He stumbled out of the church, down the marble walkway, and moved with increasing speed toward the top of the high cliff to the west. He arrived at the edge with no respect for the drop, repeatedly advancing and retreating, as if picking a fight with the open expanse. And the wind whipping up the face of the cliff and stirring the waters of the Mediterranean before him seemed to call his bluff, buffeting him, exposing his impotence, like a smirking schoolyard bully gently pushing open fingers against his chest, softly, repeatedly. He felt the buttresses of his fatalistic tower crumbling, revealing the folly of his belief that he was secure in his isolation, that nothing more could be required of him, that he would simply cease to exist in solitude, that there was nothing left to say. These facts he had long ago accepted and takens as a comfort. But no more. Alone! ... Not alone! Barking anger, he punched and swung at the vast openness, and bellowed a final agitation. ‘I’m dying! Let me be!’ This was as close to a prayer as the solitary figure could manage, before falling to his knees.

The ground beneath him, damp from the sea air and a recent storm, surprised him with its softness, provoking in him a sense of wonder. It was open, breathing, like fresh-turned soil, and he thought in that moment that the earth had chosen to receive him in answer to his nihilistic prayer. He felt his arms lift, allowing a moment of gratitude (of worship?), as he reveled in the feeling of unexpected release.

That is what it might have looked like from a little distance: like relief, like worship, until the figure disappeared from view. Because within one horrible instant, Arpa realized that he hadn’t lifted his arms at all, that they were only floating up beside him, while the rest of his body first sunk, then tipped forward, as the edge of the cliff quietly gave way. ... Not received by the earth after all, but shaken off.

He flung his hands behind him like a mad bird only able to flap backwards, and flailed once. As he cartwheeled to meet the churning ground below the cliff top, his arms, first, were pinned to his sides, useless, as he launched down the slope; then, desperately he paddled to keep himself atop the wave of moving earth. The chaos of the slide allowed no further petition, became everything: he rode the fall, it seemed, until the world itself came apart, turned inside out, and a burning hell broke free of its prison to swallow the sea and mountain and him with it, to steal him and everything from the light. He lost consciousness.

Arpaxos woke in the early morning darkness to the fading sensation that he was the last solid piece in the mouth of a chewing demon. His own mouth was packed full of dirt. His right arm was numb and cold, while he felt as though the rest of his body were on fire. He had the irrational sense that he was still sliding: it took a long time for him to feel certain that he had come to a stop, that he had not died, though this was only a small comfort. He did not know how long he’d been asleep.

The left side of his face felt swollen and useless, but through his open right eye he could see a half-dome of stars overhead. In his new reality, he understood that the other half of the sky must also have been swallowed up by the earth demon; he did not, however, know why he himself had been spit out. There was no wind. He could hear the sound of water washing over tiny stones somewhere nearby.

Lying there, a bitter feeling of defeat came upon him. It was like the feeling he’d had when news of the disease broke. Back then, it only felt like falling, like the whole planet had gone off a cliff for an epic plunge that had yet to end. Today’s sharp hurt surprised him by its unfairness. He had been alone and living in quiet resolve for months, almost wishing he could feel the pain, even to die.

But now he had to reckon with the wrath that came quickly on the heels of other feelings. He couldn’t tolerate that such (relatively) simple humiliations still had power over him. The world was ending. He’d made every effort to get away from the prosaic follies of humankind to die alone in peace. Now he was tortured by the realization that he had not really gone far enough – the appearance of the priest had ended that fantasy. Nor, apparently, was he prepared for death. It frightened him, maybe for the first time. Something in the experience of being very nearly buried alive, maybe. Buried, unburied, and buried again, twisted into every shape recalled in plaster at Pompeii (but Arpa’s final shape had not yet been discovered). There was no feeling of release for him in the moment of death, no peace in it, just a child’s horror, which embarrassed him. Grief piled on top of grief with the final realization that he couldn’t pretend to welcome the end any more, as if he knew what it meant; nor did it appear that his opinions on the subject mattered in the slightest.

