Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

The group looked rather less impressed than they had been with the deeper excavation. But Ren had more than just a road to show. “The best part of this trench, though, is the street furniture…”

Further along, there were a variety of corroded stumps in the pavement, and a signpost standing tall above all the rest, raised up so the top poked up high above ground level. “So you can see a whole heap of stuff here, but it’s the signpost everyone wants to look at. It was flat on the pavement when we found it, completely broken away from the supports, but it was nearly intact, so we raised it up. And we got a pretty nice surprise, I can tell you! The plastics they were using really lasted, and you can still see most of what was printed on it.”

The ‘signpost’ was quite broad, and stood three metres high; the plastic surface was pitted and warped but had markings all the way to the top. “We’re pretty sure this was something to do with the transit system, that light rail thing embedded into the roadway. This might have been a passenger stop, or maybe an interchange point. That symbol at the top there” — he pointed out a faded insignia at the top of the sign, that looked a little like ‘IXI’ — “we think that’s the symbol or the logo for the whole thing. You see how it’s up high enough that you can see it from a distance? The idea is, you can see the stop from a long way away, and then when you get closer you get more and more information. So the writing below it that you’re not getting a translation on, because we haven’t properly worked out the language yet, we reckon that’s the name or location of the stop. The coloured vertical bands running on the side are something to do with the particular lines the stop’s on. And then there’s the map, of course…” A simple design that showed the surrounding streets and buildings, and a line running from a dot on the map to words you could easily imagine saying ‘you are here.’

“But if you look on the other side — it’s the advertising for the transit system that really brings it home.” I’d seen it before on screens, but seeing it in real life had rather more impact: a photograph of a host of faces that were so very nearly human despite the strange eyes and ears, clustering round the entrance of a tram, smiling and waving while a driver looked on with a kindly gaze.

“Those are real people,” said Ren. “And they’ve been dead for forty thousand years.”

While it hit me hard, it hit the others harder still as they went round to look. Kwame turned away, hiding tears with a shaking hand. Olivia scowled at it. Liss looked unusually serious. Iokan sighed. Katie looked closer, to satisfy whatever curiosity she had.

Pew didn’t look at the advert. Something else about the sign affected him, something about the side with the map. He turned and stumbled away, and fell to his knees in the grass, gasping hard. I went to him and asked what the matter was.

“Think there’s too much pollen… around here…” he said, loosening his collar, trying hard to catch his breath. I looked up at Veofol. Both of us knew that Pew didn’t suffer from hay fever. This was more like a panic attack.

I directed him to take deep breaths and calm himself. He gasped and blowed and found control over his breathing again.

Olivia looked over at us and seemed about to make a remark. I glared back at her and she got the hint; she left Pew alone and looked back at the sign. “Silly buggers,” she muttered, shaking her head.

Pew soon said he was fine, and willing to go on. But he didn’t want to talk about it there and then.

Ren took me aside. “I guess that hit you guys harder than most people. Do you still want to see the rest of the tour?”

“I think we should,” I said. “But let me ask them first.”

Veofol came back to the bus and reported that the driver was using the rest facilities, so we had time to continue the discussion.

“Pew, are you feeling any better?” I asked.

He nodded. “Bit better.”

“You had quite a reaction earlier on,” I said. “Would you like to discuss it?”

The group looked at him. At first he seemed uncomfortable. But he made the effort. “It was the map.”

“The map?” asked Kwame. “Not the advert?”

“I’ve seen maps like that before,” he said. “The Soo had maps like that in their cities.”

“I thought you never went out?” asked Olivia.

“I escaped once.” Now that was interesting. “The maps were all I had to work out where I was. They were just like that, on that kind of sign. Exactly the same.”

“It’s a common solution to a basic problem,” I said. “Most cities need to help people find their way around.”

“I mean they used the same colours, and the same shapes, and… it was like…” He swallowed. “It was like standing in a Soo city. As though they were all dead and gone.” He said it with an undercurrent of approval that troubled me.

“How does that make you feel?” I asked.

He saw my concern and clammed up. “I don’t know. It just looked familiar.”

Kwame missed the subtleties of Pew’s tone. “I believe you are right,” he said. “This place is familiar. It is a graveyard.”

“A graveyard? With no bodies?” asked Iokan.

“It is a graveyard for more than people,” said Kwame. “It is the burial place for their world. They should have rested here, undisturbed. We should have left them alone, not dug them up to point at their misfortune.”

“But isn’t there something to learn from how they lived?” asked Iokan.

Kwame smiled bitterly. “I have learned that some people have no chance to survive, no matter what they do. I did not need to rob a grave to know that.”

The group was willing to go on, and Ren’s final part of the tour took us to the pride and joy of the whole site: an excavation inside one of the hills that had revealed a number of intact rooms within. The group was again issued with helmets at the entrance, but these were of the kind that would function as survival systems in the event of collapse.

“Okay, so this place is pretty safe and we’ve put a lot of gravity control in there to make sure the roof stays up, but I don’t want to see anyone taking these helmets off. I said this earlier and I’ll say it again: keep your hands to yourself, stay inside the designated paths and don’t touch anything. Okay?”

The group assented, and followed him into a tunnel with lights on the ceiling at close intervals; the walls were simple earth, supported by gravity modules on the ceiling and sides. Before long, we emerged into what our ears immediately told us was a much larger space, but the pool of light from the tunnel didn’t extend far inside.

“So here we are, and if I turn the lights up…” Ren ran a finger across a pad, and lights several metres above glowed into life. Insects scattered and found safety in crevices all around. Liss gasped.

“Don’t mind the critters,” said Ren. “They only eat each other. Real problem for preservation, though…”

But she took no notice of the insects, and instead blurted: “It’s an office!”

The lights showed a reception lobby, marble-walled and designed to impress. There were wide windows that once faced out onto a street but which had long since burst under the weight of soil. We’d walked in through one of those windows, and the path ahead ran on floating boards above the tiled floor.

“That’s right,” said Ren. “It’s an office building. We’re in the lobby right now, you can see they had real human receptionists once upon a time…” He pointed out the plastic skeleton of a reception desk. “This was a pretty fancy place, back in the day, and that’s why it survived in here. A lot of the construction is stone and that lasts better than anything. Come on and I’ll show you the rest.”