Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“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.

“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.

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.

Our car was a luxury model, a ring running round the cable with the outside edge one long window for most of the circumference. Everyone was strapped in for the launch, but once we were up to speed, you could sit at a table and order drinks just as we passed through the upper cloud layers, revealing the curve of the distant horizon. A few hundred people could travel in such a car, but today we found ourselves in a group of fifty or so, all of us on the way to Iokan’s meeting with the Antecessors. This was something of a major event; a new species to be met, diplomatic relations to be opened, and a genocide to be investigated.

I tried my best to introduce Iokan to some of those travelling with us, but he didn’t take much interest. People from the Diplomatic and Exploration Services got no more than a pleasant smile and a hello, followed by a complete inattention to their questions. He had no interest in speaking about what he expected to happen, much less in current events across the IU, which a couple of the Refugee Service people tried to engage him with. The situation on Ardëe was a frequent topic, and I swiftly learned it was worse than I thought: the sun in Ardëe’s universe was spitting flares out into space at a hundred times the usual rate, and millions were trying to flee. People were shocked at how swiftly the crisis was developing and some doubted we could manage an evacuation so soon after we had been attacked. But Iokan’s attention drifted away, so I made his excuses and tried to get him to pay attention to the spectacle beyond the window instead. We leant on the balustrade that kept us from direct contact with the great glass barrier: outside, clouds sank far below and the curve of the Earth was shadowed with the coming night.