The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  Liss grabbed her by the shoulders as lightning struck in the forest and started another fire. “Get back inside. Get your team together. Follow me as quick as you can,” she said, and ran into the woods.

  “Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!” shouted Lomeva.

  “She’s qualified,” said Iokan. And after a second, he added: “So am I.” He ran after her. Lomeva glared after them but could do nothing. She turned back to the building and the crowd who had emerged, along with Pew.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Just get back inside!” she shouted. “All you medical people! Get your kit! We’re going out to the crash!”

  16. Asha & Bell

  The head office of the Refugee Service of the Interversal Union was another of those Hub Metro edifices that made more of a statement than sense. A shining castle, carved out of silver and gold, that required polarised glasses to look at it on a sunny day — but tonight it reflected the blue violence of the sky above and the orange roar of fires around the city, making it look like it was under siege from an army carrying ancient torches.

  And under siege it was. A mob pressed against the glass gates at the front of the building, desperate to be let in. Just inside, we could see security people begging them to pull back, some of them lost and confused themselves.

  “Oh, great…” said Bell as he saw the mob.

  “Side entrance by the vehicle park,” I said. We ran to the side of the building, where a door was provided for those who were lucky enough to have private transport. As we ran, I heard a static noise, and saw a flicker of reboot in the visual overlay; but just as swiftly, it was gone.

  Bell turned, seeing lights guttering in the street. “Is it coming back on?”

  “Not yet,” I said, and hammered on the glass doors to call the attention of security, imploring them to run a scanner on my face or my implant so they could see who I was. At first they didn’t believe me, but when reinforcements came down, one of them recognised me and let us in.

  Inside, they had the same loss of data, but they at least had a shielded generator, plenty of light and functioning devices. I ran through to the main lobby and the gravity tubes that could lift us up to the secretariat level where I might find my superiors, if they had made it here. We had backup systems in the event of such a massive systems failure: line of sight microwave relays, ancient but seemingly capable of cutting through the EMP. Through landstations and satellites, the Refugee Service was patching through to centres across the continent. I heard a dozen conversations relaying stories of disaster and pain. Refugees had revolted and taken over a centre in one location. A spacecraft had come down near another, and they were launching a rescue effort. Thankfully, the Lift was far enough away not to be affected, and it looked like it would be the base for the relief operation.

  I headed back into the corridors that held the director’s offices, looking for my own boss, and rapidly finding him. Mykl Teoth was on a call to Henni Ardassian, the Refugee Service Director, as I knocked on his office door.

  “That’s all I’ve got, ma’am. They’re not risking any flights until further notice—”

  Henni glared down from the screen of the wall, her image scattering and reforming, the sound barely breaking through the hiss even though they were using the microwave relays. “Heaven damn it! Whose idea was it not to have any surface transport or landlines out to these places!” She saw me behind Mykl. “Who’s that there?”

  Mykl turned and saw me. “I’ll come back later,” I said.

  “No! No, stay, we’ve been looking for you—” he said.

  “Is that Asha Singh? Why isn’t she at that centre?” demanded Henni.

  “My night off, ma’am. I was at a restaurant.”

  “So you don’t know what’s going on out there?”

  “I came here to find out.”

  “Well then, find out! Get on with it! Go!”

  Mykl shrugged helplessly. I left as Henni started lecturing him on what he needed to do until she could get back. As Bell trailed behind me, I took over the office next door and keyed it to my own account and clearances.

  “I need to check on some things,” said Bell.

  “Do you need me to do anything?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll ask outside. Look after yourself.”

  He left me there in the office, frantically trying to patch a microwave link through to the centre. I didn’t see him pause there, not sure of what to say; I barely even noticed him go as I reached out to try and find out what was happening.

  When I did, it was more than I could bear.

  17. Crash

  The medical team followed Liss’s trail. She’d had no trouble finding her way in the dark but hadn’t bothered to go around obstacles; when she could, she simply went through. And when they got close, there was the glow of the fires from the crash to show them the way.

  They found Iokan tending to Liss, who was unconscious with terrible burns on her arms, her hair scorched and mangled. Iokan was covered in soot and singed but clearly hadn’t attempted whatever Liss had tried to do.

  “She needs help!” he cried, his voice cracking from smoke inhalation, and the medics went to her.

  “What about the passengers?” asked Lomeva.

  “Two!” said Iokan. Olivia suddenly gasped awake, coughing. “Olivia and Veofol.”

  “Where is he?”

  Iokan shook his head and pointed back at the burning wreckage of the bus. “Liss pulled Olivia out. She couldn’t get to Veofol. I had to drag her out…” He was forced to stop for a moment as a retching cough took over. Once it died, he gasped words at Lomeva again.

  “I couldn’t help him.”

  PART TEN — MOVING HOUSE

  1. The Attack

  The flow of data did not return that day, or the next, and stayed silent as long as the lightning flashed across the sky. It was only a week later that the atmosphere cleared and limited data service was restored. Despite the loss of most of our communications, the rumour factories jumped into action as soon as people stopped running and realised the world wasn’t ending. Was it aliens with vastly superior technology? The remnants of the last attempt at an interversal organisation rising in revenge? Massive incompetence by penny-pinching bureaucrats? No one knew, at first. But the answer was soon discovered, and the truth disseminated across Hub Metro by voice, by billboard, by broadsheet newspaper, by any method that could be found.

