A Few Notes from the End of the World

Call me Rat-man. I doubt that I would recognize the sound of my true name were I to hear it, those strange puffs of air that conjure up the world. Nothing remains save the Rat-man’s mind (however tainted) that is its own place and contains the world entire. I am the last voice; this is the last story, and I am sorry that there are no better words than mine to tell it.

Once upon a time, there was a very clever species called Homo sapiens. At first they lived in caves, but they were so clever that they learned how to make tools and light fires. Soon they evolved: they left their caves and grew crops from seeds and kept animals for food. They built marvelous cities. They developed language and named the world around them. They told stories. They became civilized.

Although Homo sapiens ruled the earth for only a short time, they built many wonderful things. They were especially fond of machines. They built machines that could fly and talk and play games; they built machines that could do all of their work for them so that they had more time to spend with other machines. But, because sapiens allowed their machines do all of their work for them, they forgot how to do all of the clever, good things that had helped them leave their caves in the first place. Sadly, they had not forgotten all the clever, terrible things that they had learned.

One day, some exceptionally clever sapiens made a virus that caused all the other machines stop working: GridKill, they called it. When all of the lights went out, no one knew what to do. They were very afraid.

Apart from being clever, Homo sapiens were also very dangerous when they were afraid.

Next came a brief and terrible war that poisoned the earth and the sky. The sapiens who survived needed food and water, but there wasn’t enough for everyone. Then, the strongest ones used sticks and stones to kill the weaker ones and took their food and water; eventually, some sapiens fled back into their caves, but it was too dark and too cold and they died, one by one, alone.

The End.

I must apologize: this is no way to tell this story to you, although I have no idea who you are, or what. Perhaps you belong to an even cleverer species that has discovered these pages while exploring the ruins of our lifeless world. Sadly, these marks will mean nothing to you. They will be a mystery for your archaeologists to unlock, but there is no Rosetta Stone that will allow them to comprehend a language without referents, and they will put them aside, curious but indecipherable calendar stones.

Or, perhaps you yourself were once human, aeons ago, now devolved to a mute beast with ragged, scrabbling claws and pale eyes, snuffling about in this dank cave for food. For you, my distant future cousin, these pages will hold no mystery at all, although a glimpse of the strange markings on them might spark long unused neurons in your cerebral cortex, a brief and inexplicable flash in a dark corner of your brain.

And if you are God (if God there ever were), as in the beginning, you will hover over the Void, alone once more; there will be no need for words, for you have known the hearts of all your lost creation and foresaw the end of days in their beginning: first a bang, then a whimper. The Word will lodge with you again, and though you never told us what it is, I believe that word is, “Why?” It is the Creature’s question of his Maker, the word that clings to my lips even now that everything is lost, and silence and stony walls are more answer than my heart can bear.

Most likely of all is that no eyes will ever see these pages. No inquisitive alien or slouching humanoid will find them; instead, they will decay, like their author, atoms unhinging from one another and drifting away to other purposes.

Still, I will try. After all, what else is there for me to do but tell my story, send it forth like some castaway of old? This is my message in a bottle, a message from the end of the world, scrawled in darkness and set adrift by one who holds no hope of rescue.

I don’t know that I could even tell you precisely how the world ended: I recall a blinding flash and a tempest unleashed. There is no “how,” or “why” to be told of my survival, my life was not a miracle. I never felt the hand of God, merely the mighty force of His omniabsence. Let us say only that, for a long time I suffered, shivering, starving. I had come to the last of my food: a single rusty can. How many had I opened in my lifetime? Hundreds? Thousands? Now, desperate as I was, gifted with evolutionary miracles of brain and hands, for want of a simple tool I was powerless.

There was a dusty crossroads at the end of all things where an old man tended a small fire in the darkness. I looked at the battered tin, sticky liquid oozing from the rents where I had hammered it with a rock. I looked down at my hands, torn and filthy, then across the valley to a clearing where a lone figure huddled by a smoky fire. I knew then that I would have to kill to survive.

The old man was a fool, I told myself. He deserved whatever he got, sitting there by a fire in plain view of the road. I had learned stealth from watching the rats and roaches that overran the broken cities after the war. I had become a rat, I told myself, a master of the ratly arts of scurrying, hiding, cowering.

I would wait until dark. I picked up a rock, felt the weight of it in my hand, sorry that a soup can should prove harder to open than an old man’s skull.

