The Last Little Piece of Earth

Being the last man on Earth was not all that I would have expected it to be. For one, Earth is way smaller than you probably remember it being. Technically speaking, Earth is still the same size. If you were to spread out an enormous net and drag it through the solar system several million times, picking up every last speck of dust that could be called Earth, it would be roughly the size that you probably have in your head.

For all practical purposes though, the Earth, the biggest chunk of rock that can still reasonably claim the title that the entire planet once held is about thew size of… well, try this, put your arms straight out at your sides, spin around like you are doing that whole “the hills are alive with the sound of music” thing. It’s about big enough to do that, and only feel slightly nervous about falling off the edge.

Don’t ask me how I know that.

It’s not a lot of space, but it’s home. That last bit needs sarcasm font, you probably don’t know me well enough to get the sarcasm there. Yes, this is one of those stories where it is not entirely clear who the first-person narrator would even be talking to. You are dead. Everybody’s dead. On the bright side, you have either been dead for a very long time, or you are likely one of the lucky few who were instantly incinerated when the world ended.

Again, most of the world. All but this little bit.

You would be amazed by the view that you are afforded when you are floating through space on a little chunk of rock while inexplicably not dying from radiation or the lack of atmosphere. You would seriously not get over it.

Okay, I briefly got over it, but then I leaned over the edge of my ceaselessly falling piece of rubble and I got to check out the view on the other side. That’s it, just rotate to the opposite side of the rock every couple days, weeks, hours, I dunno, time is not one of my strong suits at the moment, but anyway, climb over to the other side of this remnant of planet-hood every now and again, and you will be in near continual awe.

It’s not all awe-inspiring views, though.

Actually, If I’m being entirely frank, it is mostly awe-inspiring views. If the views inspired anything less than their current levels of awe than I might start noticing the complete lack of literally anything else.

No food.

No water.

No companionship.

Not anymore.

There is very little in the way of things to do. I find myself sketching in the dust, pacing back and forth, doing that thing that I requested you not to ask me about earlier. Mostly it’s just thinking. Sometimes thinking in the form of talking to myself. Something like this:

“Can you believe that the world ended?” I would say.

“I mean, kind of, all available evidence points that way. Besides, didn’t it really end a long time ago.” I would respond.

“Are we really going to get into that again?” I would ask, clearly annoyed at myself.

“It’s not as though we ever lived on a world that hadn’t ended.” I would shoot back, that little shit.

“The world ended long before we were born. By the time we came around the oceans weren’t even boiling anymore. From our perspective, the world was that deserted wasteland that our ancestors handed down to us.” I would volunteer.

A good point really, but here I am taking sides.

It was a good point, though. What is the end of the world to a generation of people who lived in the world left behind by the most recent apocalypse?

By all rights, none of us should have been able to survive on that not quite ended Earth, and not only did we survive, we… well, no… we never thrived, not even particularly close, we actually really did just survive. Nothing more, and often quite a bit less. It almost certainly would have been a kinder fate for the Earth to have properly ended before I was born, rather than the half-assed ending that my great great whatever not so great grandparents ushered us all into.

The day that big fucking chunk of rock, like considerably larger than this one, smacked into that discarded gym sock of a planet that we called home was a mercy killing. The end of something that should have strongly considered ending itself.

That leaves me here, as I’ve said, floating on a particularly barren rock in a very lovely portion of the galaxy, if I do say so myself.

It turns out that one of the only redeeming aspects of being birthed onto a mostly dead planet is that being constantly on the verge of starving to death most of your life is probably the perfect training for spending your last days floating through space on a glorified boulder. There’s not much to subsist on, nothing actually, but that had always been the case.

So, now that we’ve kind of settled into things, I have a confession to make. I may not have come by my title of last man on Earth by the most honorable of means. There was this other guy. There was this other guy named Tom.

Tom was a dick.

Granted when two people are sharing a few square feet of rock it is pretty hard not to be a dick, but trust me, this wasn’t a situational thing, Tom was just like that. Have you ever known someone who just had a pathological need to be the center of attention? That was Tom. If Tom wasn’t regaling you with every last stray thought that passed through his brain, he was speaking authoritatively on the more well-established domesticated thoughts that had long ago taken up residence in that same brain.

