Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

He nodded, and I asked him to take a seat. Not the best beginning; Pew had difficulty trusting strangers.

“How are you settling in?” I asked.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Do you like the countryside?”

He nodded with a small smile.

“I suppose you didn’t see much of it on your world…”

“No. Not really.”

“Hm. Didn’t they send you to a holiday chalet once a year? I think I saw that in the records the Soo sent with you…”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah,” he nodded, as though he’d just remembered.

“Well, that must have been nice, with nobody looking in the windows.”

“Yes.”

His reticence concealed the truth: they were never free of surveillance. The effort to save the Pu was monetised through video broadcasts showing their everyday lives. We’d never seen any of these as the Soo use physical cables rather than free-radiating transmission, making it hard to eavesdrop, but the effect on Pew could hardly have been beneficial.

“Do you know why I’m asking these questions?”

“No…?”

He was puzzled, not so much because he didn’t understand what I was trying to get at, but because he feared I would trip him up in some way.

“When the Soo handed you over, they gave us all their records about you, and about the breeding programme.” He flinched at the words. “But there are gaps. We think they left things out deliberately, and we haven’t been able to fill in these gaps with the information you’ve given us. We just don’t know what traumas you suffered. If I’m going to help you, I need to find out.”

He thought about it for a moment, then looked back at me. “Why?”

I was surprised. Had this somehow been missed, or was he objecting to the process of therapy? “Because of the way we’d have to treat you. Would you like me to explain?”

He didn’t object, so I went on. “You’ve been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In most species, we’d treat this with psychosurgery. But we don’t know enough about the Pu, so we have to use older methods. It won’t be easy, and it will take time, but we can help you, as long as you can talk about what happened. Even if it’s just bit by bit.” He looked dubious and worried. “I know you’d prefer not to, but it’s the only way to treat the problem, and we’ll make it as easy as we can. Has anyone explained this to you before?”

Pew looked down. Someone certainly should have explained this to him, along with the usual treatment for the disorder. Perhaps it was the prospect of that which troubled him so much. It might even have been a spur to his most recent suicide attempt. I decided to start carefully, from the beginning.

“PTSD is usually associated with warfare. That’s when most human species realise it’s a problem, after some big war that leaves large numbers of soldiers traumatised. But it doesn’t have to happen in battle; it can be the result of any traumatic event, and not necessarily just one. If stressful things keep happening to someone over a long period of time, it can build up until it’s just as bad.”

A flicker of understanding flashed across his eyes. I went on.

“It happens when the human mind’s response to trauma goes too far. When we find ourselves in danger or a lot of stress, our memory starts working differently. It embeds what we experience much more deeply into the mind, which is useful if you’re, say, a hunter-gatherer being attacked by a big animal…”

“You mean like a polar bear?”

I paused, realising my usual PTSD explanation wasn’t intended for someone who’d actually been a hunter-gatherer as a child. But at least he was talking.

“Yes. Like a polar bear. Or anything dangerous.”

His tone darkened. “Like the Soo.”

I nodded. “Yes. It could be. So if you’re attacked by something, you’re shaken up by the experience and you can’t get it out of your head. That’s the mind embedding the memory, so you remember how to survive the next time it happens. After a few weeks most people get better and the memory isn’t as troubling. But sometimes the memory goes too deep, and it’s too strong, and it doesn’t go away. And then even little things can set it off and it feels like it’s happening all over again. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

He looked up at me with pained eyes. He knew.

“If we’re going to treat this, Pew, we have to talk about what happened to you. We have to know what those memories are. You don’t have to tell me everything all at once. We can go slowly. Your last therapist made a start, but, well, things got in the way. Out here, though, your health is all we need to work on. Is that okay?”

He was tense, and hunched up. “I… yes. I don’t… there’s some things…”

“It’s all right. You don’t need to tell me about it now.” His shoulders relaxed, and he looked clearly relieved. I went on. “Really, I’d like to start by hearing what life was like in the zoo, when you were young. Can we do that today?”

“Okay.”

“Do you need some water? Or I’ve got a pot of tea?”

“Tea. And some milk?”

“Sure.” I smiled and poured him a cup from the pot I had gently steaming under its own power. He took a sip and relaxed a bit more. “So… what was it like when you first went to the zoo?”

He took another sip, and kept his eyes on the swirl of tea. “Hot.” He was born in the Arctic, and the zoo was two and a half thousand kilometres further south. “I kept sweating all the time. I hated it.”

“What was the zoo like?”

He swallowed back more tea. “There were mirrors everywhere. All the rooms had a wall that was a big mirror, but it was one way glass so they could see us. Sometimes you could see them a bit, like shadows.” The Soo public, gawping at the last Pu survivors.

“But not every room?”

“No. The bedrooms and washrooms and toilets were private. Except for the cameras, but that was just the staff watching.”

“Did they keep you inside all the time?”

“No, there was a garden as well. That had really high walls. The first thing I did…” He trailed off for a second, but found his track again. “The first thing I did was try and climb the walls, but I couldn’t make it. They had to get a ladder to bring me down.”

“You tried to escape?”

“They must have thought I was a little animal, trying to get out. The Soo thought I was an animal anyway.”

“Had you ever seen any Soo before?” Pew shook his head. “What did they seem like, to you?”

He struggled for an answer. “I don’t know, I… spirits, maybe. They were like spirits. They were different .” He didn’t elaborate. The two species had followed separate courses of evolution for a long time, and even looked different: the Soo had lost their hair and had a very different nasal structure that set them apart from the Pu.

“How did they treat you?” I asked.

“They put me in the zoo with the others and let them look after me. To begin with.”

“And what were they like, the other Pu?”

He took a gulp of his tea.

“They were all old. They weren’t like me. They got old fast and they were stupid.” Pew’s ancestors had avoided the Soo for thousands of years, but the rest of the species had not been so lucky. Generation by generation, they had been bred to slavery and physical strength. Those who showed signs of rebelliousness or too much intelligence were denied the right to breed.

“Did you get on with them?”

“They looked after me.”

“Was it anything like being in the tribe?”

“No, it… well, yes, they tried to teach me things. Like looking after clothes. Household maintenance. Basic accountancy. Magic tricks, for entertainment. And singing, but I wasn’t any good at that. I suppose… when I was in the tribe, they taught me things so I could survive, like hunting, making tents, fishing. In the zoo they did the same thing. They taught me how to survive as a slave.”