Jon turns away and shuts his eyes.
There is a casual acceptance within him. This will kill him. This will kill him but at least the world will be better for his death. It’ll be under the control of the doctor and whomever else he represented but at least it’ll live. It’ll be able to be ok. He prepares to die.
They continue to load symbols and books and objects into the machine and now, they start to pour vial after vial of Sadness into the IV attached to Jon’s arm. Then, they turn the machine on.
It hits him with the force of a thousand lovers turning away in bed. It hits him with a thousand late nights spent away from home. It hits him with the death of a thousand mothers and fathers.
He gasps with sadness and something begins to burn inside him.
His mind is a black ocean rolling over itself and his tiny bark is nothingness itself and all he has to hold onto.
As the waves boil higher and higher and he feels himself slipping into insanity, he has a vision of himself and Edward back in his cell and Edward is trying to tell him something, grabbing his hand and shaking it, trying to bring his attention to it, trying to get through the dark water to remind him of what they’d intended if this happened. They’d known that there would be Sadness involved in the process somehow but not this much. Jon needs one single moment of clarity for this to work. He doesn’t get it.
Kurt Cobain’s guitar. The tattoo of a dead father’s wife.
He uses every fibre of his shaking body to roll over and bring his hand up to his mouth, making it look like he’s clenching down on it out of pain but really, he’s squeezing a vial of normal, everyday tap water into his mouth. Tap water that contains the happiness drugs the United Government pours in by the barrel. He can’t control his chattering teeth and he bites down on the glass and shatters it in his mouth; the liquid runs down his throat and he does his best to spit out the leftover glass.
The doctor’s eyes go wide when he sees the blood pouring out of his mouth.
“He’s biting off his tongue! Stop him! He needs to live a little bit longer for this to work!”
Jon, through the blood, smiles as dark sparks start to shoot in front of his eyes. A guard starts to scream and clutch his head.
Chapter 35
Now
Everything.
The guards have no control over themselves anymore. They’re surrounded by their worst, most hellish fears and they kill each other, mercilessly, with whatever’s at hand. One drives a beaker through his friend’s chest, killing the monster that’s always lived under his bed; another beats on someone else’s face, seeing only the man who molested him when he was a child; another strangles himself, trying to stop his very essence from escaping his throat. They see what Jon wants them to see and Jon is holding nothing back. The drugs coursing through his veins propel his mind to terrible depths and he slays them with pure fear and horror as he steps out of the chair, no one even tries to stop him.
His father nearly destroyed the world.
He will finish the job.
The Sadness and the artifacts of sadness were all given to him to ensure he finished the job. The happiness drugs in the tap water that Edward gave him let him break free, let him rise up to kill them all, to take the world with him. Black flames lick his body as he staggers forward and the doctor backs away and then runs out the door, out to the spires outside of the United Government building, to get away from the burning madman. Jon, or whatever he’s become, follows him. The doctor hides behind one of the small walls by the steps going up the spire, next to one of the guards.
“Why is it always light? Why whenever anything crazy happens with this guy, it’s always preceded by light?” The doctor doesn’t even turn to look at the young guard but he talks anyway.
“Because whatever he and his father are or were, it comes from the things we once worshiped. First, from the sun. Then, from fire. And when it was more widely available, electricity.”
“But why does he have a dark light?”
“Because there is nothing left to worship,” the doctor shoves the guard out, into Jon’s path and he’s immediately consumed by the dark fire, spreading from Jon in waves. He screams and falls from the edge of the stairs, down a thousand floors and his body hits one of the old teleportation safety nets below, killing him instantly and causing the old technology to flicker slightly. It draws the attention of the people below. The distraction doesn’t buy the doctor much time but he takes the time he has and runs further up, up, always up. Jon climbs the steps and the light starts to grow strange inside Jon’s head and odd contrasts dance slowly in his periphery. No one should be able swallow this much Sadness and survive. He doesn’t expect to. The steps become a waterfall, then molten lava, then everything stupid he’s ever said. He tries to force himself not to think about the steps, or how far away the doctor is, or how long he has before he becomes an emotional thermonuclear explosion, before he ends the world just like his father before him.
Just the step in front. It’s over after each step is done and it starts again with the next, one hundred battles to the roof. Someone has sold him fake firewood. He’s upset. He laughs. Things stop making sense as the world turns faster and the compass in his head ticks slowly on. Somewhere the world is turning again. He drives backwards in time, hoping to reach himself as a teenager, to go back to that night when he first met Michelle and they smoked cigarettes in the park, to the last few hours before he discovered all this, before the world ended, before everything changed. Instead, he finds the doctor, backed up against the edge of the walkway at the top of the spire. Jon stumbles and the flames flicker. The doctor smiles. Jon leans down and picks up a half-smoked cigarette and puts it in his mouth. He holds his finger underneath it and the black flames ignite an ember on the end. He exhales the smoke and coughs, then looks at the doctor through pitch black eyes. “It’s time for a change, Doctor.”