He let out a small muffled whine, and his face scrunched around his mouth, wincing in protest against each muscle’s attempt at movement. His mouth began to work, automatically, to expel the dirt and pebbles that had collected there. His arms were of no use at the moment. He turned his head gently to his right. His tongue, which itself felt an icy-hot burn at the slightest movement, slowly began working the ball of earth around, while his jaw clenched involuntarily with each contraction of his facial muscles. He directed all of his willpower against the impulse to throw up; he was getting barely enough air through his nose as it was. As he accepted the fact that one of his teeth would be coming out too, he worked his tongue harder, crying out as exposed roots grated against the stone slurry being pushed out of his mouth. Finally it was free, and he resisted the urge to swallow gulps of air until he could work the dregs out.

As the night sky gave way to a pale dawn, his situation slowly came into focus. He could now see the stony ledge he’d landed on, and that he was on the bank of a tiny stream that emanated from within a dark cleft in the surrounding wall. To see details in the looming cliff face awoke him to the fact of it again – and he chided his assumption that half the stars had been eaten; now he felt prepared to concede the likelihood that the missing sky was behind the cliff itself. Probably, he thought, wisely, a demon had not consumed any stars in its ravenous attack on Arpaxos.

He tried to learn more. His right arm was submerged in the frigid water, which explained the numbness. He lifted it out, and carefully raised his head to look around. He could see the earthen chute by which the cliff had delivered him – more gently than he deserved – to this spot; a pile of soil to the left was peaked like sand at the bottom of a giant hourglass. He was trying to work out how he survived the fall, and how it was that the mound of dirt was not on top of him; he had no memory of moving himself from the base of the cliff, nor any clear memory of the fall itself. But he felt encouraged in this moment to respect the proverbial wisdom of forgetfulness.

Finally, looking past his feet, he saw that the cleft in the wall enclosed a narrow, whitewashed archway formalizing an entrance to the dark space behind it. An uneven cross-shaped embrasure, like a keyhole, topped the passageway. It was a cave.

A cave. Perfect. His Hero’s Journey was about to take a turn. He would descend into the darkness and confront ... his fears!, or himself!, or something, and he would learn the Valuable Lesson. Then he would be permitted to return ... to return ....

His head lay back. He laughed quietly until the pain became too great, at which point the exhaustion and the trauma of the day, and all the years, overwhelmed his consciousness and he passed out once more.

And he dreamed.

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Eighteen months had passed since the arrival of Arpaxos in Mani, and his relationship to the silence and solitude of the place remained complicated. He was, for the most part, glad for the quiet: before he’d escaped the city, it had become clear that most people had lost all sense of purpose or power, and in the bargain were losing what remained of their voices. But old wives like his aunt were not so easily silenced. They confidently offered up impotent proverbs and pithy wisdoms, each a self-assured attempt to toss salt back in time to correct the obvious misalignment of the planet and misunderstandings of men. He could not bear the simplistic bickering of the gray-haired, black-clad elders of the city, each of them with their metaphorical side tables over-decorated with the wreck and ruin of ancient philosophy. Wasn’t it obvious that the wisdom of the world was passing away? If the scientists could not save the species, what purpose did the old words serve? (To her credit, Tía Íno soon abandoned the annoying – and popular – debate over whose fault the plague was, and turned her proverbial attention to stirring the doomed to reverence. ‘Regard well the end of life!’)

Arpa left it all behind – his father’s rants, the widows’ judgements, the endless bickering sadness – and in the bargain he might have lost what remained of his own voice, and his connection to the human race. Leaving the city may have seemed like a choice to die hungry and alone, but he meant it as a choice to die in peace and quiet. Finding food turned out to be easy; finding peace not so much.

