[warning: contains 'f' bombs]
No People
Jack Spader poked around in the cellar of the third sub-basement of the Integrated Conglomeration of Commercial Enterprises, Inc. building, thinking that this was the coolest place to be in the whole world. ‘Coolest,’ as in not 132’ F like it was outside (thanks, Global Warming), but a cool 71’. It was also cool as in hip, radical, phat, fly or oogie. It was Jack’s private sanctuary. No one knew about it but Jack.
Well, Cheryl knew, but he was through with her. Okay, maybe she was through with him. Even better, because she wouldn’t want to be anywhere near Jack. What was it she said to him last week?
“I wouldn’t get wich you if you wuz the last man on Earth, Jack Spader!” Then she shot him a text thought from her visor: “U R LAM,” and stormed out of the pod.
There were other sub-basement engineers, but they preferred to do their jobs from the control room on the fourteenth floor, take their breaks in the solarium, hang out in the spa, social crap like that. Jack preferred the solitude of the sub-basements and had created his cellar retreat from a crawl space he had uncovered when the thingy on the gizmo needed crupulating.
He didn’t understand what the big deal was with gabbing at dames in the solarium. The one time he let the guys talk him into hanging out there, he had met Cheryl. Gorgeous, brainless, shiny-headed Cheryl. She came bouncing up to him in her microfiber skinsuit with her thought visor flashing: “WUT A QT.” So, that was flattering.
So, Jack chatted with her. So, he came back to the solarium a few more times to meet her. So, they had a couple of dates and he told her about his sanctuary, thinking she might like to check it out. Well, that blew up in his face, and so here he was, back in the cool solitude of his cellar of the third sub-basement, separated from the brainless airheads of the Integrated Conglomeration of Commercial Enterprises, Inc. (ICCEI, or ‘Icky’ as it was popularly known) by about seventy four meters.
And he liked it that way. He could think his own thoughts without flashing them through a thought visor for the world to see (and he didn’t much care what others were thinking, since all he had ever seen was insipid enough to be flashed in bad spelling and grammar on a stupid headband). He could listen to the quiet humming of the gizmos and doohickeys in the third sub-basement and read a book—another luxury of having the run of the sub-basements. Books had been discarded decades ago as reading material and piled haphazardly in the corners of sub-basements in buildings of a certain age, to be used as emergency fuel. He had found dozens of worlds to explore that made the world above ground seem pointless and dull.
Jack chewed on a 21st century crème-filled golden sponge cake (another fuel source to be found in the sub-basements) and flipped through The Big Book of Natural Disasters.
“Realistic book,” Jack thought. Gazing at a picture of earthquake devastation, he could have sworn he felt the earth move.
He put the book down and grabbed the edge of his cot. The earth was moving.
Okay, that’s not right. That’s not something that happens in the cellar of the third-sub-basement. The Icky Building was built on an earthquake-proof site of earthquake-resistant materials. NOTHING short of total global annihilation should make the third sub-basement shake.
Jack’s heart raced. The pounding in his ears subsided long after the tremors stopped. Once it did, he heard nothing unusual. The humming and whirring of the gizmos and doohickeys continued as always. None of the safety alarms were going off—they were singularly annoying—Jack would notice if they were.
He went to the com panel and buzzed the 14th floor.
Nothing.
He checked the sub-basement levitator. The door opened to an empty compartment. Nothing strange about that. Just as a test (for what, he had no idea), he threw the book and the remains of his sponge cake in and pushed the button for the basement, three flights up, as far as the sub-basement levitators reached. Jumping out just as the doors closed, he waited a bit for the levitator to move and called it back.
The door opened to an almost empty compartment. There was the sponge cake and the book, exactly where he had tossed them.
It didn’t prove anything, really, except maybe that there were no flash fires or radiation clouds in the basement (assuming that radiation clouds would make things glow the instant they came in contact with them).
Jack would have to check this out. Not hearing from the 14th floor was troubling. He would have to take the levitator to the basement and transfer to the surface elevator that would take him to the tenth floor. It was a short walk from there across the southeast breezeway to the bailey lift that would take him to the 14th floor as well as the solarium, spa and the other hot spots of Icky social life.
That was the Standard Operating Procedure, anyway—one that had worked for him in the past.
When he stepped out of the levitator compartment onto the basement floor, he felt a warm downdraft nudge him along the strangely lit hall. And just like that, the S.O.P. fell apart.
