The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “And there was nothing on the screen about the event?”

  “No. Nothing. Just money news on the scrolling thing.”

  “And you saw no one else? No one at all?”

  “No. It was just me. I don’t get it. I don’t…” She looked up at me. “Why do I have to be the one? Why couldn’t they pick someone who was supposed to survive, like one of the big heroes or someone in the government, or, or, someone who could do something?”

  I thought for a moment. “Do you think someone actually picked you to survive?”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t ask for it! I should be a pile of dust on the floor like everyone else…”

  “I’m glad you’re not. I’m much happier to have you here.”

  She half-smiled. “You’ve been really nice.”

  “You’ve had a terrible experience. It’s natural to feel as though it should have been you who died, and wonder why it wasn’t…”

  She sniffled on another tissue. “Was it like that when it happened to you?”

  Telling my own story always leads to this kind of question. “Yes. I wondered for a long time. But eventually, I had to acknowledge that I was just lucky. And it was better to be alive than dead.”

  “What happened to your mom and dad?”

  “They died, Liss. I told you that.”

  “No, I mean afterwards?”

  “Oh. Uh, well, I was sent on to Hub and the, uh, the bodies had to stay because of the investigation.”

  “Did you go to the funeral?”

  “No. I was only seven. They couldn’t take me back. There wasn’t a funeral, as such. They went into a mass grave.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “It’s just the way things were. Billions of people were dying, Liss. There wasn’t enough space on the planet for all the graves they would have had to dig.”

  “Did you ever go back?”

  “There’s nothing to go back to.”

  “Huh.” She blew her nose.

  “I don’t mind talking about myself, Liss, but this session is for you. So can I ask what happened after you stopped looking at the screen?”

  “Oh… I just went out. I don’t know, I lost track of time. All the dust was blowing around. You’ve never seen that much dust in the air. It was horrible.”

  “And all the things you spoke of before — calling the police and so on — did that happen?”

  “Sure. I called the police. I called the PRG as well…”

  “The PRG?”

  “Oh, uh, Paranormal Response Group. The ones you call if something big happens, you know, like there’s all the services on the emergency line, Police, Ambulance, Fire, Paranormal Response, I tried them all, there was nothing, just voicemail.”

  “Did you call your parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that when you decided to go there?

  “…yeah. I walked. And then when I got there…”

  “It’s okay, Liss. Go on.”

  “They were in the kitchen. They were on the floor, in the kitchen. Just these two little piles and, and, a couple of cracked plates. They always used to argue over the dishes when I wasn’t there to do them…” Another tissue was required.

  “And you buried them.”

  “Yeah. I put them in a sandwich bag and dug up the garden and put them in there. I mixed them together. Is that okay?”

  “I’m sure they would have appreciated it, Liss. Did you stay there after that?”

  “No. I went home. And then I went back to work. You must think I’m so stupid…”

  “No, Liss. I think you survived. I think that’s an achievement, no matter how you did it.”

  She wiped her nose on one of the many tissues I’d given her. “I didn’t do anything. All I did was forget to die.”

  “It’s still worth something. And sooner or later we’ll find out what happened on your world.”

  “’s just a joke. That’s all it is.”

  “We’ll find out, Liss.”

  “Just a frigging joke. That’s my world. Just a big joke.”

  She huddled up in her chair again, and I didn’t get any more out of her that day.

  2. Elsbet

  There was a chime in my ear, and a message before my eyes: EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE REQUIRED: INFIRMARY. I ran from my office, playing video on a separate stream, floating in apparent space before me.

  Katie was awake, shouting at the medical staff and Veofol, who had been staying by her side as much as possible — but now he was backed up against a wall while Katie screamed at them.

  “I’m not talking to fucking needle jockeys!”

  She smashed a trolley into the wall. The two nurses and a doctor backed off a little more.

  “I’ve called an officer!” said Veofol. “She’s on her way!”

  I concentrated on where I was for a moment — into the gravity tube for a few seconds of freefall, a sudden stop on the ground floor, then out to the infirmary. Security were piling up outside, checking weapons. Lomeva Sisse stepped in my way, imposing in full power armour.

  “You’re not going in there,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s lost it. I’m not risking anyone going in.”

  I checked the video: Katie had Veofol by his jacket lapels, dragging him down to her height and demanding: “Well? Where is this fucking officer?”

  “She’s on her way! If you just give her a moment!” he replied. He knew I’d be watching, and had an idea for how to deal with the situation. It was a good idea.

  I snapped back to reality. “Get out of the way,” I said. Lomeva refused to budge. “Do I have to transfer you out of here?” Grudgingly, she stepped aside.

  There were more security guards stationed on the way to Katie’s room. They let me pass, raising weapons to make space. The door was locked when I got there, but I could hear shouting from inside. More demands as to the whereabouts of the promised officer.

