Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“I have information that may assist your emotional disturbance,” said Katie, looking directly at Liss. “When a species goes extinct, one individual must always be the last to die. The reasons are likely to be beyond the control of the individual. It is pointless to trouble yourself with an examination of causes.”

Liss stared back at her with no idea what to make of her words.

“That’s… helpful. Thank you, Katie,” I said.

“I am happy to assist with therapy.”

“So it’s all just chance and there’s no point talking about it, is that what she’s saying?” asked Olivia.

“I think so, yes,” I said.

“Rubbish. Chance hasn’t got a thing to do with it, apart from maybe having a head start like Pew said. I damn well did everything I could to stay alive. None of you just laid down and died, did you?”

“I did,” said Iokan. “But the Antecessors had other plans.”

“Yeh, well you’re a nutter. But the rest of you fought. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“I… not really,” said Pew, frowning.

“I did not fight to survive,” said Katie. “I fought to defeat the enemy. My survival was incidental.”

“But you didn’t give up?”

“I would have been content to die in combat.”

Olivia looked round at Liss, “ You didn’t give up. You could’ve, couldn’t you? Could’ve killed yourself, but you didn’t.”

“I should have,” said Liss. “I should have died with them.”

“Oh, you pathetic little cow…” Liss flinched at Olivia’s words. “Am I the only one who actually bothered to try and keep breathing?” She looked at Kwame. “What about you?”

“I had no choice. I had a duty to my nation,” said Kwame. “If I could have chosen for myself, I would have stayed with my wife and children to the end.”

“Olivia, can I just ask something?” I said. “This seems to be very important to you. Can you tell us a little more about why you feel this way?”

“Why do you think? I didn’t give up! I never gave up! And you all just… ugh. I don’t know why I bothered.”

“Is that the only reason you survived, do you think?”

“All the people who gave up are dead. I’m not dead. Therefore I didn’t give up. Where’d you learn your logic?”

“And you don’t think there was anything special about you? About who you were?”

Kwame took up the theme. “Were you not involved in researching the revenation bacterium?”

“Yeh. So?”

“And you were in your… what did you call it… Coroner Corps?”

“So were lots of people. You know what happened to them? They’re all bloody dead.”

Iokan joined in. “But that gave you certain skills, surely? Like all of us, your chances would have been improved by your experiences.”

Even Katie spoke up. “I can calculate the probability of survival of a person with your skills against one without if you wish to be convinced.”

“Did you not hear me? All the others are dead . Knowing how to put down a revenant didn’t save ’em. Researching it didn’t save ’em.”

Her protestations sounded ragged. I decided to risk pushing a little further. “But here you are, and you were a researcher and you do know how to put down a revenant. Doesn’t that have any relevance to your survival?”

She exploded back at me. “Course it’s got relevance! Can’t you see? Course you can’t, you weren’t there, you don’t bloody know, do you?” Iokan tried to speak, but Olivia wasn’t to be stopped. “And why are you asking us, anyway? You don’t know anything about it. When was the last time your world blew up? Eh? Bet you’ve never even seen a dead body.”

“That’s not the point, Olivia.”

“When were you ever the last woman on Earth? Course you bloody weren’t, there’s only us here and half of ’em I don’t even know they’re properly human. How come you get to ask us questions?”

“You’re right, I’ve never been the last person on Earth. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”

“You don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be us! How are you supposed to help us?”

“I was chosen for my experience as a therapist, not—”

“How is anyone supposed to help us? Eh?”

“That’s why we have the group, Olivia. So you have peers—”

“Don’t you change the subject! You make me sick, telling us how we ought to get better as though you know what it’s like to be us! There’s not one of you knows what it was like, you with your comfortable world with your food printers and your flying cars and everything you want on a plate with a cherry on top, what do you know about it? Eh? Tell me that! What do you know?”

She glared at me, challenging me to admit to incompetence. She was doing her best to avoid her own problems, of course, but she’d drawn the group’s attention to me instead of her, and it’s true that patients sometimes have difficulty working with a therapist who has no personal experience of their trauma.

I sighed and put my pad aside. I never like having this talk with patients, but sometimes it becomes inevitable.

“Well, since it seems to be important to you, Olivia, I’ll tell you. I’ve never been the last person on Earth. But I have been through an apocalypse.” She was on the point of making a retort, but I kept going. “It’s not why I was picked to be your therapist, but if the group thinks it might be relevant, I’ll tell you what happened to me.”

Kwame put a hand on his chin. Liss uncurled in her chair and wiped tears from her eyes. Katie stared at me, waiting. Pew had a new expression on his face, close to sympathy. Iokan glanced round the rest of the group. “I think I’d like to know,” he said.

I looked back at Olivia. “Well go on, then!” she said.

“Those of you who’ve been here for a while have probably noticed that a lot of people on Hub are just passing through — diplomats, students, delegations of one kind or another. Some people come from worlds the IU is helping to rebuild…” I looked at Veofol. He got the hint.

“Er, yes. We messed up the environment on my world. There was a mass extinction, lots of UV — long story short, there were only a few thousand of us in orbit when the IU found us. That’s why I look the way I do. We’ve lived for ten generations in orbit on the stations. We’re not used to being in a gravity well.” Olivia gave him a sidelong look for a moment.

I went on. “But some people do call this world home. A few of them are descended from the people who colonised the planet in the first place. Most of us, though, came here for a different reason. Most of us are apocalypse survivors.”

Olivia scowled but didn’t interrupt.

“There was a volcano, on my world, in America. Not an ordinary one. It was like a thousand volcanoes all going off at once. The sky was blocked out with dust and ash. There was no harvest for years on end. If we’d been on our own, we’d have probably gone extinct.

“But we met the IU. They managed to get hundreds of millions of people out — which sounds like a lot but there were eight billion of us before things went bad. That’s how fast people were dying. I nearly died. Most of the children in my town did die, and I was never in good health.” In fact, I had a cleft palate because of the pollution from a chemical plant abandoned when the economy went bad a decade earlier.

“There was an evacuation centre near where my family lived, and the ships lifted off from there to get out to the portals in orbit. They built it round an old airport and kept us in tents until they could take us.” IU doctors gave out medicine and food and water, keeping us alive until we could be evacuated. They said they’d be able to fix my cleft palate, and I never saw my parents so happy.