Jack would not be taking the surface elevator or bailey lift anywhere. There was no surface elevator, or breezeway or 14th floor or solarium or anything above the basement.
It was all
gone.
“What the fuck?” Jack whispered. He tried to take in what he was seeing. He couldn’t take it in. There was no building up there.
Jack took a moment—he took several moments—to decide what to do next. There were stairs that might get him to the ground level.
He walked zombie-like to the stair well, climbed as much of the stairs as there were and then clambered over the debris to hoist himself to the surface.
There it was—total global annihilation. Rubble, smoke, ashes, oppressive heat. No buildings, no enviro-bubbles, no trans-pods . . .
No people.
Jack’s chest tightened. He could hardly breathe.
“Don’t panic,” Jack told himself. Then he remembered that even on a day when there hadn’t been total global annihilation, the air was not safe to breathe without SCOBA gear (Self-Contained Outdoor Breathing Apparatus). He scrambled back down into the basement to grab a SCOBA suit from the supply closet.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck! ” he muttered to himself as he pulled on the suit. He concentrated on fastening the buckles and closing the seals on the papery outfit to keep from thinking about why he was doing it. He would just put on the suit and go outside because . . . why? Because the building he worked in was . . . missing????
Jack climbed back out of the basement into world outside. Nothing surrounded him. The piles of rubble around him were surprisingly small, as if everything had been disintegrated.
He walked a few meters in the direction of the Green Place enviro-bubble park, which, of course wasn’t there. Beyond that would have been the residence tower, where Jack had had an apartment. There were, before this ‘event,’ three more residence towers, another enviro-bubble park and one other building similar to the Icky within the eight kilometers that made up Neighborhood 653. They simply weren’t any more.
The likelihood that someone else had survived in a super-sub-basement in the 653 was slim. The other corporate building had a brand new, fully automated sub-basement control system. Robotic drones took care of the responsibilities that Jack had at the Icky. There wasn’t even room for a real human to maneuver down there.
It was rumored that Neighborhood 675 had a corporate building with a convent of nuns in the sub-basement, 78 kilometers away.
Jack considered his options. He could go back to his cellar and pretend nothing had happened. He had survived the ‘annihilation’ down there. And the sub-basements held enough books and Twinkies to last a very long time.
Or he could grab a bicycle from the first sub-basement and try to ride it (in a SCOBA suit that wasn’t designed for the activity) to the 675 in search of possibly mythical nuns.
And then what? Re-populate the earth?
“. . . the last man on earth . . .”
Cheryl’s words rang in his ears now. He pictured them on a huge electronic billboard flashing for the world to see—for the last woman on earth to find him and get fertilized.
Jack laughed bitterly at the thought. Bringing more people into this decimated world seemed like a really bad idea. What resources were left for future humans to exploit?
He thought about Cheryl. He thought about the guys on the 14th floor. He pushed the thoughts out of his mind and headed back to his cellar where he could open another Twinkie and a book.
Days passed. Jack had lost track of how many. The first one was difficult. At quitting time, he had headed up through the sub-basements to go home. When the levitator compartment opened onto the open basement, the day’s events came rushing back. After an hour and a half of raging and sobbing, he had pulled himself together and went back to his cellar.
Jack passed the time doing his job. The gizmos and doohickeys were still working, after all. He shut down the gizmos that controlled everything above the basement and re-routed the systems to the sub-basements. He would be able to make the fuel sources last longer, in addition to making the other sub-basements more livable. Just in case . . .
Just in case some other survivors wandered into his neighborhood, he posted some signs around to indicate his existence. He thought about making the trip to the 675 in search of the nuns—he even reinforced one of the SCOBA suits with duct tape to survive the bike ride—but he came up with enough reasons not to go and used his reinforced suit to explore the empty neighborhood.
From time to time, Jack thought about people. He had spent most of his time before the annihilation avoiding them—their silly conversations, mindless activities, noisy entertainments and wasteful lifestyles made him crazy. He returned to his cellar after the necessary forays into the world of people to enjoy the quiet. Now that the whole world was quiet, his cellar was not an escape, but a reminder of the people he no longer had to avoid.
According to the expiration date stamped on the inside of his left wrist, Jack had 13 years of guaranteed freshness left before his systems began to shut down. In that other world, it would be the time for him to check into a senescent repository to wait out his death in the company of other people with the same stamp. With the end of that world, he was now spared that final social obligation. He faced his senescence alone.
Jack reached for a book and a Twinkie. What else was there to do?
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