Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

He led us in past reception, where the building opened out into a broad, single room, filled with partitioned desks that sheltered insect nests. The floating platforms followed along one of the aisles, furthest inside and away from the outside wall, where more earth had piled up from breached windows. “Of course, it’s mostly plastic and glass and some metal that’s survived,” he said. “Anything even remotely organic is long gone. But as you can see from that heap of plastic over there…” He indicated the inside of a room whose door had long since rotted away, where a freestanding boxlike device stood with a smashed glass top, about half the height of a human. “They had something I guess most of you won’t recognise. That’s a photocopier, a kinda thing they used to transfer information between sheets of paper…”

“Liss?” I asked. “Is this something you can tell us about?”

But Liss was lagging behind. She walked around the floating path, looking among the remains of boxy monitors, keyboards, computers, office chairs and all the other detritus with a wide-eyed nervous stare. Ren went back to his patter.

“Now we can’t be sure what kind of work went on here, but you can see more indicators of their technology level — you see those units in the corners, mounted on the wall? Those are screens, believe it or not, and the reason they’re that size is they needed to have an electron gun behind the screen to project the picture onto it. I don’t imagine any of you have seen anything like that in the last few hundred years…”

“You would imagine wrong,” said Kwame.

Ren was slightly unnerved at Kwame’s grave tone, but picked up the tour guide patter again. “But as I say, we still don’t know what went on here, and we probably never will. The biggest problem is preservation—”

“It’s a call centre,” said Liss.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said it’s a call centre,” she insisted.

“A what kind of centre…?”

“They… have the headsets…” She pointed out the wired plastic earpieces lying between an arc of rust that could once have been a band connecting them across the top of a head. And from one of the earpieces projected something that could have been a microphone. Ren looked closely.

“I don’t know what you think that is, but we’re pretty certain that was a miniature music system, or a personal communications set—”

“I used to work in a call centre… I used to do this. And… and the photocopier’s in a locked room, that’s for security… they were taking calls in here… they were taking calls when it happened… they were taking calls…” The tears came and she couldn’t bear it any more. She fled.

I asked Veofol to stay with the group and complete the tour, while I ran out after Liss into the sunshine and found her throwing up on the grass under a safety line. I offered her a tissue to clean her mouth, but she was too distressed. “Why did you bring us here? Why did we have to see that?”

“Okay, Liss, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was going to have that kind of effect on you. You don’t have to see any more. We can go home if you like…”

“What home? I haven’t got a home!” she shouted back at me and stumbled to her feet, still weeping. She lost her footing again immediately, and collapsed into sobs. I knelt by her and let her weep into my shoulder. I felt terribly guilty; I’d been hoping for a reaction to break through her shell, but not an outburst like this. The possibility that her therapy would benefit as a result didn’t make me feel any better.

The bus lifted up into the air, and everyone moved to the windows to see the landscape they now understood: the seemingly natural pattern of hills and valleys that was so clearly a street map once you knew what lay beneath the ground. Liss wasn’t at the window; she’d long since stopped the waterworks, but she’d been quiet since then. “Liss? Would you like to see the city?”

She looked up, distracted from her thoughts. “Hm? Oh, are we going?”

“Are you feeling better?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine now. Sorry!” she said, embarrassed.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh. Guess I made a fool of myself, yeah?” She was back to her old self, only a couple of hours after her meltdown.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I said. A look of worry flashed across her face but a foolish smile smoothed it away. “This is your last chance to take a look outside.” She put her nose against the window.

“Oh, wow, you can really see it!” she said.

“Those poor people,” said Kwame, shaking his head.

Olivia snorted. “Those people. What about our people?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“That’s us down there,” she said. “They’ll be doing this to us in a few thousand years.” Kwame looked back down, frowning.

“Taking us on bus rides?” asked Iokan with a smile.

“No, you idiot,” she said. “I mean archaeologists. Alien archaeologists digging up our cities. And wondering how we managed to make such a mess, I don’t doubt.”

“They won’t like it on your world,” said Liss.

“Oh, they’ll bloody love it,” said Olivia. “They’ll never figure it out if they don’t know about revenants. It’s the perfect mystery. They can’t solve it and it’ll get ’em funding forever. Good luck to ’em.”

“No! I mean they’ll get bitten!”

“What do you mean—” Olivia stopped, realising what Liss meant, then smiled sardonically. “Oh, I get it. Bitten. That’s good. Hah!” She chuckled.

Kwame had a look of grim approval. “That is no more than they deserve. The dead teaching them a lesson for disturbing them.”

“It can’t actually happen,” said Olivia, chortling, “they don’t last more than twenty years…”

“That is a terrible shame,” said Kwame through something approaching a smile.

“But still… can you imagine if Ren was digging and he came back up with a head chomping on his fingers?” she said, cracking up again.

“He’d be all ‘Ow! Ow! Oh, wow, look at the cool specimens… Ow! Ow!’” said Liss, imitating his deep-voiced enthusiasm and making Olivia and Kwame laugh. It was infectious. Iokan soon joined in. Even Pew cracked a smile. Only Katie remained aloof.

I had half a mind to point out that something similar had already happened when the Exploration Service had found Olivia’s world; but as I saw them laughing together, even at such a terrible gallows humour, I could not bring myself to stop them.

Veofol joined me and spoke softly. “I think I might have been wrong.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “It depends on the next round of individual sessions…”

“Well… at least they seem a bit more like a group, now.”

“Yes. Yes, I think so.”

We flew back to the sound of conversation that stayed alive all the way home, a thin ribbon of shared suffering binding them together, and hopefully enough for their therapy to move forward.

After the inevitable row with Bell once I returned to Hub Metro (he demanded I get an assignment where I wasn’t perpetually on call, as though I had the luxury of choosing), I decided spending time at home was more trouble than it was worth. I gave Veofol some time off and took some of his on-call shifts for myself, staying overnight at the centre and sharing the evening meal. Much to my satisfaction, the group were actually taking meals together now, although that was partly because I made sure the only alternative was a less than appetising emergency microwave meal. They hadn’t gone so far as to cook for themselves, but were more than willing to eat what was offered.