Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“Oh, completely. And we didn’t even need that, really, we stopped fighting real wars a long time ago. There were just a few brushfire conflicts every now and again…”

“I’m sorry, can we backtrack: you say you’d stopped fighting wars?”

“By and large.”

“Why was that?”

“Well, about fifty years ago, all the countries of the world, including mine, signed a treaty, and that was it. No more war. By my time, we only had nominal forces for small crises.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Which one was that?”

“Why did you stop fighting wars?”

“I suppose we just didn’t like them any more.”

He smiled a disingenuous smile. His way of not answering.

“Okay. So you joined up. Which service did you join?”

“The Imperial Zumazscartan Submarine Troop. Sounds very grand, doesn’t it?”

“Very grand, yes. What did they do?”

“Patrol, mostly. We had a few underwater habitats. No chance of a war, of course, but the squid got a bit uppity sometimes. They liked to rip airlocks off for fun.”

“That’s some very impressive squid…”

“The Antecessors left us with quite a lot of interesting fauna.”

“Hm. So how much time did you spend on patrol?”

“None at all.”

“I’m sorry…?”

“They gave me an aptitude test and packed me off to headquarters instead. Intelligent people didn’t join the military, you see. There wasn’t much of a career path if there wasn’t any chance of fighting a war. So if someone with a good education walked in the door, they locked it behind you and made you an officer.”

“So you became…?”

“A military planner.”

“And that was your service? That was secret?”

“Well, the details were secret. I worked on defence plans in the event of an attack from the Asian mainland.”

“But I thought you said there were no more wars?”

“That’s right.”

“So why do it?”

“Budgets. They were trying to justify military spending to the government, so they had to spend the money on something. They were just trying to keep their jobs, really.”

“So it was basically pointless?”

“More or less.”

“And that was your military career?”

“That was the first two years. Then I joined special forces.”

“Special forces? You mean…”

“Small teams making point assaults behind enemy lines, gathering intel, demo ops, that kind of thing.”

“That seems quite a change from military planning.”

“It was. They turned me down twice.”

“So why did you want to join special forces?”

“Because I knew I’d spend the rest of my life behind a desk otherwise. So I went for the only branch of the military that was still doing something for real.”

“Did you see actual combat?”

“I did.”

“What sort of conflict? If there weren’t any wars going on…”

“Oh, there was always some little island somewhere… most of my service was in the Shizima Archipelago.”

“You mentioned that one of your colleagues suffered from PTSD.”

“Yes. It was always a risk.”

“Did you come through okay?”

“It never gave me a problem.”

“How long were you in the special forces?”

“A little over a year, once I’d finished training.”

“That’s not very long…”

“I had a better offer.”

“Can you tell me what that was?”

“No.”

“Was it secret?”

“Yes.”

“More than being in special forces?”

“Much more.”

“So you still feel the need to protect someone? Even though they’re all Antecessors now?”

His look at me was very serious and certain. “I’m not protecting them. I’m protecting you.”

“Why do we need protecting?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“That seems very mysterious…”

“I don’t mean to be. But it’s safer this way.”

“Is this a danger to us, here in the centre? Or is it bigger than that?”

“Much bigger.”

“Can you tell us anything at all?”

“No.”

“Hm.” Delusional? Given his world, it was far from impossible that he could imagine a threat against us and cast himself as our saviour. But he’d clammed up for now, so I went back to another issue. “Okay. So you’ve told me about how you joined the military, and what you did while you were there. You didn’t tell me why you joined the military.”

He looked at me. Or perhaps he looked through me. Pursing his lips and thinking hard.

“Is that something we can explore…?” I asked.

“I was looking for the Antecessors.”

“So it was a religious thing?”

“No. Not for me, not then.”

“But they were part of your religion. That’s what you’ve told us.”

“They were also real.”

“I thought that wasn’t known until they returned?”

“No. It was known. It wasn’t like the religions you have on other worlds. We didn’t have to invent gods. We had evidence — all the things they left behind when they went.”

“Such as…?”

“Technology. Science. Weapons.”

“I see. So what were you trying to find out?”

“What they really were. I thought the military might know.”

“Okay, but why? I mean, why were you searching?”

He looked away, his gaze floating out over the expanse of trees beyond the transparent wall.

“I saw them when I was a child.”

“But… you said…”

“Not as they are now. I found something they left behind. An animal cave.”

“You’ll have to explain that.”

He sighed. “So far as we know, the Antecessors had complete control over the entire planet. All the plants and animals were regulated down to the last insect. A lot of the systems had broken down — that’s why we had so much trouble with the squid. But a few places still had underground maintenance facilities that preserved the wildlife so it would never change.”

“That’s quite… disturbing.”

He shrugged. “You could say they were environmentalists…”

“I think some people would disagree. But carry on.”

“I grew up on the north Selatanian coast — that was part of Zumazscarta, the rest of Selatania was another country entirely.” So far as I could tell, Selatania was his world’s version of Australia, though its climate was very different to most Australias in the multiverse. “The forest went from there all the way across the continent, and we played in the woods all the time. And then one day we found a hole in the ground.”

“One of the maintenance facilities?”

“Exactly. An animal cave. I was with three other children. We couldn’t resist — it made a splendid little fort, but that was just the tunnel leading down. Then we found a door. And it opened by itself. We went inside and the lights came on… it wasn’t big. The corridors weren’t really meant for humans. We were only children and we were still a little too tall. Everything was polished metal, as though it had only just been built, and even the animals couldn’t soil it. They were everywhere. All kinds of creatures. Marching in from tunnels, straight into cages, hundreds of cages. And little operating stations. The animals were picked up and delivered there when they were ready to start. We saw a ferret cut open, the leg bone replaced where it was broken. Mostly it was small animals but there were a few cages at the back for bigger ones. There was a bear cub in there, sleeping. As big as we were.”

“Sounds rather scary.”

“Terrifying. But so exciting…” There was a light in his eyes. “We all knew about the Antecessors from school. But we’d never seen anything for real. My heart was thudding, I was thinking this is it, this is them, they were here once …