One of the more favored domesticated thoughts, the kind of thought that greeted you at the door and had learned that pissing on the floor was a bad idea, was Tom’s concern that I know that this whole thing was my fault. If I had been a better person, none of this would have happened. If it weren’t for Tom, we wouldn’t even have our sacred few square feet. Tom, far from being the dick that I saw him as, was in fact the holiest man on Earth. Even with the talent pool as reduced as it was, that seemed like a pretty presumptuous thing for him to say, and say it he did.

Frequently.

Anyway, this wasn’t a one-off thing, Tom would go on for days, weeks, minutes about how he thought that this was all God’s wrath on the wicked, like me, not taking into account that God had already gotten all of that out of his system a long time ago, of course. If killing billions of people with fire, disease, and all that other stuff wasn’t the end game, this kind of seemed anticlimactic. But could Tom shut up about it? No, Tom could not. Tom was a dick. You might have heard.

There was this really big book that I heard about one time, Tom was a fan, and there was a story right at the beginning of it, where there were two of the very first people who ever existed, and one of them picked up a big rock and bludgeoned the other one to death.

Heck of a start to the whole human being thing.

Like, you look around and humanity isn’t really a thing yet, but before it has even been meaningfully established, you already have a guy who is pretty sure that there is at least one too many people.

I guess what I’m saying is… I killed Tom.

It seemed like a fitting bookend with that other story.

Floating along in the infinite abyss of space is lonely, but it is greatly improved by the absence of Tom.

I can stretch out a bit.

The vibe is really more peaceful than lonely.

This did have one small but unfortunate side-effect. When I chucked Tom off our rock, we were still falling at a fairly consistent speed, and in roughly the same direction, so if you look right there, yeah there, over my right shoulder, that blobby thing out there, that’s Tom. He’s kind of just hanging around, blessedly silent, but still mocking me.

The sky has gotten a little bit smaller, at least for a while, he’ll eventually be gone.

There was this other book, it was a much smaller book, and it didn’t sell nearly as many copies as the big book, but it was about a much bigger book that was pretty much the best-selling book ever, and it had these two guys who were stranded in the vacuum of space and were miraculously saved by a magic spaceship.

Neither one of those guys was a very good guy, and they somehow managed to not kill each other. Not that I’m feeling judged or anything.

I sometimes dream of being rescued by a magic spaceship.

Neither one of those guys was as big a dick as Tom.

Speaking of books, it’s kind of a miracle that while ninety-nine percent of all life on Earth died during that first apocalypse, we still managed to retain a surprisingly large number of libraries. There are no libraries now, not even cute little boxes on poles with free books in them that were never real libraries at all. I could go for a library right now, even a little fake library on a pole.

One of the annoying things about Tom was that he never really saw any need for libraries. He was super into that big book that I was talking about earlier and would occasionally read other books that were about that big book but he didn’t have anything but vitriol for other books. He didn’t seem to like stories, which is really weird to me.

I really did not get Tom.

There was another little book, actually even littler than the last one I was talking about. It was about a kid who lived on a rock kind of like mine or maybe more like that one that killed the Earth, he didn’t have a Tom, but what he did have was a plant. The plant actually was kind of a dick, but the kid loved it. I’m not sure that I get this kid either. One day, some space birds came by and flew him to another planet. I could really go for some space birds.

The book was mostly about how silly adults are, and as an adult as well as a person who was raised as a child on a planet decimated by silly adults, it’s hard not to agree with it.

Tom was a very silly adult.

Tom was always very very concerned about the blood-thirsty mutants that lived on the hill. It turned out that before we ended up together on this rock, that Tom had the strong opinion that all of life’s problems really came down to the blood thirsty mutants on the hill.

I never really got where he was coming from with that one. Were there mutants on the hill? Yes, but you could hardly blame someone for being a mutant when you live in an irradiated wasteland.

An irradiated wasteland with libraries, but still.

I’m actually surprised we didn’t have more mutants, on the hill or otherwise. As far as the blood-thirsty thing goes, everyone was thirsty, it was one of the main defining characteristics of living things by that point. I don’t know if the thirst thing had anything to do with blood, but I tend to think that they were just regular thirsty, and even if they weren’t, can you really blame them?

Tom was big on making people into scapegoats. I’m not exactly sure what goats are, they seemed to be some kind of horned animal, but in that big book of his there was this thing where you would take all of the bad things and make it a goat’s fault. That seems like a reasonable idea, much better than going around calling people blood-thirsty mutants.

Far from being satisfied with being openly anti-blood-thirsty mutant himself, Tom was the kind of guy who needed to rile everyone else up to hate their supposedly blood-thirsty mutant neighbors as well.

