The Last Man on Earth Club

by Paul R. Hardy

  “Is there something we can do for you?” asked a colonel.

  “I — the general — in the toilets —”

  The colonel sighed, and pushed an intercom. “Medics to the gentlemen’s lavatory.”

  “Sir?” asked a radio operator. “I’ve raised Matongu.”

  The colonel forgot about Kwame, and went to the radio console. “Report! How many survivors!”

  A crackle came back: “Twenty five… military… seventeen… civilian…”

  “What is your dosage?” No answer. “Repeat: state your dosage!”

  Words came out of the static: “Four grays… and rising. Three a week ago… the radiation is intensifying… no observed fallout but the dose is rising… do not have adequate protection above five grays… wish to request evacuation…”

  The colonel looked over to a man in shadow at the end of the room. A man who wore the same suit as the one who had been saluted in the lobby. He gave no signal. The colonel put a hand on the mic to hide the noise of swallowing back his grief, then released it and spoke. “Matongu, your orders are to hold fast. I repeat, hold your position. Relief will come shortly.”

  No reply came through the static. The colonel laid down the headset, straightened his uniform and marched to the man in shadow.

  “Sir. I wish to report that the surviving population of the sovereign republic of Mutapa consists of forty-two individuals.”

  The man in shadow put his head in his hands.

  Kwame backed out of the room — out into the light of the corridor, wheezing and gasping for breath. The medics stepped forward but Kwame waved them away. He found his breath again, and stumbled into a staircase going down, leading to parts of the bunker used for maintenance, for generating power — and also for housing the hibernation chambers. The corridors below had not been whitewashed like the ones above. The concrete was raw and grey. But somehow he was more comfortable here. Somehow he knew this place better.

  There, in that room, that was the generator: the nuclear pile, shielded from the rest of the bunker, radiation suits hanging on the wall. And here, this was the air filtration system, linked to the water tanks where more oxygen could be generated if needed. And this was the water recycling facility — pipes running to and from every sink, washbasin, toilet and tap in the bunker.

  And there were the hibernation chambers. Sixty of them, in a hall off to the side of the main bunker, big enough to need structural pillars, all added after the original construction, when the technology had been gifted to Mutapa from the Chifunyikans. Each chamber was a sarcophagus lying on a low pedestal containing the support equipment.

  Kwame crouched to inspect a unit, and pulled open a panel to reveal pipes and tubes and wiring; everything needed to keep the body fed and watered and oxygenated for years. It was beautifully designed, he noted. None of the poor soldering and jury-rigged parts you would find in the Mutapan versions, which were used in the shallow complex far above this one.

  He turned away from the panel, and rested his back against the pedestal, sliding down until he was sitting.

  He closed his eyes until he heard footsteps.

  A man in shadow walked in, rested against the opposite pedestal and sat, just like Kwame.

  They looked at each other across the gap.

  “Hello, Mr. President,” said Kwame.

  10. Katie

  I was called to Hub Metro when they detected signs that Katie was improving. A medical team was working on her in a clean room in the hospital, and I had to put on a gown, cap and mask before they would let me in.

  I must admit to being shocked when I saw the state of her brain; it had been slashed into several pieces by the landslide, but they had been able to revive all the individual scraps and reconnect them. All the shreds of tissue were suspended in jars of nutrient solutions hooked up to the battered remnants of glands and other organs, including the cybernetic implants that had caused so much trouble. The jars were suspended on a framework of metal with polymer sheaths wrapped around delicate cables of nervous tissue running haphazardly about the structure.

  Dr. Ingeborg led the team that had reassembled her. She was justly proud of her work, and very used to the look of shock from anyone who saw it for the first time. “It is a surprise, I know,” she said. “But this is how we all are. Just pieces of matter connected by nerves.”

  Katie’s face was the only thing I recognised, suspended from an armature in front of the apparatus. It had a deep slash held together by sutures and the skin around the edges was rimmed by a polymer that sealed it from infection. Her expression was sleeping and restful.