  We had been attacked. The device that lit up the sky, and which kept it on fire with electromagnetic discharge for a week after, was one used in a war between machines and AIs in another universe fifty years before, which seeded the upper atmosphere with EMP detonators. Radio communications were rendered impossible to use, save for higher energy microwave bands, and unshielded electrical devices were rapidly destroyed. A few older types of implants burnt out inside people’s bodies, causing severe injuries. The constant barrage could even affect some shielded machinery, and power transmission had been the first thing to fail.

  Most of the fatalities came in the immediate aftermath of the attack, as the computers on gravity flyers burnt out, leaving their human pilots to manage by themselves — something most of them weren’t ready for. Without computer assistance, the subtleties of the Earth’s own gravity field have to be compensated for manually, and that takes skill.

  I remember the feeling then, in the days I was stranded in Hub Metro before a qualified pilot could be found to take me back to the centre: no one could believe we would be targeted. How could we be attacked? Why would anyone want to come after us? What had we done to hurt anyone? The certainties we all shared shifted under our feet and the multiverse looked like a more dangerous place. Hundreds of groups on dozens of worlds claimed responsibility for the attack. All they shared was a dislike of IU interference in their affairs. For some of them, we had done too much. For others, we had done too little. Altogether too many people were quietly happy to see our noses rubbed i
n the same dirt they had to live with.

  The truth, when it was eventually uncovered, was hardly a surprise. Anti-AI extremists had built the weapon on Hub to designs smuggled in from a world seething at the price they’d paid for IU membership and assistance — being forced to live alongside the AIs they’d been trying to eliminate for decades. AI species on Hub were the most affected, and had suffered the greatest loss if they were not backed up inside an EM cage. Several individual AIs caught outside were destroyed completely, and one embassy whose EM cage failed was completely wiped out. Their trust in the IU was shaken for years to come.

  The IU had taken a terrible beating, and no one knew yet what it would do when it roused itself from the shock — whether it would carry on as it was, or change into something none of us would recognise.

  2. Asha

  Bell called me once more, from the port city at the base of the Lift. None of the facilities in orbit had been affected by the attack, and a number of worlds were withdrawing their citizens from Hub in a knee-jerk reaction. Bell took the opportunity while it was there and got away weeks before he’d originally planned.

  I didn’t cry for Bell. I’d already accepted he was gone. I cried when I realised that, as Veofol’s line manager, I owed his family a letter informing them of his death while on duty. His species’ consulate had already notified them, of course; but they had not been working alongside him for the last two years, as I had. So it fell to me to offer them some kind of comfort and an assurance that he had been incredibly talented, and was a loss not just to his species, but to all of us. To Hub. To the group. To me.

  3. The Centre

  I noticed a change in the staff when I returned to the centre. Many had grown tired of what they saw as the group’s petulant determination to suffer in the face of comfort and freedom on Hub. But now they’d discovered the merest taste of what the group had endured, and turned to them for support. A dozen times, I saw a security guard or a nurse, or even the groundskeeper, talking with one of the patients. Olivia would tell them to buck their ideas up and put their backs into rebuilding. Iokan hoarsely encouraged them to bear it and keep going despite the pain. The others simply didn’t know what to say, or kept their thoughts to themselves. I myself was pestered, especially by one security guard whose wife was missing, and presumed dead. As I had been in Hub Metro that night, he was desperate for any clues I might have had. In the end, I had to transfer him to another centre where he could receive the therapy he needed.

  I tried to bring the group together for a therapy session, but it proved impossible. Liss was still in a coma as her body healed her burns. Iokan strained his voice and was ordered to stay quiet, though he kept ignoring the advice and hurting himself further. Kwame and Pew had their own traumas that kept them in their rooms. So I ended up with an almost-silent Iokan and Olivia as my therapy group, and even she was quieter than usual. But at least she gave up on her demand to leave. She muttered that nowhere was safe now, so what was the point? And I had no answer to that.

  Elsbet regained consciousness the day after, but she was no longer Elsbet. The electric shock from the suicide attempt had enough effect on the implants to ensure it was Katie who emerged from the coma, questioning the gap of time since she was last awake and asking why her shoulder socket was now so damaged that her arm could not be remounted.

  The first permanent effect of the attack on the group was to bring forward the proposed move of the centre to a more secluded, and hopefully more secure location, across the continent and far away from any further violence. The site had been ready before the attack, and it was only the shortage of skilled pilots that meant we had to wait a few days.

  4. Moving

  Our bus cruised at what seemed like walking pace a few hundred metres over an empty savannah. “How long is this going to bloody take?” asked Olivia of the pilot, who was replacing our usual driver while he was trained up to the new standards.

  “There’s a speed limit,” he said, almost grinding his teeth at what was the twelfth time she’d complained.

  “Speed limit? Who are we going to hit out here? Do you see any trees?”