No food? It was the blood-thirsty mutants at fault.

Everyone breaks out into fresh radiation pustules? You guessed it, blood-thirsty mutants.

The point is this, for some people it doesn’t matter how bad something is, they are only capable of making it worse because it doesn’t matter how bad things actually are. What really matters is that things are slightly better for them than they are for other people. Tom may have been a miserable son of a bitch, but if he could make things measurably worse for some outsiders, then that meant that he was winning.

Winning at what?

Who the hell knows.

Who’s winning now, slowly drifting into the nothingness of space, blob-Tom?

If anyone is winning, it’s me, and I am very much not winning.

I’m the last one to leave, and there aren’t even any lights to turn out. The lights I have now are beyond my ability to turn out anyway or they’ve already gone out and just haven’t let me know about it yet.

It’s strange to stare at the vast array of stars laid out before and think that I could be staring at a graveyard, and I would never know about it.

There were books in the libraries, both fiction and non-fiction, that pictured us traveling among these stars. We apparently got out here at one point or another, but we never got much further than I am now. Didn’t meet any of our neighbors. Didn’t set foot on another planet. People didn’t take camping trips to the moon or anything neat like that, but we got out here which is still pretty cool.

It makes you wonder what we could have done with ourselves if we had leaned more into that sort of thing and less of the destroying the world, drag everyone down and give in to our worst impulses Tom type stuff. We might still have ended up where I am today, it’s still pretty hard to dodge a giant space rock that resulted in the world exploding, but maybe we would have come up with something, some big space shield or at least an evacuation plan or something.

I don’t know, I guess I just feel like we could have done better. Been more than our worst urges. I say this as someone who has very recently murdered someone, so the moral high ground avoids me every bit as much as the physical high ground, or most any ground at all. Reflection would seem to be a side-effect of going from a human being to the sum total of humanity.

If I were to get scooped up by a magic alien spaceship or flown to a new world by a flock of space birds, what would they think of the human race when I told them about it. Yes, we were clearly a bunch of idiots who destroyed ourselves long before an asteroid or whatever came along and finished us off. Telling them that part would be embarrassing, but we weren’t all bad.

Spending my life having little to do but read and starve I’ve heard from plenty of the voices that were calling us to be better. That big book that justified Tom being so angry all of the time even had more than a few scraps of that. We just refused to listen to those voices, or enough of us did that it ultimately didn’t make a difference.

What would be the legacy of the human race, you know, if there was any reason to believe that the human race would have any legacy at all? As I sit on this crumbling remnant of my planet, I would like to think that something beautiful would find its way into the hands or tentacles or whatever of a species that we never met. I wish that culture would get entirely the wrong idea about us. That maybe something excellent had been tragically wiped out when we were destroyed. That the universe would have been a better place with us in it someday. That we could have been friends. That something in us might have even inspired them to do better.

There will be no legacy for the human race, and maybe that was the kindest end that we could have hoped for. No one whooping and cheering at our demise because we never truly left a mark in the cosmos at all. We could be forgotten, and no one would ever need to know what we were.

Thinking of all the people who did unspeakable things in their lives for personal gain, but also for the possibility that we would remember them when they are gone, and how there will soon be no people to speak about them at all. There’s already no one left to listen.

So, here I sit, the repository of all things human. I know everything there is to know about the human race and its history because anything that I don’t know, that I never learned or have managed to forget, might as well have never happened.

As this shard of the planet is the last little piece of Earth, so am I. Maybe as I drift here, waiting to die, I can give humanity an opportunity to pass away with dignity.

Tom, as much as you don’t deserve it, I’m sorry.

I don’t think that you were doing your best with the information that was available to you, but I didn’t do any better in the end. I gave in to the impulse that much better people than me had repressed all throughout history because they thought that being the actual better person would do more good than getting rid of the bad ones.

There is no “greater good” to serve anymore, but I still dishonored the memory, or even lack of memory, of all those people, those people that I wish that we could have been known for if there was anyone else out there to know us.

I’m sorry, but yes, probably more to them than you, Tom.

The ground below me is starting to give way, and it turns out that dehydration, starvation, and madness aren’t going to have the notoriety of ending me. With the ground goes the inexplicable bubble of air that was sustaining me and I’m floating alone, no longer tethered to Earth, no longer sustained by it.

Only moments left.

My last thoughts.

A flock of space birds.

A magic spaceship.

Huh.

What were the chances of that?