Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

He turned and left, pulling the door shut behind him.

I stopped the movie. “That’s it. It goes in a loop. The dream persona keeps sitting there and eventually they bring the other prisoner in again.”

Kwame sat shaking in the easy chair. “That is not my wife.”

“Do you recognise him at all…?”

“He is a stranger to me.”

“Are you certain?”

He snapped: “I do not have sex with men!” The denial was vehement, absolute, and revealing. It hung in the air for a moment before I replied.

“I didn’t ask that question.”

“This is a farce. You have taken some scene from a television programme, or from something else!”

“Okay, Kwame, if you don’t want to discuss it now, I can understand that. But I can assure you that was your dream. Those memories are in your head. It may be that your trauma predates the nuclear war—”

“It does not! Those are not my memories! I did not do those things!”

“We can talk about this next time.”

“There will not be a next time.”

He stormed out, and I called Veofol to monitor him. He contacted his legal counsel and complained about our methods, but got nothing other than a promise to investigate which I could answer simply by telling his lawyer the truth, so long as it remained privileged: his dream was real, but we could no longer say the same about any of his other memories.

I was still thinking about Bell and his cryptic message when it came time for Iokan’s next session. In the minute before he arrived, I sent an interversal message back to Bell, regardless of the cost. Where had he been? Was it a nice holiday? What was he up to? Please send me a message and let me know. Love, Asha.

Iokan was his usual happy-go-lucky self, the opposite to my fretfulness. He whistled his way onto an easy chair in my office, gathering up his robe and seeming keen to begin therapy. Which probably meant he’d thought of a way to avoid it. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, in excellent Interversal.

“What about?” I asked.

“The Antecessors.”

“You surprise me, Iokan.”

He ignored the gentle sarcasm. “I think I know what happened.”

“Really? You know why the genocide happened?”

“Oh, I knew that . No, I’ve figured out why they were different when they came back.”

So he’d been having theological thoughts. Hopefully this was a sign of theological doubts. “How exactly were they different?” I asked.

“Well, they never seemed especially… compassionate, if you know what I mean. They changed the world to their liking and didn’t let anything get in their way…”

“Like animals, for example.”

“Exactly! They changed everything to suit them, nothing like the way you run this planet. They wouldn’t have thought twice about getting rid of the native species and adding their own instead. But when they came back, they weren’t like that at all. They gave us an option. They gave us a chance to say no.”

“Did anyone want to say no?”

“Of course not. They were offering an eternity in heaven, with them! Who’d refuse that?”

“I thought you said you refused?”

“I… avoided them. I thought they were the way they used to be. But finally they found me and showed me the truth.”

“As you’ve said. But you were saying you’ve realised why they had a change of heart?”

“They went into space!”

“Okay…”

“No, think about it. Why do we go to other universes? Because the stars are so far away! No one can get past lightspeed. We can see there are other species out there on some worlds, but they’re hundreds, thousands of light years away, and we can never reach them. But what if you were made of light? Like the Antecessors? Light can travel at lightspeed, it has to! And you wouldn’t have to experience all those light years, you’d feel like you travelled the distance almost in an instant! You understand relativity, yes?”

“I understand the basic principle.”

“So they disappeared for three thousand years. Imagine what they might have found! There must be amazing things out there… beautiful things. Divine things.”

“But this is just speculation…”

“Something must have happened. It must have!”

“Iokan… have you been having doubts?”

“Doubts?”

“About the Antecessors.”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why are you trying to figure out how they became good?”

“I’m just trying to understand them better.”

“You didn’t seem this concerned until recently. Are you sure you haven’t had doubts…?”

He seemed at a loss to explain things to me. “Well, you see, it’s like…” he sighed. “You’re not going to believe me unless I explain, are you?”

“I’m finding it difficult, yes.”

“Part of my job — yes, that job, the secret job — was to investigate them.”

“I see.”

“Every country in the world had a unit dedicated to investigating them, either to find things we could use, or to make the relics safe…”

“And that was what you did, after you finished with special forces?”

“Not straight away, they put me in their own special forces unit to begin with, just for a probationary period, and then I had to go back to school to pick up all the skills I needed, but then, yes, I was an investigator.”

“What was the organisation called?”

“Do you really need to know?”

“It helps to put a name to things.”

“All right, I suppose if you have to put a label on a file… D0”

“That’s it? Dee-Oh?”

“That’s enough.”

“And this organisation investigated the Antecessors?”

“That’s right.”

“Can you give me any examples?”

He sighed. I was exasperating him. “Well… well, there was the time we found an ancient bodyformer.”

“Which is…?”

“It was a device that created human bodies. Copied them, either with the personality intact or with some other mind. And, as sometimes happens with that kind of thing, it was set off accidentally and made copies of the investigative team.”

“So you didn’t work alone?”

“There were three people in each team — me, Feren, Soferenata. We got trapped in there when the machine made copies of us, and of course everyone thought they were the real ones. We got out in the end, but the copies made a complete mess of things on the outside. They went off on another investigation and screwed up because, well, they weren’t exactly perfect copies.” He shook his head. “We had to destroy them.”

“You killed them?”

“They planted a bomb in D0 headquarters and threatened to set it off unless someone explained what was going on. They thought they were in a parallel universe.” He smiled sadly. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“And was this typical of your encounters with Antecessor technology?”

“Some things were worse. Most of the time we only found trinkets. But yeah, that kind of thing happened a lot.”

“I can see why you were having some trouble reconciling the two sets of experiences — the Antecessors you investigated and the ones you met later.”

“I’m not having doubts.”

“But you need more justification?”

“I — well, what I need — it’s hard to explain…” I waited for him to try. “Something happened to them. I don’t need to know why…”

“But it helps.”

He sighed. “They’re good. That’s the important thing. They did what was best for us. I’m certain of that …”

His hypothesis was clearly wishful thinking to shore up his beliefs. But there was a loose end to the story that, if pulled on, might help to unravel it. “Can I ask a question?”