  I answered before the pilot snapped back at her. “We’re already going faster than anyone ever did on your world, Olivia. And you know why there’s a speed limit.” I’d explained about the precautions: there were still occasional EMP bursts, so speeds were kept low enough for a human pilot to handle with ease in the event of trouble.

  “Might as well be in a bloody balloon…” muttered Olivia as she retired back to the passenger seating. I apologised to the pilot and let him get on with his job before going back myself.

  Liss had woken from her coma, and was in a stretcher locked to the side of the cabin, a nurse by her side to tend to the burns that were still wrapped in flexible polymer healing casts. Iokan was in a chair with oxygen infusers wrapped across his face, having exacerbated the injuries he suffered from smoke inhalation. Katie was still without her right arm. Olivia was badly bruised and carried an arm in a sling, but had escaped worse injury. Pew and Kwame were left unhurt, at least physically. Nobody looked particularly upbeat.

  “How are you all doing?” I asked. It was the first time I’d been able to get them all into the same room for quite a while.

  “I’ve been… better,” croaked Iokan.

  “How do you feel, Liss?” I asked.

  “Ow. Ow. Ow.”

  I turned to the nurse. “Hasn’t she had anything for the pain?”

  The nurse shook her head. “She won’t take analgesics.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do?” I asked Liss.

  “No,” she said.

  “You don’t have to… punish yourself,” said Iokan. “You can’t save… everyone. I think you said that… once.”

  Liss laughed bitterly. “I remember.”

  “But there’s no need to suffer…” I said.

  “I don’t heal so well if I take painkillers. I can switch most of it off. It’s fine.”

  I looked to the others “Does anyone else need anything?”

  “When’s he being buried?” asked Olivia. She meant Veofol. I think she was surprised to find she missed him. The others felt the loss as well, and they looked to me.

  “His remains are going back to his world. They’re not doing an evacuation like some species, so it won’t be for a couple of weeks, until there’s portal time available.”

  “His family will take him?” asked Kwame.

  “I think so,” I said. “I don’t know how they handle things on his world.”

  “I do,” said Pew. “I looked it up.” He held up a pad he’d been working on. “They recycle. Because they live in orbital habitats, you know, they can’t afford to waste anything.”

  “They eat their dead…?” said Kwame, ready to be appalled.

  “Uh, no. More like take the organs for transplants, blood for transfusion, extract minerals. That kind of thing.”

  “That is disgusting,” said Kwame.

  “You do what you have to do,” muttered Olivia.

  “They have a ceremony, it’s not like they dump him in a machine,” protested Pew. “They might cremate him, though, they get a lot of aid from the IU so they don’t need the recycling so much. And he’s sort of famous there apparently, so they might make the exception…”

  Katie spoke up. “They will not require much fuel for cremation. He was extensively charred in the crash.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve come back…” said Olivia. They knew Katie had returned, of course, but this was the first time she’d spoken.

  “I have made no journey to return from.”

  “Well you can bloody well give the man some respect!”

  Katie reacted as if struck. She froze, twitched, and relaxed her face again. “I apologise,” she said. “His loss is regrettable. He will be missed.” A muscle at the side of her mouth quivered, then settled down.

  “Can we… send someone?” wheezed Iokan.

&nbs
p; “There’ll be a representative from the IU there,” I said.

  “Is there anything we… can send? A… recording? Or a message?”

  “I sent something to his family,” I said. “If the rest of you want to say a few words, I’ll see what I can arrange.”

  5. The New Centre

  The bus took us up into a mountain range, weaving through snowy peaks to the new centre: high on a bleak valley through which glaciers had run in colder millennia, with the treeline only a couple of hundred metres above. We arrived at the end of summer, with warnings we should prepare for snow. The centre was often used for alpine sports in the winter, and there were ski runs laid out nearby.

  Kwame declared it reminded him of Bvumba, the military reserve on his world the bunkers had been built under. The familiarity of the landscape gave him no comfort and seemed to set him on edge. Olivia complained her garden was lost; it was far too late in the year to start another one and even if the timing had been right, the soil was a long way from what she wanted. The land was perfect for pasture, if there had been any animals on the planet that needed it. Other than that, you could grow a few small flowering plants, but that was it. The growing season was far too short for most crops. Olivia muttered and swore when she surveyed the ground, and said she might as well be back in Tringarrick, which, though hilly, was hardly the same kind of terrain. I let her order some seeds anyway, since the old garden had been so helpful in getting her to participate in therapy.

  We were a long way from Hub Metro; two thousand kilometres distant and very dependent on a microwave link to a satellite for what little dataflow was available, along with regular supply runs that would become ever more important in the winter months. The buildings themselves were familiar, as they were of exactly the same design as the last centre. They were prefabricated and mass-produced so we could set up as many centres as we needed to cope with sudden influxes of survivors from dead worlds, and the common design made them very easy to work with. But this time, it was more than a little disturbing when you walked out a familiar door and were suddenly reminded of the chill you’d never felt at the old centre. All the rooms had been set up in an identical manner as before, so moving in proved to be fairly easy, though few of the group were in a fit state to do the work themselves.