Little challenged his belief that he would never encounter another soul: the apocalypse was one thing, but this place had always been desolate. Until one day, after what seemed like endless days passed in isolation, and as he sat in front of the half-ruined stone shelter that leaned against the low cliff above the church, a priest approached, without ceremony, on sandaled foot, from the southeast. Arpaxos was shocked to see the man, but surprised himself by freezing in place, unable to move or talk. On a good day, on a normal day, he would be unsure of how to interact with a member of the consecrated class, or whether to do so at all. He had never really known what to say to them, or what to ask for, and today was no different in that regard. But these were different days, neither normal nor good; he questioned whether even the priests knew what to say any more. Memories of prior encounters with locals (and of his last brush with a holy man for that matter) led him to expect at least a rebuke for squatting, if not worse.

His mind raced as the man came closer. Maybe the goat that had been keeping him in milk belonged to this one? Maybe he had news, or would enjoy a little conversation before the end of the world? Certainly, at least, he would be surprised to see that the parish population had grown from 0 to 1, defying the general trend?

But no, it seemed not. The dark-robed figure entered the chapel straightaway, and soon the sound of a monotone prayer came flat on the wind. The sound of the voice almost tore Arpaxos apart. His heart fought to escape his chest; his body nearly collapsed under the oppressive sensation that his veins were filled with lead, cold and heavy. Within minutes the prayer was done and the priest hurried out of the building. Without at all adjusting his hurried posture, he raised his forearm in an awkward gesture, his only acknowledgment that there was another human being present. Was it meant as a blessing? He never stopped walking and Arpaxos never raised his hand in reply, because the man never turned to face him.

The encounter left Arpaxos with an excruciating curiosity. He waited until the shy itinerant was a safe distance away, then quickly entered the room. Everything looked as it had before. The carbon smell of a spent match hung in the air and a thin trail of smoke rose weakly from a wick propped up in a dolma tin, but the flame had already been extinguished.

He was rattled at the intrusion, could feel, somehow, that the space itself had changed, though apparently only a single match had been lit and everything else remained undisturbed. He stood in extreme discomfort, now suddenly aware of how invested in being alone he’d become, while at the same time he was almost desperate in hope that the visit of the priest might have made a difference, might compel the Almighty to finish the work of centuries, to rip the dome open and enter the derelict space. What he felt was not the right kind of change. It was now merely the scent of the man and his impotent devotion that filled the room. There was nothing else, and now he was more desperately alone.

The face of the icon caught his attention, and he thought, almost with a laugh, of course! Never really alone. He only wished he could laugh, but something stopped him, a feeling that what he wanted to turn into a joke was in truth not funny at all. The face – it appeared in this moment that the image was alert, attentive. His immediate response was to feel embarrassed, that this change in attention was not because of him, not meant for him. But changed it was; and now alert, waiting. But waiting for ... what? What was he supposed to do?

Surprised by a groan escaping his own throat, he silenced himself, tried to settle his nerves in the presence of the now activated image. But he could not settle. He was becoming angry, and had the urge to chase after the priest, to tell him that he was required back in the church. A childish thought: had the priest done something wrong? Shouldn’t the visit, the recitation, have been enough? Prayers had been spoken, a flame had been lit, the obligation fulfilled. But the eyes of the image grabbed him and insisted. Perhaps the priest had failed to acknowledge the Savior as well, had only offered a mechanical greeting, as he had outside the church.

Stupefied, Arpaxos stood in that space with a growing heat behind his chest (of longing? Of despair?) until he decided he was a fool and, with a terrible, cold and rational resolve, rejected the feeling. He had been torn between the wish to never see another person again, and the starving desperation to look into another face. Now a painted picture seemed alive, seemed to confront him with his own willful blindness. In a seizure of febrile rebellion, he cast the image down, and tore at the eyes, scratching with his dirty fingernails, until in his pride he croaked out the words, without believing any of it, ‘Nor shalt thou make unto thee any graven image, for I am the Lord thy God!’ It then became terribly quiet.

He cursed the priest through clenched teeth, and reached his trembling fingers toward the altar, moving them through the fading trail of rising smoke.

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He might have stayed in that apartment for the rest of his short life, except for the fire. Just days after losing her, he found himself outside in the middle of the night looking up at the building as it burned. How had the fire begun? He could not, or would not, remember. The only clue was that he felt no emotion as he swung his pack over his shoulder and turned to walk down the street. There were no sirens, no shouts of alarm.