  “How is she?” I asked through my surgical mask.

  “Good! Very good. She is in normal sleep now,” said Dr. Ingeborg.

  “So she’ll wake up soon?”

  “I can induce consciousness whenever you wish.”

  “Please.”

  “Emteth? Yen? Can you monitor, please?” Two of her assistants moved into position around the apparatus, while she went to the main console. “She was wakeful earlier, but we did not reveal what happened. She may not remember.”

  “I understand.”

  “Here we go.”

  Katie’s eyes snapped open and looked across us, one to the other, not knowing where she was. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Dr. Ingeborg reached for a pad and activated speakers.

  “Where — where am I?”

  I looked at Dr. Ingeborg, unsure. “She is awake!” said the doctor. “Talk to her!”

  I looked back. “You’re in hospital, Katie. In Hub Metro. You hurt yourself, remember?”

  Her jaw trembled. “I — I — I can’t feel… any pain…”

  “You hurt yourself very badly.”

  “Who… are you?”

  I pulled my mask down to show my face. “It’s Asha. You remember?” I replaced the mask after a sharp look from Dr. Ingeborg.

  Katie tried looking about, tried to see her body, but her face was locked into position. “What happened to me…?”

  “You were in an accident,” I said. “There was a rockslide. Do you remember?”

  “No — no — I don’t —”

  “You were very badly hurt. It took a lot of work to save your brain.”

  “My brain…?”

  I looked back at Katie, at the face hung on the machine. If anyone could take this news, she could. “We had to take your brain out of your body, Katie. I’m sorry. It was the only way to save you.”

  Now she looked confused, drifting. “Who’s… who’s Katie?”

  I realised who I was talking to. “I’m sorry — Elsbet…? Is that you?”

  But her eyes snapped on me with a sudden understanding. “Show me. Show me!”

  I looked over to Dr. Ingeborg, and she nodded. So I mirrored a pad and held it up to Katie. Or to Elsbet. She saw the familiar outlines of her face — and beyond them, nothing human. Just a lattice of steel and glass, organs and fluids.

  She screamed. Tears dripped down her face and stained the floor.

  She went on for an unnatural length of time. She had no lungs and could not run out of breath. Dr. Ingeborg and I waited. There was nothing we could do; she had to have her moment of horror. Anyone would. But eventually it degenerated into sobs.

  “Sergeant!” I said in as commanding a tone as I could muster. She looked up at me, snapped out of her agony by a lifetime of duty and training. “Elsbet. It’s you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  “I remember you.” By the tone of her voice, she didn’t remember me with kindness.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  “I died. I died and I’m more a machine than I was before! Why can’t you let me be dead?”

  “When you… when you hurt yourself, we saved you then. But it was Katie who came back. And since then, she got worse. She tried to kill herself—”

  Elsbet’s eyes rolled back. I looked at Dr. Ingeborg, who leapt to
the controls of the life support machine. “Not as stable as I thought. There. How is she?”

  Elsbet blinked, returning to her senses. “What… what…?”

  “How are you feeling, Sergeant?”

  “Falling. Asleep…”

  Her eyes fell closed. Dr. Ingeborg frowned and shifted controls some more. She beckoned me to the console. “She is not stable at all. I thought I had her! But there is something in her species makeup I don’t understand…”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t keep her like this for long. She’s going to die.”

  “Can’t you put her in hibernation? Or a coma? Or something?”

  “She is not that kind of species! There’s activity here I don’t understand…” she indicated a gobbledygook on the screen, pulses of connections around the brain.

  “Can’t you do anything?”

  “If I get her out of this body, sure…”

  “She said no.”

  “Then she’s going to die.”

  I had to think about it: a neat and unpleasant ethical dilemma. Katie had refused treatment that would save her. And now the moment had come when she would die without that treatment. But Katie was gone. She could make no further decisions. And Elsbet was only a simulation.

