If you stand on a high enough point you can hear the whining of the world. The clock ticking down. The air leaving the balloon.
If you can find yourself on the top of a mountain, you might sense the coming WHIMPER …
No BANG …
No Excitement …
No FANFARE …
Just a pile of flesh mungous, the last human left alive, screaming for MERCY and DEATH in the year 2103 …
“SOMEONE FREE ME FROM THIS HELL …”, then pathetic silence as the radioisotope batteries give out on the junctis-module and the crumuli flesh is flushed into the main digester tank … and it’s over.
Maybe it’s different …
Perhaps the LAST HUMAN is a STRONGLOID-HUMUNCULOUS comprising all RACES and SEXES and SKIN TONES and EYE COLORS. It slunks through the empty streets, licking sclib-paste from the rotting street game. It mutters a name, repeatedly … “TONY …” – “My name WAS TONY”, it chants, in subdued breath, as if afraid to wake the STAR DEMONS that brought us to this fate. A perfect person, in every sense – filled with tumors and purple bile and yellow teeth and ears sealed over with scar tissue.
How about them apples …
It could happen like THIS: In the year 3344, a generation ship sent from Earth hundreds of years earlier, powered by a hybrid fusion-anti-matter drive, reaches TERRA-244 … a goldilocks zone world … a world with triple state water and ski resorts and and old style scotch whiskey … The humans leave the ship for the ground, after waking up, and set up camp, but they hear a rustle from the woods – CAVE MONKEYS … the cave monkeys ruled this world, and fed on dead ideas and abandoned space orphans. Cave monkeys attacked the human encampment, and left honorary piles of stool where each tent was set up … this is how the world ends …. the LAST HUMAN being pooped from a cave monkey.
… sure …
Jinctian-ho-mongers sell the SKEEBS of REGION-3, and hunt telly-flesh down in the swamps of south S’compton. They sing songs of bewildered dust babies, as they feed upon the marrow of this sterile land. And the turnip-head musket men call forth DOOG the GYPSY CAT, to set it right … but he does not hear them.
Tilapia dancers from Juarez process corn-pills for the duke. They can’t stop working until their quota is met, for the island wanderers would show no mercy and the Greek pond joggers take time at the checkout. You could hire a man to clean the bathroom and to get that yellow filth off of the base of the toilet, but that man is GONE. Robot gardeners set fire to the church, and the LAST MAN … the LAST PERSON swaps stories with St. Peter at the mission.
KEVIN sent his family to Nebraska for the SUN FESTIVAL. That year the SUN turned on 30 days, and for those days one could wander to the surface and enjoy the bursts of gamma rays and UV-C and solar wind particles tearing the flesh wobblies from the skin and heart and mind. TEGLON FREAKS gather black mushrooms from near the cooling towers, and the waste pool is open for swimmers and divers and dreamers. No one considers the voice of their children, for they fall to the ground like scabs chipped away by a pocketknife after a long night of drinking everclear.
BLUE MEN struggle in the great wheel, as time grinds them down and leaves their hearts sideways and bent. They know the GREAT CRIMES of the TRIB PASSAGE and suffer no fool regarding that truth. The hospitals are filled with waxy pink flesh, seeking some kind of balance, but the BLUE MAN controls the power station and the radio and the auto shop. Every parts store is under their care. Every library is forgotten, and his HAZEL FURY sets fire to all. Goofing on the dynamite store, the 8 year old boys toss nitric acid at the old fools and hobos, and the LAST PERSON smokes a cigarette made of asbestos and graphene, and tosses his junk in the GROOB PILE.
Is that how it ends?
WE COUNTED the last flowers to bloom, and fed the whales to the crushers. When the squirrels went into revolt, we implanted the raccoons with chips and lasers to take out them damn squirrels. Our eyes are held open by toothpicks and copper teardrops, our mouths are PVC now, hooked to the central swill tank where babies are tossed in just after birth. We watch reruns of the SEINFELD SHOW, as the bile pumps remove our waste and the flesh dries around our bones.
The LAST person left alive makes a command request: rm -rf –no-preserve-root /
The lights flicker in LAB-JULIET-666, and the various vats and tanks start draining into the long dead ocean …
His name was KROGAN the SNORG-MASTER, and he felt his body crushed and pulverized as the wheel spit him out into the waste pond and the lamprey-sharks fed upon his flesh.
… he was the last man …
SHEESTRA the WHORE QUEEN ruled the EARTH until 4566, when the WOOKIE REBELLION broke through on the HUMPTON FRONT near FRESNO … Her lesbian submarine navy controlled much of the Pacific, but CARL the TRESSLOR had the LAST LAUGH … he introduced a nannite technology into the main plasma vault, and all the old ships were set to sink by the next MOON. DROGLON, the gervis-herder, was the last dude on watch that day, he saw the highland folk burn, he saw the cloud-realm turn to fire, he saw his hooker wife become salt, and his family reduced to seal-milk. He’d leave soon too, he’d be sad for a few minutes, and then whimper … and then nothing.
… so it goes, AMIRITE?!?
CHURG stopped the chant, and rounded up the TROOG-JOCKIES. These were the STRONG SERVERS and bed scum. They made their homes in the walls of the old city where the rats lived off of decaying dead and aborted babies. People would just have babies and toss them into holes, in the wall … they’d hear this all day long in the last POD COMPLEX … Sick folk, weighing 400 pounds on average, would waddle to the edge of the balcony to piss and poop and pray for some demon to emerge from the muck swamps below to destroy fate and remove this caste of lost grumble flesh. CHURG lit a match to the methane pipes and saw the building windows blow out, as the fatties were ejected from great height out the floor to ceiling windows in their POD SPACE … and a shower of plumps could be seen by the LAST MAN, before he lit his own fart and blew away …
And below the heavens were ashes …
And beyond the horizon was tomorrow.
And the LAST HUMAN stood there, staring, at it … imagining what “could have been”, and knowing “what did”.