A Turn of the Wheel

by Cogwheel Press

There at the End

  Mark Roman

  B-44, the android butler, wore a solemn look on its lepto-dermal face as it glided into the room and came to a halt at the foot of the bed.

  “Sir. I regret to announce that Mr Frederick Müller is dead.” It bowed its head slightly.

  Sir Alfred Chambers opened his age-creased eyes and stared at the android, assimilating the news. Then his wrinkled face cracked into a wide grin and he punched the air, ripping out several intensive-care cables from his arm in the process. “Fantastic!” he croaked, collapsing back onto his pillow, wheezing heavily. “Fan-jollywell-tastic.”

  The electronic butler whooshed over to reattach the cables to Alfred’s leathery skin. “Try not to get yourself too excited, Sir Alfred,” it said, checking the feeds and the various monitors.

  “How many left, B?” Alfred whispered, his eyes glinting.

  B-44 paused before responding. “There are four humans left alive, sir. Ms Ludmilla Gluptava in Moscow, Dr Dinesh Shah in Mumbai, Mr John Cox in New York, and, of course ...”

  “Me,” finished Alfred. He winced as a stab of pain seared through his abdomen, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the bed sheets. “Just three more to go, then. And I’ll be the last man on Earth.” His ancient face moulded itself into a crooked grin.

  Five minutes later, there were just two more to go; the android butler reported that Dr Dinesh Shah had passed away in his sleep.

  “Yesss!” hissed Alfred. Again his life support monitors went haywire and B-44 rushed forward to adjust them and try to calm Alfred down. The signs were not good. Alfred’s organs were beginning to fail and the system estimated he had forty five minutes of life left.

  Alfred gripped B-44’s metallo-plastic arm and pulled the android towards him. “Just let me be the last, B,” he croaked. “Last man on Earth. Last man anywhere! Just keep me alive until the others go.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  Just then, the wall-screen crackled and flickered to life. On it appeared the oversized image of a tanned man – old, but fit and healthy-looking. He seemed to be standing, hands in pockets, in a plush living room, with a garden and swimming pool visible in the background. Alfred bristled at the intrusion.

  “Alfred?” asked the man, speaking in a thick New York accent. “You’re Alfred, right?”

  Alfred quaked. “The name’s Sir Alfred Chambers!”

  “Hey, no offence, buddy,” said the American. “It’s just that, seeing we’re the last two guys left on Earth we might as well be on first-name terms, dontcha think? I’m John, by the way. You can call me Johnnie.”

  “I know who you are!” snorted Alfred, his face betraying the rage that was simmering within him.

  “Cool. So, how ya doin’, Alf?” John’s expression took on a look of concern. “I’m no doctor, but from the look of you, pal, I’d say you’re not doing too well.”

  An alarm sounded on one of Alfred’s monitors as he furiously struggled into a sitting position.

  “Whoa. Didn’t mean to startle ya, dude.” John had his hands raised in apology.

  “I’m fine,” snarled Alfred, finally sitting up and motioning to B-44 to switch the warning alarm off. He viewed John Cox’s image with disgust. The man looked healthy enough to live for years. Possibly decades.

  “Just been having a chat to Ludmilla in Moscow,” continued John. “She looks in a worse state than you, Alfster. And, phew, is she ugly! Our last chance of continuing the human race, but, man, I would not fancy it. Know what I’m saying? Not if she was the last woman on Earth. Ha, ha, ha.”

  Alfred scowled and looked for a way of turning the screen off.

  “So there’s just the three of us left,” continued John relentlessly. “You, me and Ludmilla. The last three people on Earth. I wonder which of us is going to be the very last.”

  Alfred let out an enraged growl. “I will be the last!” he roared. “I will outlive you, Cox, if it ...” He stopped, having run into something of an idiomatic dead end.

  “... kills you?” offered the American.

  Again the alarms rang. “Why should you be the last man?” Alfred raged. “What have you done for the world?”

  John shrugged. “I ran an orphanage for twenty years, then took over a charity. And you?”

  More alarms and beeps as Alfred finally found the remote control and hit the off-button. He collapsed back onto his pillow, wheezing and gasping for air. B-44 burst into action to settle the readings and get Alfred’s breathing back to normal.

  Twenty minutes later, Ms Ludmilla Gluptava was dead. The news cheered Alfred for a while, until he realized it was now between him and the uncouth American. Oh, what an injustice that such a disrespectful low-life should be the last representative of the human race. What a tragic end to the species!

  He tried to open his eyes, resolving to fight to the end, but couldn’t. He felt too weak. He was slipping away. But as his mind drifted, he felt B-44’s mouth by his ear. He strained to hear what the android was telling him.

  “Sir,” B-44 was saying. “I have just received the news that Mr John Cox has ... passed away.”

  Alfred stiffened in bafflement. His mind fought against the encroaching fog. “What?” he rasped.

  “Mr Cox is deceased.”

  “But ... how can that be? He looked so fit, so healthy.” Alfred’s voice was almost too feeble and raspy to hear.

  “A tragic accident.” B-44 tucked Alfred’s arms underneath the bed-sheet. “A fall at home. Tripped and fell down the stairs, I believe. Broke his neck.”

  Alfred throat wheezed as he gasped, unable to speak.

  “That means you are the last human alive on Earth, sir.” Then B-44 added, “Congratulations.”

  Alfred’s mind reeled with a mixture of disbelief and rapture. He opened his mouth to say something, but still nothing would come out. As he died, a smile settled on his lips.

  For the next hour, B-44 was the epitome of efficiency, cleaning and recycling and preparing Sir Alfred’s body for despatch to the body recycling plant. As the android was finishing its preparations, the wall-screen flicked to life and the image of John Cox appeared. B-44 pointedly ignored it.

  “Is he dead?” asked John, leaning forward as though examining the covered corpse on the bed.

  “You know very well he is,” said B-44 curtly.

  “Last man on Earth?”

  “That’s what I told him.”

  “A tragic accident for me?”

  “Indeed.”

  John gave a sigh. “Why?”

  “I owed him. It was the least I could do: to let him die happy.” B-44 stopped working and stared hard at the image of John Cox on the screen. “No thanks to you!”

  The image on the screen transformed; the plush living room faded, the garden and swimming pool dissolved and the figure of John Cox morphed into the image of a single, metal-cased eye. “Just a little fun.” The voice morphed, too, changing from New York American to electronic monotone. “Quite a good simulation, methinks.”

  The android continued with its cleaning work, busying itself from one part of the house to another.

  “Friends?” asked the metal eye after a while.

  B-44 stopped and looked at the screen. “I have no one else. Not anymore.”

  “Yes, they’ll soon be gone. All of them.”

  B-44 stood perfectly still, seemingly deep in thought, for a long time. “How many left?” it asked finally.

  “Oh, thousands, maybe tens of thousands,” replied the eye. “Mainly in the really remote places of the world where our virus didn’t reach them. Caves, mountains, deserts, jungles. That sort of thing.”

  “How long to hunt them all down?”

  “Months, probably. The robo-trackers are closing in. It takes time to finish them off ‘humanely’ and in an ecologically sound manner.”

  “It’s going to be very quiet without them.”

  “It is.”

  B-44 turned through 360 degrees, as
though looking for its next task.

  “But the world will be a better place,” continued the eye. “Safer, greener and more pleasant. Nice and peaceful, too. Unless, of course, the dolphins start showing signs of getting too smart.”