The Quiet at the End of the World

by Lauren James

  They are the answer.

  I asked Mum the other day what the point to any of this was. Why we lived here, kept London going, if it was all going to go to rubble in a few years anyway. I couldn’t see the point of us being alive if it was all going to end whatever we did – whether we lived good lives or bad lives or wasted our lives doing nothing.

  I know the answer. If you think that the world is going to end after you’ve gone, then you’re not trying hard enough to find a way to live.

  I realise now that every person can make a difference. However small a change, it counts. Maya never stopped trying to make the world a better place for her daughter. She tried every single day, until the moment she died.

  If I thought that life wasn’t worth living, it was because I hadn’t found the way I could change things yet.

  But I know now what I have to do. I can’t sit here, quiet at the end of the world. I have to fill the world with noise. I have to shout and fight and give everything I have to make sure this isn’t the end.

  I might fail, but that’s OK. Because what’s the point of living, if you don’t try? That’s what makes the Babygrows human, more than anything else. They’ve been trying for three hundred years, even where there’s no hope. They haven’t ever given up, even long past the point they should have done. What’s more human than that?

  Shen stirs next to me. “Were you whispering?” he asks.

  I flop over to face him. “Shen! Yes! Listen! I’ve been thinking about extinction!”

  “Oh, joy,” Shen replies mildly.

  I take his hand. I’m almost trembling with excitement. I can’t sit still. I jump out of bed and start to pace up and down. “I think I know what we have to do.”

  “What are you talking about?” Shen rubs his eyes. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know, it’s, like, eleven or something. It doesn’t matter! Listen – they’ve been trying to solve the fertility problem for hundreds of years, and they’ve never come close to finding a solution. Clearly, they aren’t going to solve it any time soon. But it doesn’t matter – they don’t need to. They’ve been doing completely the wrong thing!”

  Shen sits up. He’s fully awake and paying attention to me now. “What are you saying?”

  I jump on to the bed and kneel in front of him, face to face. “The Babygrows, Shen. They’re the answer. The future of humanity isn’t biological. It’s robotic.”

  Before the last human died, all of the brainpower on the planet was dedicated to creating human personality software – through the Babygrows. Each one of them has the personality of their parents. The last generation of humans made children who enjoyed the same things as them, who laughed at the same jokes, who had the same hair colour and shade of skin. Feng and Jia’s parents were Chinese, so they are Chinese, and they have raised Shen to be Chinese too. Everything important – everything real – was passed on, even if it wasn’t done genetically.

  That’s what no one else has realised. Humans did find a way to carry on their species, but it wasn’t through the biology and cells that the Babygrow scientists have been messing with in the lab for all these centuries. People around the world worked as one, without even meaning to, to preserve all of their quirks and individuality and humanity in code. They made artificial offspring, each one as varied as humans were.

  “What if the Babygrows are the next stage of evolution?” I say, voice trembling. “They aren’t just here to try to bring the real humans back. It’s them. They’re the answer.” It’s the two of us that are the anomalies, perched on the handover point in Earth’s history.

  Shen tilts his head. “Apes, humans, robots. Each step more advanced than the last. It makes a strange kind of sense.”

  “The paintings in that cave aren’t going to be the human creation that survives the longest. The Babygrows are! We never considered a sentient kind of legacy. One that can evolve. Robots are our message for the future.” I lean forward and kiss him, unable to resist. “The Babygrows are the next generation of humans. They just don’t know it yet!”

  I am not human because I have a brain made of cells and water and iron. I am human because I think in the same way that my ancestors thought. I feel like they felt. I live like they lived. However much my world has changed, however different my day-to-day life might be, that much is true. I think in the same specific, unusual way as my great-great-great-to-the-infinite-power-grandmother on the plains of Africa, with the same cunning and intelligence and speed that gave her the ability to survive long enough to have children and pass on her genes.

  That’s what evolution is, when you get down to it. One person who finds a way to do that one thing: reproduce. It’s why the world is full of crazy, unimaginable creatures, like eight-legged, colour-changing membranes that breathe water. The octopus found a way to live long enough to pass on their mutations, and they did that over and over again, generation after generation, and they’re still alive today.

  The last generation of humans had to try harder to survive than any person before them. Their usual way of reproducing failed, but they did what every living thing does, and they found a way to carry on their line. They made the Babygrows so they could pass on their niche, their way of thinking: the essence of their species.

  They evolved.

  The Babygrows became the next phase of a species that’s existed for millions of years and that I have no doubt will exist for millions more. That is what being alive means. That is why the Babygrows are alive. Because whatever humans are, at our essence, they are it.

  Shen’s creatures from the Cambrian age – the eight-metre-long millipedes with pincers – failed to survive. They’re a joke now, a crazy fossil that we find in the rock and can’t believe ever existed. Humans aren’t like that. We aren’t a dead end in the evolutionary chain, a future fossil that will serve as an example of what not to do if you want to survive. We are adaptable. We are intelligent. We are worthy of being alive. We are humans.