Perhaps now you are thinking how terrible I am, that this story is not worth the telling. Good riddance, you will say, or you might ask why anyone would want to stay alive in such a world? The answer is all too simple: I clung to life because I feared the darkness, because those grey dawns held at least a little light.

I waited while the dull day faded to black. No stars appeared. The old man lay shrouded in the light of his dying fire. I crawled towards him: patient, stealthy as only a rat can be. Whenever he stirred in his sleep I froze, studying him. I could hear his ragged breathing, see the almost imperceptible motion of the heart-shaped locket—futile talisman against despair—that rested on his sunken chest. This is mercy, I told myself, imagining his troubled dreams erupting in a violent flash as his skull imploded: neural GridKill. Next stop, Oblivion.

He mumbled in his sleep as I raised the rock. He was frail, a skeleton already, blue-veined flesh stretched taut over angular cheekbones, nose jutting sharply from between sunken eye sockets: a scarecrow of a man, but still a man. I cast the rock away and sat watching the old man sleep until the fire was cold and dead and I shivered violently in the cold, ash-choked dawn.

The old man awoke with a start and sat up to face me, little bird-eyes darting back and forth, taking in the emaciated fellow mortal before him.

“Couldn’t do it, huh?”

I shook my head.

“Well, now that you’re here, we can get started.” He rose slowly, wincing from the effort.

“Started with what?”

“Our final stand. Unless you’re still planning on bashing my head in.”

“I’m not going to, but someone else probably will: it’s pretty dangerous to have a fire going out in the open, isn’t it?”

“I want everyone to see it.”

“Why?”

“We’re gonna make soap.”

“You’re insane.”

“Probably. Who can tell anymore?” He squinted at me, “You got something better to do?”

He had me there. “Why soap?”

“Can’t have civilization without soap. We’ll trade it for other things we need.”

“Trade with whom?”

“Other people.”

“What if they just kill us and take our soap.”

“I suppose they could do that.” He crouched down to rekindle the fire. “We’ll eat first.”

“Then we’d be dead.”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“Not really.”

“Besides, if they take our soap there will never be any more. We know the secret…well, I know the secret, and I’ll teach it to you. And you teach me something that you know how to do. We’re going to rebuild the world by rediscovering one secret at a time.”

“I don’t know how to do anything: I was going to murder you in your sleep because I couldn’t open a can, remember?”

“Hell, everyone knows how to do something. What did you do before…”

“I was a failed writer and a successful drinker.”

“Multi-talented, eh? Well, we probably only have use for one of your skills.”

“When do we start making the booze?”

“We need to find you something to write with,” he said.

And so, for a short time, the Rat-man became the Writer, scribe to a mad old man, preserving arcane rites for dubious posterity. We stored up cakes of soap and waited. At night, by the fire, we would sometimes hear screams in the distance. And then, one by one, the travelers came. They approached us warily, sure that the strange scene before them must be a mirage.

There was a man who carried with him a dozen apple seeds. For three of them, we gave him two bars of soap. “I can’t promise that anything will grow,” he said.

But we planted them and nurtured them and made our soap. And still more travelers came. We traded them soap for secrets: how to tan hides and make snares; how to carve and build and sew. We obtained thread and wire, books and food. Some of the travelers decided to stay. There was a man who had memorized seven poems (three by Shakespeare!) and I wrote them down and read them out loud again and again.

One day, a woman came looking for her lost child. “I have nothing to trade,” she said, “but I know a song.”

And so she sang for us a song so bittersweet that the old man wept to hear it, clutching the locket as though it had pierced his heart. It was a song of loss and loneliness comingled with such hope that I almost believed in salvation. When she finished singing, we begged her to stay with us, but she would not. “I must find my son,” she said. “He is lost and alone in the darkness.” She turned away then, saying, “There are some things which cannot be endured,” and no one disagreed. We gave her four bars of soap for her journey and considered ourselves far richer for the bargain.

The last men who came knew the secrets of steel and of machines and they did not care for soap or songs or stories. The old man died where he stood, arms outstretched as a great metal beast roared over him, grinding him into the dust.

When the machines had gone, I buried the dead, leaving behind only the ghost of a song and a golden locket to haunt that lonely crossroads long after the end of the world.

It grew colder then. What little light there was would sustain no life and everything began to freeze and die. I am writing blindly, scratching out my final Rat-man words and wondering what will remain when I close my eyes at last.