flakes of orange rust splinter on to the burled walnut panelling of the car. Her shoulders are stiff with worry, and I don’t think that has anything to do with Mitch.

  Now I’m in clean, air-conditioned air, I notice that the smoke has settled into my lungs. It’s thick in the back of my throat. When I cough, trying to clear it out, Mum’s eyebrow jerks upwards, looking at me with concern in the rear-view mirror. I wince. “This isn’t going to be good,” I lean in to whisper to Shen. Our parents already worry about us far too much.

  He taps his ear. “Wrong side,” he says.

  It annoys me that I can never, ever remember which is his deaf ear. Which is ridiculous, because I know everything about him – every food he likes and dislikes, the meaning of every single expression that crosses his face, all of his favourite phrases. Why can’t I remember to sit on his hearing side?

  “We’re screwed,” I whisper into his other ear when he twists, dipping his head to mine.

  He hums his agreement.

  They’re probably not even going to let us leave the grounds after this. They’re all going to start another discussion about how we need to be more careful, because we’re too important to get hurt. Like I’ve been hearing since the day I was born. But all of that feels inconsequential when I think about Alexei, and that fireball. Maybe our parents are right to want to keep us safe.

  CHAPTER 3

  After the car pulls up outside the gates of the manor, we all traipse inside in silence. There’s a Conversation about Safety simmering, but it’s bad manners to start before Dad and Shen’s parents have a chance to join in.

  Mum groans as she gets out of the car. She was born five years after the sterility, so she’s almost eighty, and she groans a lot these days – more than Dad, even though he’s older. I feel bad for making her worry about us. She shouldn’t have to deal with that, not at her age.