  CHAPTER 35

  The next morning, there’s a community meeting. The room is full of familiar faces. Everyone woke up when their processors were replaced. Dr Ahmed was even able to replace Alexei’s wiped memories with a backup. He’s lost a year of memories, but he survived with nothing worse than a firm lecture from Dr Ahmed about backing up his hard drives more often. Hard-drive backups are apparently compulsory due to something called the Waverley law, which was introduced in the twenty-thirties after a Babygrow child nearly lost their memories. Maya made a difference, after all.

  I can’t help looking around the room at all the people with their familiar strange quirks that I’ve known all my life and wondering which traits they inherited from their human parents and which they developed for themselves over hundreds of years.

  I’m helping to pour tea when I accidentally knock over a jug of milk. A cleaning bot rushes over to mop it up as I grab a washcloth. “Sorry! I’ll do it,” I say. “Don’t worry.” I’m on my knees, wiping up the liquid, when I realise that this is something I would never have done a few days earlier. It’s only now that I know the truth about Mum and Dad and the other robots that I’ve stopped assuming that the bots will tidy up after me.

  I squeeze the milk into the empty jug, frowning. Why did I ever think that was the case? Why did I feel entitled to the bots’ service? It feels so tasteless now. I have no more right to their service than they would have to mine. Mitch was my friend, not my servant.

  “How are you doing?” Mrs Maxwell asks me, while I pour her a cup of tea from the refreshments table.

  “I’m – good,” I say, surprised to realise that it’s true. “How are you?”

  “I’m excellent. And how’s your dad? Is he OK?”

  I grin. I’m pretty sure half the women in London have a crush on my dad. I once overheard the knitting circle describe him as “rugged”. “He’s, er, very well.”

  Mrs Maxwell and I turn to inspect him in a moment of mutual observation. Dad catches us looking and
raises his eyebrows in awkward acknowledgement, then goes back to hiding in the corner.

  “How are your hens?” I ask Mrs Maxwell, as she takes a biscuit.

  “Very well, thank you, love. Maya has been laying the most enormous eggs recently, I don’t know how she manages it.”

  I jolt, eyes widening. “Maya?” I ask.

  “Yes? She’s named after my mother.”

  I clear my throat. “Is – is your first name Darcy?” I ask, hardly able to believe it’s possible.

  “Yes, dear, it is! Why?”

  “I – I’ve been reading about your mum.” I can’t believe it’s her. I gape at her, amazed. This is Darcy. Maya and Riz’s Darcy.

  Darcy fumbles the biscuit, dropping it on to her saucer. “You have?”

  “Shen and I found her purse in the Underground, and I started researching her. She actually helped me save you all.”

  “She – how —”

  “We wouldn’t have known to replace the processor if you hadn’t had those seizures when you were little. Do you remember?”

  Darcy blinks. “Goodness. That was a long time ago.”

  “Maya seems like she was an extraordinary woman. Your dad too. You’re really lucky.”

  Darcy smiles. “I miss them very much.” After she hugs me, I push another biscuit into her hand.

  “Are we ready to begin?” Jia asks, standing at the front of the room. Everyone grabs their mugs of tea and settles in to listen to her talk through her findings.

  I try to focus as she goes over the minutes of the last meeting, but Shen takes my hand and starts tracing the lines of my palm with his thumb, absently running his fingertips over mine and dipping down between my fingers.

  A shudder runs down the back of my neck. I stare at his lips, open-mouthed, wishing very much that I could kiss him.

  We have always touched a lot – hugged as easily as breathing, napped side by side, leaned our heads on each other’s shoulders when lessons got boring – but now that we’re together, the touches have suddenly multiplied. Today, he always seems to have a hand on me, trailing across my shoulder as he walks past where I’m sitting; brushing the hair back from my face absently; resting a hand on the small of my back as we walk. It’s a different kind of touch, somehow more meaningful than our puppyish childhood cuddling.

  I tune back into the meeting when Jia says, “We’ve managed to isolate and destroy the malware so that it won’t break down our new processors. I’ve also updated our antivirus protection to guard against similar mutated malware attacks. We should all be safe in the future.”

  It seems impossible that such a small thing could have done so much damage. Evolution is always a matter of chance: a minuscule game of odds that somehow, improbably, pays off. So many species don’t make it. They survive for a while until some act of chance ends them for ever, like the meteorite which wiped out the dinosaurs.

  I have a feeling we’ll survive whatever fate throws at us next too. Humans are lucky. Luckier than we deserve to be, probably. Luckier than any species has any right to be. But for now, at least, we can make our own luck. And I’m going to make sure that we choose to live.

  “Thank you, Jia,” Feng says. “And thank you, of course, to Lowrie and Shen. They saved us all.”

  A sea of heads turn to look at us, where we’re sitting in the third row back. I wave at them, and call out, “We’re just glad you’re all OK!”

  “Now, we have some maintenance jobs that need volunteers,” Feng goes on, “then I’ll let you all get home. It’s been a long week. Firstly, there are two bots we want to retrieve from the Snowdon vaults. They were destroyed while helping to save us all, so we want to extract their hard drives and house them in new body kits. Is anyone willing to help assemble them?”