  Unless she wasn’t.

  “Can you wake her up? I need to ask her some questions.”

  “She will wake up by herself. There. See?” More nonsense on the screen. “She goes, she comes back. It will be intermittent.” I dashed back to Katie/Elsbet, as her eyes fluttered open.

  “Elsbet. Can you hear me?”

  She showed no sign of it.

  “Sergeant!”

  She snapped awake again. Dr. Ingeborg seemed delighted. “Yes! Keep doing that!”

  “Sergeant. You remember me. Correct?”

  “Yes. I remember you.”

  “Do you remember what we discussed?”

  “You told me I’m a machine.”

  “That’s right. And you’re dying. Right now. You’re dying right now.”

  “Let me. Please…”

  “If that’s what you want. But I have some questions first. Do you remember Katie?”

  “Assassin!”

  “Yes. An infiltrator. Do you remember anything else about her?”

  “What…”

  “You share the same brain. Her memories are inside you. Is there anything you remember?”

  “I don’t want it… I don’t want her memories…”

  “Elsbet. Is there anything?”

  But she stared forward. I worried she was failing again and looked to Dr. Ingeborg. “She is good! Some other regions are lighting up…”

  I looked back at Elsbet. She locked eyes on me.

  “What do you remember, Sergeant?”

  “I killed children.”

  “Yes. In the hospital.”

  Her eyes darted aside, ashamed. “No. In a bunker. With fire.”

  Not the hospital. Another memory. A Katie memory from the Second Machine War. One that Elsbet had never heard, that had happened long before they shared a body.

  “Go on.”

  “I… I was a machine. I had… needles and tubes… I put the needles in the little bodies and.. it was blood and mess in the tubes… samples!” She gasped. “That was how they made people! They took our blood and made us from that… that’s how they made me… Oh God…”

  “Elsbet. This is important. You remember I said before that you were only a persona? You only came out because of the neural problems Katie had?”

  “Yes…”

  “I think I was wrong. You’re not cut off any more. You have access to things in Katie’s mind. I think that makes you a second individual in the same brain. Katie may have chosen to die but you have the right to choose as well.”

  “I’m a monster!”

  “We can make you human.”

  “But… you said…”

  “Yes. I was wrong. You’re more than just a simulation. You’re a person. I’m sorry we were wrong before. But I can offer you the choice now. We can make you human.”

  “I — I — you don’t know what she did…”

  “You’ll be human. You’ll have some bad memories but you’ll be human.”

  She looked back at me, lips trembling.

  “Yes! Yes. Please. Yes…”

  I nodded. “Dr. Ingeborg?”

  “It will be difficult—”

  I looked back at Elsbet. “It might not work. I can’t promise anything.”

  “I don’t want to be like this…” she tried to look behind her at the life support apparatus, but of course she could not.

  “You won’t be.”

  “What if she comes back?”

  “It’s a possibility. Are you okay with that?”

  She steeled herself. “Do it.”

  I nodded to Dr. Ingeborg, who said: “I shall prepare. I need to let her sleep now, before more damage is done.”

  “Are you ready, Sergeant?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  Drowsiness overtook her before she could reply, and her eyes closed once more.

  11. Asha

  “Have you ever thought about going back?” I asked.

  “There’s nowhere to go back to.”

  “I don’t mean there. I mean the other place.”

  “Oh… the colony.”

  “New Earth.”

  “So many of those these days.”

  “They’re doing well. Apparently.”

  “Oh, sure, sure. That’s what they say.”

  “So, have you thought about it?”

  Dawa Dorje looked back at me. He’d hidden his surprise when I came into his bar, but not so quickly that I couldn’t see he was worried. He thought I was there to discuss some further ramification of Liss’s assault on him, some other way he could lose his business licence or be kicked off the planet. He didn’t trust me at all, even though I’d gone out of my way to make sure he still had his last little bit of Tibet in the middle of Hub Metro. He was still keeping his host’s face on. Humouring the crazy woman who’d wandered in off the street in the middle of the afternoon, wanting to talk about the homeworld.