  “Lab coat,” I said to a doctor, who hurried to remove hers and pass it over. I slipped it on and buttoned it up — anything that looked even a little bit like a uniform would do. I tied my hair back as tight as it would go, assumed the most thunderous expression I could command, then keyed the code to enter.

  Katie had really made a mess of the place — smashed equipment, fixtures ripped from the wall, the bed upended and mattress flung to one side. Two nurses and a doctor cowered in the corner, while Katie, still in her infirmary gown, hunched over the doubled up Veofol.

  “What’s going on here?” I demanded.

  Katie turned and saw me. And hopefully, saw I wasn’t intimidated.

  “You an officer?”

  I put on all the disdain I could muster. “I’m Major Singh. What are you doing out of bed?”

  “You’re not in uniform.”

  “I was in surgery. Or I was until I was called to deal with this disgraceful behaviour.” My tone of voice shook her confidence. Military training is always very useful when dealing with someone who isn’t listening to reason. “Stand to attention!” She jumped smartly to attention, dropping Veofol. “Now identify yourself, soldier!”

  “Sergeant Designate Elsbet Carmon, sir!”

  “What’s your unit?”

  “Vesta 4 Holy Brigade, Attack Squadron Alpha Six!”

  “What’s the last thing you remember, Sergeant?”

  “Sir?”

  “Answer the question!”

  “Sir! I was piloting my missile towards enemy facilities on the homeworld when I encountered turbulence! I blacked out!”

  “Stand easy.” She assumed the required stance. “Sergeant. This is a hospital.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re here for your own good. You will co-operate with the staff. Is that understood?”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “If I see any more of this kind of behaviour, there will be a court-martial. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Now get bac
k to bed, and get well. You’ll be debriefed shortly.”

  “Sir!”

  “Well get on with it, then!”

  She dashed back to the bed and put it back where it was supposed to be. I gave the medical staff a look, and they peeled themselves off the walls to help.

  I glanced at Veofol. “Corporal. Come with me.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and followed me outside. Once the door was closed again and we were safely out of earshot in an office, I breathed a sigh of relief and collapsed into a chair. Lomeva came in as a nurse brought us tea.

  “You’re completely fucking insane,” she said, meaning it as a compliment.

  I shrugged. “Soldiers usually respond to an authoritative voice. Anyway, Veofol had the idea.” He sighed as a nurse sprayed his bruised arms with analgesics.

  “How do you want to deal with this?” asked Lomeva. “Given our other problem.”

  “Complete lockdown on her, of course. She doesn’t leave the infirmary until we decide it’s safe.”

  “Good. Anything else?”

  “Hm…” I had a think. There was one very odd thing about the whole business, and it took a moment to put my finger on it. “She was speaking Interversal, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah…” said Veofol.

  “So?” said Lomeva.

  “So if this is a completely new personality, she shouldn’t know our language. She must have access to Katie’s memories. Or files, or whatever. Maybe Katie’s still in there as well…” And maybe she would come out again. “Okay. We play along to begin with. And then we break it to her. Very carefully. Veofol, you’ll need to debrief her.”

  “Me…?”

  “We need to keep the number of people involved to a minimum. She already knows you. And I’ve got the rest of the group to deal with.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “We need to know who she is. And I don’t mean just her name. We need to know how she relates to Katie.”

  “Okay.”

  “This might be Dissociative Personality Disorder, and it might not. It might be a persona coming out of the implants. Just find out as much as you can.”

  He nodded. He was still unnerved, but I was confident he’d be up to the task.

  3. Pew

  It was painful for Pew to talk about the past, and I had to send a nurse to find him and bring him to his next session. He came in flustered, still wearing his boots from the garden and leaving mud everywhere, trying to apologise for his lateness and then for the dirt tracks on the carpet.

  “It’s all right, Pew. Just leave the boots by the door and I’ll have someone clean them for you.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m really sorry—”

  “That’s fine, just take a seat.”

  He put his boots outside as I sent a message to the housekeeping staff to deal with them. He’d been working hard in the garden, trying to forget he had a therapy session coming up. A quick review of video showed Olivia telling him to slow down before he did himself an injury. He expected questions he didn’t want to answer, so I decided to get them out of the way first.

  “Can you tell me anything more about Ley’ang?”

  He looked up at me, instantly distressed. “I— I—”

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to…”

  “No, no, I mean, that is, I…”

  “Pew, I’m sorry. I know you don’t like talking about her. We’ll have to eventually, but if you’d rather talk about something else, we can do that today.”

  “Okay.” He sighed, safe from the hard questions he feared. But we would have to get there somehow — if I could get him to talk about her, I might be able to get him to talk about the breeding programme, which he’d conspicuously avoided in every other conversation I’d had with him.

  “So you said last time that you hated the Soo, and that’s quite understandable. But you seemed to get along quite well with Shan’oui. I was wondering if there were any other Soo you found tolerable?”

  “Can I have some tea?”