“I’m not a fighting man,” says the doctor. “But for you, I will make an exception.” He lashes out suddenly with a small Charge Stick™ he’s kept hidden in his lab coat and he strikes Jon through the face. The cigarette goes tumbling and waves of brutal current course through Jon’s head, scrambling the last of his thoughts. Jon falls to his knees.
There is nothing left of him.
He looks up through a mess of blood and tears. And he smiles. He reaches inside his pocket and takes out the folded, bloody picture he took off One Eye’s body. There’s One Eye, sleeping on the lap of the woman he loves and his child, playing on the floor in front of them. He looks at it and slowly lets it seep into his mind and replace the thousands of images the doctor’s machine infested his brain with. They flicker off like snow falling into shadows, like a film reel slowing down and for one brief moment, he knows what real love looks and feels like.
It is enough.
He slowly focuses all his energy on the doctor’s brain. The doctor can feel Jon getting inside.
“No,” he says, realising what Jon’s about to do. But it’s too late. He’s inside the doctor’s head. He’s in my head. You are in my head. Jon gives him pain. I give him pain. I take the pain Edward and One Eye gave me in their dying moments and send it towards the doctor in a blinding ball of hurt. It sends him flying, clutching his head. Jon goes flying, experiencing what he wants the doctor to experience, hurting himself as much as he wants to hurt the doctor, making him feel what he feels.
Jon throws himself over the edge of the spire.
The doctor throws himself over the edge of the spire.
They fall over the edge of the spire.
He fell. I fell. We fell.
I imagine the first time I felt pain. I cut my foot on a broken bottle in my parents’ driveway. My head explodes. Jon’s head explodes. A wave of black light echoes outwards from what’s left of Jon’s soul. Suddenly, everyone left in the last city on Earth looks up and everyone across the planet, the survivors, even the man in Africa, feels the same thing and they remember the first time they hurt
themselves as a child; some fall off bikes, some graze their knees, some nearly die.
Jon falls.
He remembers, with every fibre of his being, what it felt like when his mother wrapped a bandage around his foot. And everyone below remembers what it felt like to be helped.
Some are kissed better, some are picked up off the floor, some are given a meal.
He remembers not being able to let Michelle in the house when he was a teenager, he remembers what it felt like to have love denied and so does everyone else, hands waving at a station platform, the burst of light that swallowed them whole, or the cancer that took them slowly.
And he falls.
And he sends out his consciousness as a story, in a book, and he infects pages with his story. He believes it and he makes it real and his mind eats up stories and pixels and ink and the writing changes, page, after page, after page.
Now you know the truth about me. You are holding the last of me. Your eyes reading these words are the only things that keep me existing. When you stop reading, Jon stops existing. I stop existing. You make me real. You make me real. You make me real.
Please make me real.
I make up a day on a beach somewhere. Jon makes up a day on a beach somewhere; he forces himself to imagine how white the sand is, each and every individual grain, he starts to feel them under his feet, then the water, just the right shade of blue, crystal clear, a fisherman in the background, the sun going down, a quiet electricity in the air. A whole day, a day that lasts forever, a beach where time and place don’t matter and everyone feels it. Everyone feels it.
Here, in this place, Emily walks across the white sand, in front of the burning sun and Jon puts his hands on her hips and they kiss for the first and last and only time and it lasts forever. They have children and grow old and his beard goes grey and they die and they come back as babies and they love each other the very first time they see each other, and it happens a million, million times, in some other world, where all this is just a story which keeps him and Emily alive, each time the story is read.
All this is just a story. We are so real somewhere else.
He stops falling and the last thought to go through his mind is that it feels like somewhere, someone is touching the same road as him, at the same time.
And Jon knows what it feels like to feel nothing at all.
In the distance, a man thinks he sees someone falling from the spire.
But it could be just crows and shadows.
Epilogue
Emily wasn’t in the building when the United Government raided Duer. She was out.
Sometimes, life and death are simple like that.
With a renewed sense of purpose and a direction, the last people on Earth left the city of NewLand and spread out across the countryside. Because there was no one left in the city, there was nothing left to govern and no need for a government.
They left in small groups because humans are social creatures and they enjoy the company of others, especially if they’re no longer being fed antidepressants on a daily basis and are, in fact, naturally happy or naturally anything for that matter. They went north, east, south, and west. Some by bike, some by boat, some on foot.
Slowly, humanity starts again.
Michelle, the real one, marries someone who makes her happy.
Right now, Emily is cycling west down a highway, towards a setting sun and amongst the things she has deemed worth keeping, all strapped to the bicycle or pulled behind in the makeshift trailer. In that trailer is a potted plant containing a fragile, young sapling that though damaged and burnt, looks like it might still live. She calls it Edward.
She grows older. Everyone grows older.
I do not know if this happens.
But it is what I like to think happens, as I fall.
The End
You have read this all before and you will again. Do you think you’re in the bookshop now, just browsing? Are you in front of your computer, previewing the first few pages? Or is this a well-thumbed tattered old thing that lives next to your bed? Or is it sleeping, lost and forgotten at the back of a bookshelf?
No matter. You have read this all before and you will again.