  “There’s nothing there for me,” he said.

  “There’s the species. You ever think about that?”

  He smiled. “I’m a citizen of the multiverse.”

  “We’re still refugees, you know.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a world full of refugees. And some more, soon.” He nodded at a screen: pictures from Ardëe, where the solar flares had grown suddenly worse. People looking up in fear at a too-bright sun, hurrying to pack whatever they could, jamming all the skyways to the spaceports.

  “But don’t you think—”

  He cut in. “No.”

  “You don’t think about it at all?”

  “No. Never.”

  Was that his solution? Just ignore it all? Salvage a tiny shred of his nation and hide?

  “What if you weren’t the last one? From Tibet, I mean?”

  He shrugged. “But I am.” He finally took pity on me as he saw me frown into my coffee. “You aren’t, are you?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Where are you from? India? Pakistan?”

  “Britain. Lots of Indians settled there.”

  “So it’s different for you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I suppose that means you still have a world.”

  I nodded. The colony world, our New Earth: a hundred million of us, scattered on two continents, trying so very hard not to screw it up again. People of my own species, and every chance of a new life. There was a standing offer to all of us on Hub to join them, regardless of whether we’d taken IU citizenship.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So go.”

  I looked into my coffee for a while. “You never wanted to?” I asked.

  “No. Not once.”

  “Because you�
�re the last survivor?”

  He thought about it. “Yeah. I suppose so. It’s a good life here. Why get caught up in all the shit from the old world?”

  “Yeah. Why should we, huh?” He smiled, still humouring me, well aware I was only trying to convince myself. “I really should get you to talk to my patients…”

  His eyes went wide. He’d only met one of them, when she beat him senseless.

  “No, no, I don’t mean her. I have other patients…”

  He nodded, plainly wishing I hadn’t come in.

  “Never mind.”

  My calendar chimed at me: it was time to go. I had a flyer to catch. I thanked Dawa, and gave him more of a tip than he’d earned.

  12. Iokan

  I met Iokan at the base of the Agvarterheer Column, or as anyone who lived on Hub knew it, the Lift. From a distance, it was a taut blue string anchored to the earth from the endless sky, lights rippling up and down for the benefit of pilots. Up close, you could see there were five columns; the central anchor that kept the counterweight station connected to Earth, and the four elevator strands, slimmer and dotted here and there with the bulges of passenger or cargo lifts.

  If you stood in the open, the column seemed to be of a fantastic, unreal size. Even though the main anchor cable was at its narrowest at ground level, the sheer scale and height defeated the mind’s attempts to comprehend it. Anyone who spent more than a few weeks there got used to it, and stopped looking up. Anyone who was new spent every spare moment staring into the sky.

  Iokan should have been one of the latter, but despite the excellent view from the security station in Agvarterheer Port where he was waiting for me, he just kept his smile and looked out at nothing in particular while the ordinary travellers outside gawped at the megastructure above their heads. He didn’t even look round to see me enter, until I said his name.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. “I was wondering where you were.”

  “They had to take Katie into surgery. Sorry about the delay. Are you ready to go?”

  He sprang up. “I am.”

  All across the plain where the cables were anchored, cars lined up to hook onto an elevator strand and begin the climb. As we headed for the boarding station to meet our own, I saw a line of evacuation lifts waiting on a track, kept discreetly in the distance but difficult to hide. It looked for all the world like a small city queueing up to launch into space; evacuation lifts are like skyscrapers wrapped around the cables, mostly composed of dormitories and medical facilities. Somebody evidently took the possibility of a full scale evacuation from Ardëe seriously, even if no announcements had been made, nor even a formal request from their government. I found myself worrying about the group, and what we would do if the evacuation went ahead, but couldn’t find any simple answers as we boarded.