The Last Nomad

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Well, so they said. Is that right? Vacuum of space? It doesn’t sound right but I have no one to correct me and no one to ask. I can picture Sigourney Weaver's prodigious cheekbones but I can’t quite recall the film’s famous catchline.

The Earth is gone and I am all that remains - an accidental note struck at the end of a symphony. I am alone, profoundly alone, on this peculiar new planet.

The conditions are remarkably similar to Earth. I need two injections a day to regulate the oxygen intake in my blood but this all that’s required to survive in the outer. (I can gladly report that one’s eyes aren’t sucked from their sockets as the old films prepared me.) The gravitational pressure is not all that dissimilar to Earth's; sometimes my skin stings or I feel my teeth aching and my ear drums twinge - I don't know what it means but it doesn’t concern me. The long term health consequences are irrelevant as I only have vials to last six weeks and water for less than that.

There is a vast expanse of dark purple sand before me. Here and there, I see holes opening in the ground like great ant tunnels. I recall no indications of life from my briefings, yet I still can’t do away with the image of a great space slug bursting out with gnashing teeth and dragging some poor creature into the depths below. In the distance, there are thin grey clouds lined with bright pink that seem to not move at all. There is a strange sweetness in the air - not the light fragrance of a flower; it seems more chemical, like flavoured nicotine vapour. But the most unique and inhuman aspect of this planet is its deathly silence.

If you scream in space, no one will hear you. No that's not it either. God, what was it?

Expressions, jingles, and famous quotes often come to mind. It’s tremendously odd to know there’s no material trace of any of it. The world as it was, exists only as faint pictures that bob in and out of my mind's eye.

As a boy, I had a recurring fantasy I was brought into the future by a much advanced human race where I was feted and treated as a minor deity. The citizens of the world were enthralled at my revelations: the great wars, the plagues, the crowning moments of our humanity. Historians wept with singular gratitude as I confirmed their thesis or resolved some other conundrum or professional disagreement. In actuality, I feel completely incapable of giving any kind of faithful account of the History of Earth. I could tell them a little about the Ancient World and perhaps name a few cities and Gods. I could only really speak on the Eastern World with vague elusions to great dynasties and perhaps the slower and holistic nature of their philosophies. I could talk a little about the British Isles: The Anglos and the Saxons. Who were they? I’m not sure. William the Conqueror of Normandy - a territory ceded to keep peace with the marauding Vikings - I could speak more confidently here but I would get completely lost talking about the various monarchs and what they did. Richard the Lionheart: he led the 3rd Crusade? I read he spent most of his life in France or was that one of the Edwards? Hopefully their questions would be much more general, about how we lived and our attitudes towards work, children, and traditions.

All of this knowledge, I believed was safely interned in digital vaults. I didn’t believe any Fall of Rome or Fire of Alexandria could ever befall us again; I believed our history was beyond catastrophe and act of God.

If I died on Earth, before The Disaster, there would be banks of data that had captured my presence in one place or another. On social platforms, there would be tens of thousands of words shared between friends, there would be innumerable drunken photos from parties and dinners, and there would be reams of bureaucratic documents. From all of this you could create a clear enough picture of who I was. There was, as it happens, a growing ‘post-life’ industry where our digital footprints were used to rebuild the dead as an avatar - a dynamic repository of quirks and foibles wandering a digital landscape.

The impermanence of life is something which human beings will never or rather, had never, come to terms with. We knew we lived and died; we knew we experienced and forgot. We asked ourselves, “If it is forgotten, what did it all mean?” But the greater tools we had to record our experiences, the more preoccupied we became with that very question. For many, the fear of forgetting was seemingly greater than the desire to experience. I've seen photos of music festivals, perhaps a few hundred years ago, where people in their thousands are filming artists they presumably adored. They didn't trust themselves to remember.

We were told, “every man should plant a tree, have a son, and write a book." I am now in the extraordinary position where the world that contained those trees, sons, and books has been extinguished. I am now like the nomad, only in possession of a spoken history or Dreamtime. The nomad had no desire to involve themselves in history, perhaps because they had no means to record it. To live, to experience, and to die - that’s all they had. It should be liberating but I'm still fighting the urge to scrape my name in a rock, shake my fist at the sky and let the cosmos know I was fucking here! I worry if I start trying to madly document everything I know to be true, my last days of life would be an exhausting muddle. So I won't.

The cynical presumption has always been that we invent our Gods because we simply cannot abide the idea of death - the return to the black unknowing before our births. We invent the Heavens and stories like the dragonfly who can't return to the larvae below the water - the more abstract and gnomic the better - anything to bamboozle the senses and stretch our credulity a little further. But I don't believe God was as consequential to the question of our deaths as he, her, or it was to our lives: Death takes care of itself - death cannot contemplate death. But in life, we wanted to know we were seen and that the meaning we attributed as human beings were reflected in the mind of God. We wanted to know that love was not merely chemical, that some actions were good and bad. We wanted to know we didn’t have to hold the world together in our thoughts! For all that to be true, we required definitions that transcended humanity.

I have it in mind to trek into the beyond. I really don’t expect to find anything that will further extend my life, although I hope the ground doesn't swallow me up. There is a hill in the distance - it looks like a knot of hair or a black meringue. I will aim for that hill and venture out from there. This is my last run. I do not consider it a leap of faith nor do I consider it a suicide mission. I’m walking because there’s nothing else to do. It doesn’t feel sad or tragic, not when everybody I ever loved is already gone. There’s a matter of factness about our end and even a sense of comedy about it.

What a strange place to die. I wish my mother was nearer, or at least I wish I knew which corner of the sky to look.

In space no one can hear you scream. That's it! I'm sure of it. Now, I don't actually think it was said by anyone in the film but I'll never know.