Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

I said, “We can’t actually do that, Olivia, not unless we understand the species well enough. We can’t do it for Liss and we can’t do it for you, either.” Kwame held his silence, wanting to avoid complicated explanations about his own experiences.

“But you trusted her. That’s what I don’t understand. She’s obviously off her head and you trusted her.”

“We saw someone in distress and tried to help.”

“And she took advantage of you, is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s possible.”

“Well, you know what? Good for her!”

“What do you mean by that?” said Kwame.

“I mean I don’t believe a word of it because she’s a drip and nothing you can say is going to make me think any different, but if , and I mean if , she’s gone and made fools out of the lot of you, then good for her.”

“I’m no good at this,” said Liss.

“You did okay. You had us fooled.”

She scowled back. “Don’t patronise me.”

This was definitely not the Liss I knew. “I’m sorry. Please go on.”

“I was supposed to keep my mouth shut if I got caught. I tried, but… why do you have to be so nice? All of you, it’s like a tyranny of niceness. How’s anyone supposed to hold out against that?”

I smiled and shrugged. There are worse things to be accused of. But Liss was still dispirited. “I’ve never been any good at this. I’m the last person who should be here.”

“Does that mean you’ve done things like this before?”

She sighed. “I used to be an adventurer.”

“So you do have powers?”

She snapped back at me. “Yes, I’ve got powers. Crap powers. I had early onset superpower syndrome. Kids who get their powers early are usually screwed up somehow, I was just crap. I’m strong and fast and tough but not as strong and fast and tough as the people who have real powers.”

“So why did you become an adventurer?”

“My parents did it, my boyfriend was doing it, how was I supposed to avoid it?”

“Then why did you stop?”

“Because I wasn’t any good at it! I was better at doing the paperwork when everyone else got back from the mission. And then Yott dumped me and the PRG didn’t want me and you don’t really want to hear about all this.”

“I do want to hear about it.”

“This isn’t a therapy session.”

“Actually, it is.”

“Therapy sessions are supposed to be confidential. They’re watching.” She jabbed a finger at the cameras she assumed were in the room.

“I had the cameras switched off.”

“And I’m supposed to just believe you?”

“I’m your therapist. I give you my word.”

She did her best to disbelieve me, then gave it up and sighed. “Whatever.”

“Do you mind if I ask some questions, just so I know what happened?”

She snorted. “Didn’t they let you read the report?”

I shook my head. “I don’t work for Security.”

“Go on, then. If you really need to.”

“I suppose you didn’t actually work in a call centre? Or the recruitment agency?”

“No, I worked in the call centre and the recruitment agency, well, a kind of recruitment agency, they were the same place really, different parts of the same organisation.”

“So… was it sales, or customer service, or…?”

“We had a service for adventurers, I mean amateur adventurers, the ones who didn’t get paid, they could call up and find out who they were up against, get help if they needed it, call the professionals in, that kind of thing.”

“So anyone could be an adventurer? How many people had powers on your world?”

“Forty per cent. Maybe fifty, sixty in some areas.”

“That’s… very strange.”

She shrugged. “It’s why the world was so fucked up. You can’t stop someone with superpowers trying to save the world or whatever, so they licensed it. They did a psych evaluation, gave you some training, you paid your fee, they let you run around on the rooftops scaring muggers.”

“I can see how that would cause problems.”

“Hah. You don’t know the half of it. Once I’d been in the call centre for a while, I moved over to dealing with applications. Interviewing them, trying to stop the real idiots from getting a licence, that kind of thing…”

“Was that what you were doing when it happened?”

She paused for a moment. “Yeah.”

“Can you tell me…?”

She sighed. “I was interviewing this guy. He could go sort of half invisible so he thought he could be an adventurer. I was trying to talk him out of it because really, it was disgusting, you could see all his organs and everything. Poor kid.”

“What happened?”

“He caught fire. Got so hot he burned into powder in just a second. At first I thought it was his power backfiring on him but when I went to the office for help, all I saw was ash. And outside… it was like a dust storm. Or a building collapse. Clouds of it, everywhere. And that was it. For all of them.”

Iokan cleared his throat. “I have a little experience with this kind of thing…”

“Really?” I said.

“Oh, bloody hell, you’re not pretending to be a nutcase as well, are you?” said Olivia.

“No, but—”

“Oh, so you are a nutcase.”

Iokan smiled. “Very witty, Olivia. No, what I mean is, I know a little bit about police work. And I think there’s something missing from the story.”

“Go on,” I said.

“If you’re infiltrating an organisation, or a world, or anything, really, it’s very unusual for someone to do it on their own. There’s usually someone backing you up. I was wondering if she had an accomplice.”

“Forgive me for asking what must seem an obvious question,” said Kwame, “but how can you have an accomplice if you are the last member of your species?”

Iokan shrugged. “Was she?”

“Yes. Very definitely,” I said.

“What if it was someone else?” asked Pew.

“Another species?” asked Kwame.

“Well… you can have more than one species on a world…”

“She didn’t have an accomplice,” I said. “But she did have some very advanced technology.”

“Artificial Intelligence?” asked Elsbet, suddenly on edge.

“No. Not intelligent as such, but very sophisticated.”

“How could she possibly have access to a device that could defeat your security?” asked Kwame.

“We’re not sure.”

“Perhaps something left behind by another species…?” asked Iokan.

“We don’t think so.”

“Are you certain?”

“We’re still looking into it,” I said.

“What about the device?” I asked.

“The what?”

“The one that let you get past our security. The one you were hiding in the remote for your screenplayer.”

“Oh, so you found it then,” said Liss with a scowl.

“Was that kind of device common on your world?”

“There was too much of that kind of crap.”

“So it was a common device?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay…”

“I meant there was too much crap from the superbrains.”

“Superbrains?”

“Look, lots of people had powers. Some of them, it was being clever. Too clever. A lot of them went mad. That’s what was wrong with the world. They built all this amazing stuff but then one of them would do something like wipe out all the wheat and rice so they could find out if people could eat some horrible crap they made from rocks, or invent some healing gloop that ended up eating people and mashing them together into one great big blob, or try and stop the hurricanes and give us a winter that lasted three years instead…”