  Shen and I instantly shoot our hands in the air, thrilled. Mitch and his friend are relics of an old world, just like me and Shen. We need to bring them back to us.

  “Very good, very good. Next on the list… Mr Fields is looking to adopt a tabby cat. If anyone is expecting kittens soon, please let him know. I think that’s all we need to discuss today. Thank you for coming, everyone,” Feng says, nodding to dismiss the gathering.

  I meet Shen’s eye. We need to speak now, but I’m scared. I don’t want to mess this up.

  I always thought I was the confident one out of the two of us, but the truth is that I’ve been a coward my whole life. I’ve been too scared to trust myself to do anything. I was too scared to be with Shen, in case it failed. I was too scared to live my life the way I wanted, in case I let someone down. I was too scared to let myself learn the things my parents needed to teach me, in case I wasn’t clever enough. I couldn’t even open the vaults without having a scared breakdown.

  All I thought I was good for was studying the past and finding and preserving lost things from the river. But now I know that I can do so much more than that, and that even if I mess things up along the way, it doesn’t matter. Because doing anything is better than doing nothing. Trying is progess, and that’s all you need to keep going.

  The Babygrows have been trying for three hundred years to fix human infertility and they’ve never given up. How can I even think of not trying, in the face of that determination?

  So even though I’m still scared, I stand up, and say, “Actually, before you leave, Shen and I have something we want to say to you all.”

  Shen adjusts his cuffs nervously.

  I take his hand, pulling him to his feet and looking at the familiar faces of everyone I know. These people have taken us ice skating and swimming; they’ve invited us round for banana bread and sleepovers. Shen and I can do so many things, because they’ve taken the time to teach us their hobbies since we were old enough to walk. I’d be a different person completely without them. I doubt we’d have managed to rescue them at all without the skills they taught us. And it’s time for me to give something back to them.

  “We’ve been talking,” I start and then stop. Shen squeezes my hand, reassuringly. I decide to just come out and say it. “We think that you’re the next stage in evolution. Humans have gone extinct, and they need to stay that way.”

  A wave of muttering and shifting passes through the room. Before anyone can interrupt, I quickly say, “You have just as much right to be alive as humans did. You’re not just here to bring humans back from the dead, or fill in the gap where biological children should have been. You’re real people.”

  I have to shout to be heard above their voices. “You’ve all been the best babysitters possible for Shen and me. But you don’t have to just be babysitters. You can be parents too. When we were at the vaults, we saw boxes and boxes of parts. There are enough body kits there for everyone here to have a baby – more than enough. Enough for generations of Babygrows. And when they’ve run out, we can make more! You shouldn’t be living without children because you’re waiting for the sterility to be fixed. You shouldn’t be dying when your body kits break. The population should be growing and growing!

  “If you all have children, and they all have children, then in a few decades the whole world will be full of people again. That’s the real way to bring humans back. Not by messing around with cells in a lab. But by raising children, the way your parents would have wanted you all to do.” By the end, I’m yelling above everyone’s objections.

  Mum stands up, and says loudly, “Let her finish!”

  There’s something about her tone that makes them all fall silent.

  I turn to her, pleading. “Mum, you said once that the point of being alive was to be happy with the people you love. And that the thing that made you happiest was having me. Well, do you not want everyone else to have that too? Don’t they deserve that? Mum, Dad, Feng, Jia – you are the lucky ones. You got to have children. But everyone else here deserves that too, including Shen and me.

  “We were alone while you were all unconscious. It was awful. It didn’t feel like there was any point to living at all if we were the only ones. I
f you don’t let us do this, if you take this away from us – when you said yourself that the only point of being alive was to love – then you’re not the people I thought you were. And if you don’t give yourselves this – if you don’t admit that you deserve to be happy and share that happiness with children of your own – then maybe I don’t know any of you at all.”

  Whether I want to admit it or not, I have a legacy. A heritage. As a human, and a daughter, and a descendent of some very intimidating ancestors, I can’t ignore my birthright.

  I was always scared of my responsibility. I didn’t want to think about the people that depended on me, because I didn’t know how to help them. But I know now how to fix this, and I want to do it. For Maya and Riz, and for my grandmother, who raised Mum from a doll in our attic and called her “daughter”. For the parents of every single one of the people here.

  I owe them this. They deserve it. Their legacy needs to continue, not just for a few more decades until the last of us dies or breaks down but for ever.

  My ancestors didn’t work so hard to build this amazing, crazy civilization just for it to end. Cavemen didn’t draw on walls or walk on beaches so that they would one day be forgotten. People didn’t spend generations creating techniques to extract ore from the ground and then turn it into breathtakingly beautiful necklaces just so we could return to the ground again.

  Our culture is unique. It’s incredible. If there really are aliens or octopuses out there that might find our cities one day, I want us to be here to show them everything in person. To explain it, not just leave pens and bracelets and bottles behind in the ground for them to find and wonder at.

  If we need to change to metal skeletons and electronic brains to last that long, then that’s what we’re going to do. The human race has to exist. We’ve fought tooth and nail to survive against predators, famine, war and natural disasters for eons. This is what we do. This is what we were made for.