  “Of course. You carry on, I’ll pour.”

  I filled a cup and he talked. “I, well, they weren’t all bad. I mean they were, but they didn’t all want to be.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said as I poured milk.

  “They were kind of… they grew up with everyone telling them Pu weren’t good for anything, but most of them never actually met any of us.”

  “So they were just ignorant?” I handed him his tea.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Shan’oui told me.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “She tried to help. She didn’t do very well but she tried.”

  “Were there any others who tried?”

  “Oh, loads. There was a big group of Soo who’d been campaigning for the Pu for years, well, longer than that. Centuries.”

  “Was Shan’oui one of those people?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is this the SPCA? I think I read about them…” I pulled up my notes on a pad: IU Diplomatic research teams had identified a group called the SPCA as potential allies on the Soo world. “The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Aboriginals?”

  “Yeah. That’s them.”

  “Did they run the breeding programme?”

  “No. That was the government. There were a lot of SPCA people involved, though.”

  “Can you tell me more about them?”

  “Um. Well, it started with Ang’zi…”

  “He founded the SPCA?”

  “No, no, he was Pu. Pu Ang’zi. He was a mechanic, he was one of the first ones who’d been captured in the Arctic, well, his parents were.”

  “Ah. So, what did he do?”

  “He wrote a book, um, On the Rights of the Pu as Compared with the Beasts of the Field and Engines of Steam.”

  “Catchy.”

  “That was how they wrote things back then. The government thought somebody in the SPCA had written it, some Soo pretending to be a Pu. So they banned it for being harmful to Pu interests, you know, giving us ideas above our station.

  “And then they figured out the truth. His owner was an SPCA member and she tried to hide Ang’zi, but they found him and took him away. So she sued the government for stealing her property, but the court case was one of those things where they use it to talk about something else. Do you know what I mean?”

  “They made the court case about the Pu as a whole?”

  “Yeah. And they lost. Ang’zi was executed. They called it euthanasia because of a brain deformity, can you believe that? Because he wasn’t stupid. Like being intelligent was an illness. His owner was compensated, and she gave the money back to the SPCA to print more copies of the book. That was how it got going, really.”

  “So there was something good about the Soo, after all?”

  “Huh. Yeah. They started getting all the owners to give retired Pu to zoos instead of just killing them and turning the bodies into fertiliser.”

  “Ah. So they didn’t go all that far…”

  “They never wanted to set us free. They just wanted to make our lives easier.”

  “Do you think Shan’oui would have set you free?”

  “She didn’t think we were ready. Maybe she was right.”

  “Don’t you think the Pu should have been free?”

  “On our world? Where could we have gone?”

  “And the SPCA never thought about letting us help you?”

  “The IU? Hah! They didn’t trust you. They thought you wanted to take us off to be slaves somewhere else. They thought they were protecting us from you.”

  “And outside the SPCA, was there anyone with any sympathy?”

  “A lot of people thought they were on our side. They weren’t. I found that out before the breeding programme started.”

  “Did something happen?”

  He looked up and took a breath. “There was a girl.”

  “A Soo girl?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.” />
  “What did she do?”

  “I was… no, it was her. Or maybe I… oh, shit, I was only fourteen.”

  “What happened?”

  He sighed. “I saw her behind the glass.”

  “In the zoo?”

  “She kept coming in every day at the same time. She must have had a season ticket. She was always there just after three, when the school groups were gone…”

  “I thought it was one way glass?”

  “Yeah, but you could see a bit of what was on the other side. And there was this girl. And she was… beautiful. Amazing. Every day at the same time. She’d come up as close to the glass as she could, and then wave at me. I mean, kids did that all the time, but this was…” He sighed. “So I waved back. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Next day, she jumped the barrier and came up to the glass. She put her hand up to it and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I did the same. She smiled again, I thought my heart was going to come out of my chest…”

  “Very normal for teenage boys. Teenage girls, too. What happened next?”

  “She ran for it. I suppose security turned up. They didn’t catch her because she came back the next day, in disguise. And that time she had a note, she put it up against the glass. It said she wanted to meet me. I was still trying to find a pen when she had to run away again.

  “Shan’oui asked me about it and I lied. I’d never lied to her before. I said I hadn’t seen a note. She said they were going to put in new barriers, and I thought I was never going to see her again. I was so miserable…

  “And then she turned up. On the inside! She’d joined the SPCA and volunteered to help look after the other Pu. They were really old then, they needed someone with them all the time. She just smiled and put her finger to her lips and I was happier than anything.

  “We couldn’t talk, though, because of all the cameras, until she managed to switch one off and get me alone…” He sighed.

  “You must have been very excited to see her.”

  “She said her name was Sha Ai’mi. She thought I was cute because she’d seen me on TV. Her uncle was in the SPCA, so that’s how she’d managed to get in. She thought it was amazing how I was a completely different species. I should have figured it out then…