Not everything I write is funny (well, at least not intentionally so). I think sometimes about the fragility of the human race and our stubborn insistence on keeping all our eggs in one basket, despite having reached space over half a century ago. I think that sparked this, which I wrote a few years ago for no particular purpose.
Story
They liked each other more than would be expected, given the circumstances. Once upon a time people like them would have likely gone on a couple dates, decided the romantic spark wasn’t there, and moved on with their respective lives. But that was generations ago. Now, they were the last viable pair left in the shelter; the population had dwindled despite the plentiful supplies, and at last it was only the young couple and an aged woman left. The child was a surprise; they had been instructed about such matters by the schoolmaster before he had succumbed to despair almost a decade ago, but instruction was one thing, and the reality of an infant quite another. The old one, who’d buried one of her children stillborn and another from the flu as a teenager, wept with joy at the sight of his small head, and the squall of his birthing cries. She died when the child was three, asking the boy to remember her. And he would, though only as a bony outstretched hand which stroked his cheek before flopping lifelessly onto the bed for the last time. At night, as they had since they were children and learned it from watching their parents, they would broadcast on the radio set, and listen for the broadcasts of others. More and more often, scanning the frequencies yielded nothing but static and silence. The young man half a continent away, who was also the last of a formerly crowded shelter, halted his broadcasts when the boy was seven. A critical power failure forced him into an untimely frozen grave, without even the ability to tell others of his fate. The two women in a bunker created by a long-dead government, who had so often sardonically proclaimed themselves to be the President and Vice-President (which always mystified the boy and his parents, for whom such words held no meaning), finally grew tired of the endless jumble of days and chose to end each other’s life using two of the many firearms the bunker housed. The last to cease transmission was the almost-ageless preacher, who never responded to the calls of others, gave long rambling sermons about God’s love expressed through His wrath, and reported the count of how many souls he had delivered to their otherworldly destination. Though others had previously resisted his attempts to save them from the sin of continued existence, the small feral child he had tracked to a cave on the wind-swept surface finally delivered a fatal blow, by biting the preacher in the ankle right before having its throat slit. The subsequent infection silenced the holy man within a month.
In most other areas of the world, these dramas had played themselves out years ago. This region was simply a bit behind the curve. But by the time the boy had become a teenager, there were no incoming broadcasts, no matter how much they boosted the receiver’s signal, and their own nightly responses appeared to be heard only by themselves. Still, his father would tell him to persevere, that someone else must be out there and would at least be able to take comfort in hearing them, even if they were unable or unwilling to respond. No matter how many years passed, the father’s optimism never wavered despite the boy’s increasing cynicism. His mother, however, became increasingly withdrawn and quiet. She continued to lose weight despite the overflow of foodstuffs available to the three people who occupy a shelter meant for thousands, and finally she simply slipped away one night, from a gnawing malaise she could never find the words to voice. Without his de facto soulmate, the boy’s father became obsessed with locating other survivors. The radio consumed not only his nights, but his days as well. Cleaning, eating, even his son, all became less and less important to him. At last, he gave up on contacting others through the radio, and prepared himself to do what had not been done for untold generations before: to leave, and go topside. He made his boy swear not to follow him, no matter what happened, and promised in turn to contact him as soon as he had found the other who were out there. And then, he was gone.
The boy heard from him once; his father had found shelter in a decaying outpost aboveground with a manually powered generator for the basic communication and climate control systems, and he told his boy that he still felt confident people were in the area, although he had yet to see any sign of them in the empty shelters and bunkers he had gone through so far. He reiterated the boy’s promise not to follow him, and told him he intended to contact him again within a week. But three days later, he put his foot in one of the deep snowdrifts which now covered so much of the surface and found not solid ground, but the crumbling edge of a hillside. He was fortunate; instead of breaking his leg or back and wasting away slowly from hypothermia while attempting to find another safe haven, his head struck a rock as he rolled down, causing him to fall into an unconsciousness from which he never emerged. Though he could never truly know for sure, it was less than a month before his son, now a young man himself, accepted the loss and continued on with his life.
Days, months, and years blurred together, his days unbroken by even the slightest derivation from routine. Machines were maintained, terse broadcasts sent out with no reply. He ate, he slept, and he aged, though he ceased to consciously track his years before long. He even began to make less and less use of the well-worn entertainment devices in the shelter, or to work out as religiously as he had in his youth in the large gymnasium. Finally, as gray hairs began to show on his head, he also found himself eating less, and sleeping large chunks of each day away. He had been close to the end then, before catching a glimpse of himself in a tarnished mirror and realizing his sunken stare was just like that of his mother the last time he had seen her alive. He decided then that he required a goal, something to give more purpose to existence than simply continuing to exist. But no matter how long he considered it, the only higher calling that came to mind was that which had claimed his father: to find the other humans left, and try to make contact, somehow. So he too set out from the shelter, though he made sure to keep the equipment operating in a low power state so anyone who came after him could reclaim it. He did not expect that reclaimer to be himself.
He set off along his father’s path, and within a week found the outpost where he had heard from him the final time. However, he never saw his father’s eternal resting place, buried as it was by snow and time. It was three more weeks after unknowingly walking over the remains of his parent that he camped under an alcove and realized he was at a crossroads: his supplies were only just enough to allow him to return to the shelter if he turned back the next day. If he did not, his only option would be forward, as he would likely starve before once again reaching his shelter. That morning he turned around, intending to go back to his home. But before he took the first step, he thought of what awaited him, that seemingly endless life of emptiness, and pressed onward instead. More weeks passed, but his meticulous search of the ruins around him turned up no signs of people who had lived within the last century. Finally he reached the great frozen tundra which had once been a desert, where it was that his stores ran dry. His weather gear continued to keep him warm so long as he kept moving, but his energy to do so continued to ebb. He continued on, crawling when he was no longer able to walk, and then finally even that was too much. He flopped down, rolled over onto his back, and stared at the grey sky. Though he had spent so much of his life cynical at the thought of encountering those mythical survivors, the drive which had spurred him on during this trek continued even when he could not. Before he closed his eyes for good, his final thought was a surprisingly positive one, given the nature of the species whose epitaph it was: “I hope the others find me someday, and take a moment to wonder who I was…”
But there were no others left.
