Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

A chime at the door announced the arrival of Iokan’s chakchuk. I brought it to him as he watched the news roll on. He let it sit before him until I pressed pause.

“From what we gather, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “They were only reporting the most sensational incidents. A lot of individuals were dying by themselves as well.”

“Yes,” said Iokan, his attention far away in time.

“There’s a Department Zero document from this date…” I brought it up. “What can you tell me?”

He gulped back his chakchuk and rubbed his eyes. After a moment to gather himself, he looked back up at the screen.

“I remember this. They managed to stop a man from killing himself. He was in a pharmacy, picking up a prescription. He was normal until they handed over the pills, and then he took them all at once. His stomach was pumped and we interviewed him afterwards. It says there’s an artist’s impression of what he saw…?”

“Yes,” I said, and brought up the next page. A pastel-style sketch of a glowing light: pure white in the middle with a rainbow of refraction around the edges. Subtle shades of polygonal forms at the centre.

Iokan gasped. “That’s them. It’s one of… them.” A chime came in my ear; my pad showed a suddenly high pulse rate for Iokan. A smile of joy twitched around the edge of his mouth. Then he remembered his surroundings, and reached for his mug to drink. His pulse came back down.

“There’s a reference to another casefile,” I said. “It’s dated about thirteen years earlier. Your name’s on it.”

He nodded. “I think I told you before. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen them. We found an ancient machine that made them, and there was an Antecessor trapped inside the system. My commander set it free. When they cross-referenced it with what the man from the pharmacy saw… well, that’s why I was brought onto the investigative team.”

“Let’s move on. We have some video here. Can you talk me through it?”

He didn’t look at the screen. “Why are we doing this?”

“Because I think you need to be reminded of what happened on your world.”

“I know what happened on my world.”

“Would you prefer to come back to it another day?”

It wasn’t in his nature to admit to weakness. “No. Let’s go on.”

I called up a video. It had been taken through a specialised camera and carried telemetry of various kinds. It appeared to have a high placement, on a building of some kind, but not so high as the skytowers of the city it swept across.

“This is a test I asked for,” said Iokan. “We needed a way to make them visible…”

A green light flashed in one corner, and a filter was imposed on the view. The camera swung again to regain a wide shot of the city.

The sky was full of glowing lights: Antecessors floating above the skyline.

“They can bend light around them. But they can’t hide the higher energy stuff quite as well, so there’s some x-ray leakage. This is us looking for them.”

“How did Department Zero react?”

“We were shocked. There were so many ways we could have been attacked… so many ways we had been attacked. We thought it would be the interversal powers again. Finding out it was the Antecessors instead was terrifying. Some people wanted to give up there and then…”

“Did you?”

“No. I wish I had.”

“Why?”

He looked at me, incredulous that I had not already guessed. “Because then I’d be with them.”

“How did you feel?”

He paused, reflecting. “I had a family.”

“Szilmar and Ghiorghiu. Your wife and son.”

“Yes. They’re safe now.”

“But you didn’t think so then.”

“No.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to get them. D0 headquarters was safe. We had an EM cage around the building that could stop them getting in.”

“How old was your son?”

“Less than a year.”

“Had you been with Szilmar long?”

He shook his head. “A couple of years. We knew each other when we were younger, but we didn’t click until… well. Until I wasn’t an investigator any more.”

“So… you brought them back to Department Zero headquarters.”

“Yes. By then there was a cluster of them around the building. We parked on the roof and ran for the door… I made it there but she stumbled… she had to turn round to get up. And she was suddenly… happy. I was calling her in but she walked to the edge… I had to drag her inside. She begged me to let her jump…”

He finished the last of his drink, unnerved.

“Ghiorghiu saw them as well. He just shut down. Didn’t cry. Didn’t play. Didn’t sleep. The doctor had to feed him through tubes… it was like he was waiting.”

“And Szilmar?”

“We had to restrain her.”

“How did you feel?”

He looked down at his empty mug and wiped his eyes. “As though my heart had been ripped out.”

“How did you feel about the Antecessors?”

“I hated them.” He shook his head, mourning his foolishness. “I didn’t understand…”

“How do you feel now?”

“I…” He struggled between memory and later conviction.

“Okay. Let’s keep moving. I’ve got some records here of the response to the Antecessors.”

He looked up at the screen, relieved. A scatter of pages came up.

“Can you join the dots for me?” I asked.

“Okay…” He stood up, went to the screen and pulled a group of reports together. “These are observations of Antecessor behaviour. Here’s the analysis… there was information going from the Antecessors to the people who saw them. Transmitted visually, somehow. These are records of brain activity from a volunteer: she saw more than just the Antecessor, she saw… something amazing.”

He smiled, then turned to a surveillance video, showing an Antecessor floating above a corpse in the street. “And they were doing something to people’s minds as they died. We couldn’t see the process, it was too fast… but two Antecessors would leave the body behind. The theory was that it was a kind of reproduction.”

The process really was fast; just a flash of x-rays, and then there were two.

“And here’s our response…” He pushed the other materials aside and gathered up a series of reports. “Lots of attempts to communicate. Signals in every frequency. Appeals on the media. Billboards, even. Nothing worked. But there was a cluster around D0 headquarters, so they knew who we were. In the end, we sent someone out to talk to them.”

“That was suicide, surely?”

“Yes. But we didn’t have a lot of time. You see here?” He pulled up a graph. “This shows how long we had left.” He point out a series of lines running across the diagram. “That’s the level of population needed to sustain cities. That’s how many we needed just to keep civilisation going. That’s how many we needed to avoid extinction.”

“It would have taken a few years, then.”

“At the rate they were going then. But we expected them to speed up. So we sent out a man with the best psych record we could find, and gave him a message. Just that we needed to talk to them. He killed himself. But one of them came to us an hour later.”

He tapped a video. One of the camera feeds showed the sudden appearance of an Antecessor in visible wavelengths. The air about it shimmered with pressure waves; and text appeared on the screen. Analogue Audio (language): Please state your concern.

“We told it they were killing us, and causing unnecessary suffering. It said they didn’t want to hurt anyone, they only wanted to take us to a new stage of being. We begged them to postpone, order a truce, anything. It said they would scale back their efforts and try to make the transition easier. We just wanted time to find a way to stop them. We thought they’d bought it. We thought it might be over…” he trailed off into silence.