Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“I might have known you’d come to say goodbye,” she muttered.

“The least I could do,” he said. “But I don’t think you’ll be gone long.”

“Hah! Watch me!” She turned her back on him and boarded the bus. Iokan lingered patiently. Olivia did not. She came back to the door and demanded: “Where’s the bloody driver? Pilot? Whatever they’re supposed to be called…”

“I’ll go and look, shall I?”

“Yeh. Go on. Have a look. I’ll sit here.”

Iokan went back and almost walked into Veofol, who had a cross look on his face to match his determined march to the bus.

“Where’s the driver?”

“I’m the driver.”

“ You’re the driver?”

“The usual drivers are off site. We have to keep one qualified driver here in case of emergencies, and that’s Satna in security. Which leaves me.”

“You’re qualified to fly one of these?”

“It’s not flying. It’s driving. And yes, I am qualified.”

“I’m impressed.”

“The computer does most of the work. It’s not that impressive. Don’t tell me you’re coming along as well?”

“No. Just here to see you off.”

“Well. Thanks. I’m sure Olivia appreciates it.” Iokan chuckled but Veofol didn’t smile. “I’m serious. It’ll make it easier to bring her back if she thinks someone cares whether or not she’s here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Has anything I’ve done… helped?”

Veofol paused on the steps of the bus. “At least you’re trying.”

Iokan nodded.

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours. We can talk about it then.”

“Yes. I’d like to.”

“Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

Veofol boarded to a grumpy “about bloody time you damned elf!” from Olivia. The door slid shut, an automated voice warned people to stand clear, and Iokan dutifully backed off as it rose up into the sky.

As we tucked into steaming chunks of rolled up mammoth meat flavoured with krill paste, I found the evening growing easier to bear. He was leaving for another world, and wouldn’t be coming back. Somehow I skipped the usual stage of distraught pleading. Had I actually loved him? I felt fond of him. He was still funny, in his own way, making little linguistic jokes and waiting while my translation system caught up. But I didn’t love him.

“It’s strange,” I said.

“No, really, it’s completely genuine!” he assured me.

“Hm?”

“The meat comes in every week. It’s frozen but it’s still the real thing.”

“I didn’t mean that…”

“They don’t bring in the real delicacies, though. Some people swear by the mammoth penis stew back home.”

I choked, then very carefully finished chewing and swallowing.

“This isn’t…?”

He smiled. “No, of course not. Penis is too expensive.”

“Anyway, that’s not what I meant. I mean I feel strange. I ought to be angry. I ought to be making a scene. I thought it would be terrible, if this happened…”

He looked hurt. “Oh.”

“I didn’t mean it that way! I meant…”

“You feel like you dropped the tent.”

“What tent?

“A tent you were carrying through winter drifts that wasn’t even yours. And you didn’t feel the weight until the straps broke and it fell into the snow. You look back, and it’s a broken thing with cracked poles and worn hides. You were only carrying it because you needed shelter in case the blizzard came. But there was no blizzard. And once it’s gone, it’s easy to get through the snow by yourself.”

“That’s really… accurate.”

“It’s from a poem. You can look it up.”

“I will. I wish it was that easy for everyone.”

“Your patients, I suppose?”

“Yeah. Actually, let me look at that poem…”

I fished in my bag for a small pad, and searched.

“It’s called—” he said.

“No, don’t tell me, let me see if I can… huh.”

“You might find it under my name. I, uh, translated it into Interversal.”

“I can’t find anything.”

He sighed. “Try The Tents of Love and Ice , it’ll be in the collection.”

“No, I mean everything’s gone…” The data connection had dropped. I’d seen this kind of thing happen in distant therapy centres where we depended on a local retransmitter, but never in Hub Metro. I looked up and saw people all over the restaurant fumbling with devices and putting hands to their ears as if straining to hear something. I checked my own implant and found myself cut off from all outside services.

“It can’t be everyone…” said Bell, shaking his watch and finding that he, too, was cut off.

“It’s probably a local failure,” I said.

Every light in the restaurant went off. People gasped. The lights flickered back on. Then off again. The gasps were deeper. No one knew what to make of it.

The room jumped. Plates scattered. Glasses splashed wine and fell. People stumbled. I grabbed the table to steady myself.

“Earthquake…?” said Bell, hardly believing it.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. My crisis training pushed aside all thoughts of the impossibility of tremors in Hub Metro: all I knew at that moment was that the most dangerous place during an earthquake is inside a building. I grabbed Bell’s hand and we ran for the door.

The lobby was full of people with much the same idea, and I mistook the orange glow on their faces for a fire still burning in a stone hearth. But the light came through the glass frontage, and as we were carried along the human stream to the doors, we saw what was lighting us up, and what had made the ground shake: a vast, mangled twist of metal and ceramic that had crashed down from the sky and was scorching trees and grass and people in the park opposite the restaurant.

“Oh no. No…” said Bell, distraught by the wreckage. But I was driven by rigid, trained impulses for survival: if one had crashed, what of the others? I looked up.

Above the orange glow, the sky was alive with the flash and thunder of an awesome lightning storm, sudden sheets of blue making the clouds burst and glow, forks cracking through the air from cloud to cloud and down to hit the tops of buildings, exploding their lightning conductors in showers of sparks.

And below the lightning, the aircraft suffered. A small flyer struggled to stay in the air. The driver did his or her best as it was punched across the sky by an invisible fist. It wasn’t just the datastreams to our devices that were down: the computers that made gravity-assisted flight easy had failed. Everything that could fly was coming back to earth.

Liss snapped awake. The romantic adventures of Ellera had put her to sleep with their familiarity, but another sound made her jump. Something at the edge of her hearing. Something that triggered old instincts.

She burst out of her room and ran down the stairs to find Iokan in the common room.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

“I didn’t hear anything…”

She heard something else that made her look up. “It’s outside.”

She ran out of the building with Iokan behind her.

“Shit…” she muttered as she looked in the direction of Hub Metro, and saw the lightning storm like a cap over the city, spreading outwards and touching the clouds over their own heads. Thunder rumbled and crashed over them as forks of lightning spread a web of light across the sky.

Iokan followed her out, and looked up. “Ancients…”

“Anyone you know?”

He shook his head. “They never came like this …”

A low thud drew their attention towards the dark horizon — and a sudden burst of flame in the canopy, followed by smoke.