I was seated on the top of a dolomite escarpment, above
the destroyed valley where the Lubian warrior robots were slowly trundling back
to their craft. Some were broken, some
leaking a fluid, others dragging long arms or eight-foot long legs behind. All were damaged in some way, but it didn’t
matter. The Lubians had won the war,
Earth had been destroyed. The machines
had won the war.
One of them turned and made a final sweep of the valley
before boarding, searching for more beings.
I hastily dug my incognomesh out of my backpack and wrapped it around me. The Lubian warrior’s sensing detectors
scanned the hilltops, but the incognomesh rendered me safely invisible. Satisfied, the last of the warrior robots
boarded their craft, and in an instant it was gone.
No one on earth knew where the Lubian’s had come from, or
at least no one would admit having such knowledge, although the truth is that
someone knew, or perhaps several people, people in positions of power and
authority knew. No one knew why the
Lubians wanted to destroy Earth and its entire people and their civilizations. Even in their last moments of life, the
powerful rulers of Earth’s countries feigned ignorance about the aggressors, hoping
against hope for a reprieve from their fates.
But they knew. They had secretly and covertly participated in the
Lubian destruction of Earth. I had
the proof. I knew that now, I had pieced everything
that happened together. I had the
answers. But it was too late. The war was over.
The other side of Earth had been gouged
out by weapons beyond the ken of the human mind to understand or invent. The other half of Earth, if you could see it
from space, would look like God’s grinding wheel had ground if off the
planet. It was simply gone. All of its people, its mountains and oceans,
rivers and cities, all gone, without any trace remaining. No future civilization could study it,
could discover what happened, because nothingness holds no clues.
My side of Earth had been wiped clean of human life, of animal
life. Everyone was dead, except me. I had escaped death by hiding in caves, using
the maps Agency Prime had given me in the survival kit. I watched the
destruction. The cities were all gone,
as were the towns and villages and farms and ranches. The fighting had been fierce, noble humans
struggling heroically against weapons and robots they could not defeat.
It was time to end my life. I was
the last living being on earth; the choice was death by my choice, or death by torturous deprivation of sunlight, food and water. I opened
my survival kit and took out the vial that held the end it all pill. We laughed about it at the training center –
the end it all pill. The last resort of
the defeated operative was to take the end it all pill. We named it Enditol, jokingly, not believing
we’d ever need to use it, and never imagining the kind of circumstances that were now
closing in on me.
I opened the vial and held the Enditol pill in my
hand. One bite and life ends painlessly,
instantly, like a light switch turning off a lamp. I grasped my water bottle and moved my hand
to my mouth.
A slight and unexpected noise at my left made my head turn. A cockroach scuttled out from under a leaf,
then disappeared down a fissure in the escarpment. I stayed still for a moment, pondering. Did life remain on this remnant of the planet? How would another civilization know what had
happened here, if another civilization arose, or arrived from beyond?
I put the Enditol pill back into its vial. I reached into my backpack and pulled out my
daily log and a pen with perma-ink and began to write:
“My name is Sam Callahan and this is my true story.”