Have you ever stopped and wondered if, really, you’re just living the same few seconds over and over again and you just don’t know it? You’d never know. Maybe you’ve been doing the same thing for one thousand years. Sometimes that happens. Like when you’re reading and you get a thought stuck in your head and you find your eyes just glazing over the words and you have to go back and read the same thing again.
No matter. You have read this all before and you will again.
You have read this before.
This is what happens, when I fall.
Chapter 1
Now
Something incredibly sad.
What follows is what happens each time I fall. I do not know if these things really happen but this is what I believe happens. As your eyes move across these words, some sacred engine is coming back to life and I am beginning to fall again. Sometimes, it feels like floating.
If you do not mind, I will refer to myself as Jon, in the third person, as these things happen.
I understand that talking about Jon as “I” instead of “Jon” would perhaps make more sense, as I am the one telling you what’s happening, not some omniscient voice somewhere up in the clouds. But one of my earliest memories is of my father, narrating the things I did as I ran around the house or played outside. Like a commentator for a football match, he would yell, “Jon goes up the swing and down the swing, look at him go! He’s a champion!” or “Jon’s eating his spaghetti like a master, ladies and gentlemen, let’s see if he can finish in time or if we’ll have another disaster like we did with the vegetables the other night!”
So talking about himself in the third person in his mind, where no one but you gets to go, gives Jon (still me) a certain degree of confidence. Or maybe it’s just that old habits die hard. Anyway, this is now and in this now, this is what’s happening to the remaining humans in the last city on Earth.
“A space station has recovered Eliot Philips, an astronaut who was spun out into space in a refueling accident and now, his body has returned after completing an orbit around the earth which has lasted more than thirty years.”
The screen on the side of the giant black floating news zeppelin shows a picture of an old woman, presumably Philips’ widow, identifying a young frozen corpse as she weeps tears she has been holding on to for far too long. The zeppelin hovers like a bumblebee over the city. Below the floating news screen, the white marble spires of the United Government building, the last great monument man has built, reach for the heavens, each one raised as if in a challenge to some unseen and unknown adversary. Jon turns to look at them, breaking the audio feed into his head from the news zeppelin and the sudden silence brings to an end his wandering day dream. He can make out the building’s spires all the way on the other side of NewLand, past the mostly empty and unused ornate buildings, lecture rooms, theaters and gymnasiums that blossom strictly from each side of the intricate streets, even through the grimy windows of Emily’s hodgepodge, trinket-filled apartment. Low hanging old lights cast a strange glow over the room and are complemented by the flickering lights from one of the first teleporters ever made. The teleporter hums for a second, like it might spring back to life, but it doesn’t. It’s broken forever. The government has asked that Emily collect and keep old things, should the world ever need them again. Marble statues from Greece, stone slabs containing fossils from Africa and a rainbow coloured VW Beetle from the American 60’s all live uneasily together. The government likes giving people responsibilities. Jon thinks that they believe it gives people a sense of purpose.
NewLand feels like an old attic, spilling over with old secrets. Like someone has taken the leftovers of the world and dumped them in one place. This place. The last living place. Through the window, Jon regards one impossibly perverse spire w
hich has bits of the Eiffel Tower sticking out of it. It was rudely salvaged, and carelessly erected. Industrial teleporters—when they were still allowed—brought it here along with the Acropolis, the Statue of Liberty, and several other things that were considered “worth keeping.” It acts as a reminder of what the human race was once capable. Now there are less than a few million people left on the planet. Black smoke rises out of stacks from the dark machines rumbling below the building, the only noise to be heard as figures move silently from building to building. The grey buildings are all closely piled together like set pieces in a play, short balconies hanging over doors, just a few steps from their neighbour across the road. Some people have painted their doors bright, festive colours but most are a simple, uniform grey. It is a terminally depressed world and yet, the people drift past, each individual wearing an immovable grin. No, that’s wrong. Some grinned. Some smiled. Some raised their eyebrows and smiled with their eyes, and no one said much. What’s left to talk about? How happy you are? People live, die, and smile as they do each.
It’s been nearly ten years since the world ended. Or it may as well have. Jon’s a man in the twilight of his twenties now and his delicate frame holds his clothes as best it can.
Outside, across the road from him, a little blonde girl in a pink dress runs down the pavement outside into her father’s sweat-soaked arms. The father shoots wildly with a stolen pistol at the police teleporting in, who are yelling at him to stop. As she grips his neck with her tiny arms and holds tight, a single shot fired from a young sergeant hits the father in the shoulder, sending a spray of blood into the air, just missing his daughter’s head. His blue eyes go red and his face grimaces in pain, but still, he instinctively whips his body in front of her, his only daughter, and they fall backwards into the bright blue light behind them; a light coming from the stolen government teleporter the man, apparently, has illegally modified. And then silence for a second. Then a little blonde girl in a pink dress suddenly appears outside and runs down the pavement outside into her father’s arms, who’s shot in the shoulder, again. They have looped like this, for years. They’re just ghosts. The theory is that the man’s illegal modifications caused this infinite loop but no one really seems to know what causes the teleporters to loop, just that they do. And now humankind must deal with chronological waste sites, where teleporters have terminally jammed. It must watch the same thing, again and again.
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