Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

I opened my eyes. Was it always the same? Was it always like this? Mountains of human remains on every world?

I found my pad and pulled images up on the wall. The orbital surveys of Iokan’s dead world had reminded me of another, and I sought out the latest pictures of my own all-but-perished Earth.

There was a ship from the Refugee Service in orbit, listening in for appeals from the last few survivors, appeals that no longer came. We knew they were hiding in bunkers, especially in the great military cavern at Cheyenne Mountain, wearing uniforms of a country that no longer existed. There was only a tiny hope they would respond to our offer to save them, but still, we listened. And as well as listening, we watched, and those images were available for anyone to see.

The widest view of the planet seemed almost normal. But it took only a short zoom to see too much cloud cover, the lines of continents shrouded and barely visible. I stripped the clouds away, but the shroud remained. It wasn’t a normal cloud. It was ash, spreading from the vast volcanic inferno of Yellowstone. A zoom into what was once a national park revealed only a dull glow of fiery red beneath the ash-storm. It had been erupting for forty years, and might go on for centuries more.

I spun the globe away, to where the ash clouds thinned out and shorelines broke through the haze. Across the Atlantic, to Europe, to Britain, to my own long-dead nation. I pushed in through the clouds to find my home town, not so vast as the Zumazscartan capital, and long since perished. Snow seemed to cover the towers and roads and houses, or perhaps it was ash falling from distant Yellowstone.

There were no corpses. It had all happened too long ago for that, and even if the dead had still lain in the streets, the ash or snow or whatever-it-was would have concealed them. I couldn’t find any of the places I had known; not the house we lived in, not the hospital we went to in the last days, nor even the airport from where I had been evacuated. So many of the buildings were in ruins, so many skyscrapers fallen and smashed into rubble, so much of the city covered in a grey-white blanket, that I could connect none of it with my childhood memories.

And I could not see my parents’ graves. Not that they had single burial places. They went into a mass grave with all the others who died in the region, and even that was hard to find until I invoked a layer of geographic information that tagged every significant site. When I did, all I found was yet another featureless plain of ash or snow or something, with no sign that tens of thousands of human beings had their last resting place there.

I pulled out, back away from the city, sliding the image up to hundreds of kilometres in orbit, and saw something I’d never spotted before. Something that had to be new.

Far to the north of Scotland, ice was creeping ever further south from the Arctic. Iceland stood in its path, and broke the line of advance, but the wall of ice was pushing up the beaches and turning into a glacier. I checked the timestamp: this was supposed to be summer . I pulled the timeslider back six months and watched as the glacier rushed across the island, burying the coastal plain that used to be Reykjavik. I dragged the image back to Britain and saw the edge of the ice cap touching Cape Wrath. Estimates accompanying the images gave Britain no more than twenty years before it, too, would be covered by glaciers, and the towns and cities I remembered, everything I had been taught about in the heritage classes I had to attend while growing up on Hub, would be scraped away from the surface of the world. Never to be seen again.

It was too much. I wiped the image from my wall and lay back down.

Pew interrupted my reverie, half an hour before his session was due. I’d planned a slow, careful start to his PTSD therapy, taking him gently through the abuse he’d suffered, slowly desensitising him to the memories until they no longer caused distress. But he thumped on the door, in no mood for therapy. I brought the lights up and let him in.

“Is something the matter, Pew?” I asked.

“Did you know?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“The news! About the Soo!”

“I haven’t heard anything. Did something happen to them?”

“No! It was what you did!”

“What I did?”

“I mean the IU — look.”

He snatched a pad up, patched into the picture wall and rifled through a newsfeed to find a small notice, buried beneath all the stories about reconstruction after the attack and the announcement of the ICT.

Hub Chronicle

HD y276.m9.w1.d1

14:56

Diplomatic Service Admits Partial Responsibility For Extinction

In a report issued today, the Diplomatic Service of the Interversal Union has accepted partial blame for the extinction of the Pu species, while maintaining that the bulk of responsibility lies with the Soo species who evolved on the same world and enslaved the Pu.

The Diplomatic Service identified a number of faults in their oversight of Soo efforts to preserve a nucleus of the Pu species, including a naive willingness to accept Soo assurances at face value.

The report finds these failings to be institutional in nature and recommends that the officials who determined policy should be subject to disciplinary hearings. However, many are now retired from the Diplomatic Service and have returned to their home universes, where any action taken against them may contravene local laws.

Kast Khraghner, Diplomatic Service Contact Director, said: “While we cannot turn back the clock and reverse this appalling disaster, it is nevertheless something we have learned from. Our future dealings in similar situations will be guided by the recommendations made in this report.”

The Pu species is now represented by only one survivor, whose anonymity is protected by law.

“I see,” I said.

“How can they do this?” he asked.

“Have you read the full report?”

“No! I can’t even find it!”

“Hm…” I turned to the screen and started a search, but swiftly encountered an apologetic icon asking me to try again later. “Well, it’s probably out there somewhere but you might have to wait a bit. You know what things have been like with the dataflow.”

“But—”

“Pew. I wouldn’t rush to judgement until you’ve read the actual report. News reports aren’t always the best guide to what really happened.”

“But they’re not going to do anything!”

“We don’t know that.”

“They’re not even prosecuting anyone!”

“They said it’s difficult, but—”

“What about the Soo? Are they going to do anything about them?”

“I don’t know. You have to wait for the report.”

“It doesn’t even exist. Does it?”

This was more like an accusation, and a very sudden bitterness directed against me.

“Why do you say that, Pew?”

“Nobody’s even talking about it! Look at the comments!” I did — and the list was very poorly populated for something this important. Just a couple of the usual complainers. “It’s because they released it on the same day as the ICT announcement, isn’t it?”

I checked the date — he was right. “Well, that would draw attention elsewhere,” I agreed.

“See? That’s what they want! They put the story out on the one day nobody’s going to notice, and hid the report so no one can find out who was responsible!”

Sad to say, some of his accusations were all too possible. Hiding embarrassing news by releasing it at the same time as a bigger story is a tactic as old as media itself. But Pew was constructing a conspiracy theory, which would do him far more harm in the long run.