Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

I had to make a visit to Hub Metro to inspect the new facility for the group: a small building in the outskirts that carried no markings, was not listed on public directories, and could not be found unless you had permission. No vehicle would take you there, and if you stumbled across it, the doors would not open, nor would any staff emerge to see who you were. It was one of those places the Diplomatic Service kept aside for secret negotiations where the parties could not admit they were even talking to each other. There was provision for overnight stays, and this was being turned into something the group could use for a while, until a more permanent home could be found. Progress was slow on the conversion, but they promised me no more than another week.

The evacuation was being felt in every quarter of the city: wreckage still heaped up from the attack was cleared away and prefab buildings were dropped into place in public spaces, while residents of the more permanent structures were shuffled into as few buildings as possible, so the ones that remained could be turned into refugee centres for those who were less afflicted by physical and mental trauma. But all of them would have issues. Those that did not would be sent straight to a colony world; there simply wasn’t room on Hub for anyone who didn’t desperately need our help. So Hub Metro would once again be filled with troubled refugees, as it was during every evacuation.

I visited my own apartment for the first time in weeks to supervise a couple of robots as they packed up my belongings and shifted them into storage, to make a little more room if it was needed, and so I could leave once and for all if I decided to do so.

While I was in Hub Metro, I rolled as many duties into my visit as I could. Liss had her meeting with the Quillian diplomat, which had been put off half a dozen times, and which I’d only been able to arrange as a face to face meeting between the diplomat’s other engagements; elsewhere in the city, I had to pay a visit to Katie in hospital. Or rather, I visited Sergeant-Designate Elsbet Carmon, late of Attack Squadron Alpha Six of the Vesta 4 Holy Brigade, for it was she who had emerged once the new body had woken.

I found her sitting up in bed and working on a co-ordination testing programme with one of the neurologists, stabbing away at a pad with a finger.

“Yes. I’ve got a finger. It works.”

“That’s right,” said the neurologist, “we just need to test how the fine motor skills are coming along…”

“They’re fine ,” she said, and stabbed at some more buttons.

The neurologist smiled, patiently. “You need to look at the pad for this to work…”

She looked round, saw me standing at the door, and broke into a smile. She jumped off the bed and ran to hug me, knocking me back half a metre.

“Thank you! Thank you!”

“Okay… nice to see you too…”

She pulled her head back from my shoulder. “Thank you,” she said, looking straight into my eyes.

I smiled as best I could, then looked past her to the neurologist, who was also smiling, though rather wearily.

She let me go and twirled. “This is amazing… I’ve never felt this good!”

“They tell me your old body had a lot of toxins in it. So now you don’t,” I said.

“And look!” She turned her head to show a scalp covered only by close-cropped hair. “No sockets!”

“I’m sure you can have an implant later—”

“I don’t want one. I don’t want anything in me!”

“Okay. You might have to wear contact lenses if you want to understand people. Not everyone speaks Interversal.”

“Hah! They can fucking learn!”

“Well. You seem very happy.”

“Yeah. If it wasn’t for these fuckers.” She jabbed a disrespectful thumb in the direction of the neurologist.

“They’re just trying to make sure everything went okay. The operation you had doesn’t always go this well.”

“Balls. I’m fine.”

“And they’re probably going to need the bed soon. I’m sure they’re being very polite about it, but we’re going to have a lot of people coming in with radiation burns in a little while. Did they tell you about Ardëe?”

“Yeah, yeah, fine, I’ll press all the buttons and get out of here…” she sulked. “Are you taking me back now?”

“I have to get the agreement of the rest of the group, first. Katie said some very worrying things and they’re a little cautious.”

She snorted. “Idiots.”

“I think they’ll be happier when they realise it’s you.”

“How are they?”

“They’re fine. Mostly. Some of them are a little fragile at the moment.”

Iokan woke in the centre, in his old room, set to a standard bedroom layout. He hadn’t bothered to recreate the old settings. He hadn’t shown any interest in anything, not even the terrible news from Ardëe, or my announcement to the group that they would need to move to Hub Metro soon. He slept, rose in the morning, put on his robes, ate whatever food was put in front of him, went to the toilet, but otherwise stared at the wall.

Today, he rose and looked out the window. The snow was thick this year, and the evergreens wore white as far as the eye could see. The buses and trucks and fliers that brought in the work crews and their equipment grew snowy beards after only minutes on the ground, and had to melt them away before they left. For once, you could see a good distance; the centre had been wrapped in fog and blizzards for more than a week. But today the only clouds were those spiked on the mountains.

Iokan dressed, left his room and headed downstairs. On hearing a troop of new staff being taken on an orientation tour, he turned away and found another way down, twisting and turning his route through the building to avoid people. Pew was in the gym, slamming angrily at weights, and did not see Iokan sneak through. Kwame was in the kitchen enjoying a meal that didn’t consist of freeze-dried emergency rations, and failed to hear Iokan’s footsteps pass the door. Olivia fretted in the common room, writing on an antique paper pad with an ink pen and crossing out everything she wrote almost as soon as she read it. She never knew that Iokan passed by, heading for the exit, wearing no coat, no thermals, no boots. The centre’s systems knew where he was, but he had done nothing yet to endanger himself or others, so they stayed silent.

The snow was half a metre deep, and paths had been carved between the buildings. Iokan found his way to the edge of the compound and headed into the woods, crunching sandals on fresh snow. The only life there was the forest itself; insects had fled or died or burrowed deep into the soil as winter came, and there were no mammals or birds to trouble the plantlife.

He came out the other side onto a frozen, snow-buried meadow, just as the weather was changing. Clouds had raced in from the mountains and visibility was back down to less than a hundred metres. The sun was just a vague glow and the air temperature fell even further.

He didn’t care. He looked about; he was still alone. He took off his robes and stood naked in the snow, waiting for whatever might come.

“I just popped in to see how you were, really,” I said.

“I’m fine and my fingers are fine,’ said Elsbet, with another sidelong glance at the despised neurologist. “You’re not going, are you?”

“I have to pick up Liss soon. She’s having a meeting in town. You should carry on with the therapy. I’ll be in touch.”

“Oh! Before you go, let me show you something!”

She took my hand to pull me away. I looked back at the long suffering neurologist, who shrugged his permission. So I let her take me down through the hospital, past all the porters and nurses moving patients and equipment, clearing beds and stocking up on supplies, down a gravity tube and out to a glass-walled common area looking out on a patch of nature bounded by the structure of the building: trees bursting with the red and gold of autumn, reaching higher than the hospital itself.