Before he started university, Arpa’s father took him to Mount Athos, to live with the monks for a summer, in what must have been an attempt to put Lent before Fat Tuesday. But the young man needed no encouragement toward the contemplative life. During his stay, he wrote of his new community in his journal:

‘The wilderness accepts pilgrims of all kinds. Some are driven there, some are led. Others flee comfort and then preach from the simplicity of the desert, inviting travelers to look into the face of the ascetic, to mine the poverty there for understanding.’

At the time, he could not see that there are also those who escape because they can no longer bear to look into another’s eyes, or risk being seen themselves – they seek the simplicity of death without understanding. The arrival of the elder pilgrim Arpaxos into the wilderness (he was of this last category) came at the end of a journey marked by humiliation, and inauspicious signs.

He traveled as far as he could by car, looking for a place to finish out his days away from the madness, grief, and complications of the city. However, as he quickly discovered, trouble just manifested differently in the rural places. When enough doors had been slammed in his face, or swung open to some horror, and when enough guns or other improvised weapons had appeared in windows, he gave up on hope and hospitality. He tried fending for himself, stealing food to survive. But the shame was too much and his skills not enough: in each village, he was marked within a day, might have been killed if he hadn’t kept moving. When it was clear that he’d become a stranger to all, he headed southwest on a single-lane road, resolved to leave it all behind.

A day south of Gytheio, he lay down in the back of an old derelict truck and rested his head on a bundle of canvas. The dome of sky above him resonated with a deepening indigo that seemed to contain within it all the energy of the cosmos, both the light and the dark, together. It was unseasonably warm, and he’d just begun to read by a small lamp, when he became aware of a flash of light from above. A star was glowing extra bright, and green, and moving. He watched with growing unease: he knew what a falling star looked like. This one was too slow, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether it was descending or rising. For more than a minute, it seemed, the thing burned hot, then dimmer, then bright flecks of orange and yellow broke off. The profound discomfort he felt at this moment recalled childhood terrors ... the mountain storm that blasted roof tiles off the family’s summer cabin, and made his mother scream; his sister’s cruel taunt of tearing back his covers and grabbing at him when he was asleep. Even the heavens, the eternal dome, could not be trusted to provide covering, or comfort, in these days.

Soon, he realized that what he was seeing was the end of some great work of humankind. He understood. Space-faring nations, having recently lost the will to project their curiosity, hopes, and hubris into the void, were leaving such works – satellites, and deep-space telescopes, and floating research stations – unsupported. Many had begun to fail, and some were falling to earth. At least that was the story. Arpaxos was not alone in speculating that these things were being brought down, that what had been happening with increasing frequency was the rocket scientist’s version of throwing a brick through a window after an earthquake – belligerent, disconsolate hooliganism, which apparently lurks inside us all. There had been several reports of these ambiguous re-entries in the last year, but this was the first he had seen. He marveled at it, briefly, then felt a little sick. As the trail of light faded, a supersonic crack and rumble punctuated the rending of our delicate planetary veil.

What he could not have known is that those space platforms that remained under the control of caretakers not yet given in to nihilistic vandalism were being turned off. Not neglected, not abandoned to entropy, but powered down on purpose as a potential liability at the boundary of a defenseless planet and it’s shrinking and increasingly vulnerable population. Before we ever had a chance to discover our place in the heavenly neighborhood, we were turning off the lights and drawing the blinds.

Moments like this were the very thing he would have stayed up late to watch with his father when he was a boy. And his father would have spoken some cold and comforting words, explaining how this monumental destruction made sense in the grand scheme of human effort and progress. As a student at the Polytechnic, Arpa would have marked the moment with a poem about how the fiery conclusion of such a venture highlights the pride and folly of men, the poet calling our attention back to the earth, to the plane of our rightful existence, to each other. He would not have shared the poem with his colleagues at university, nor would he have shared it with his father. But he would have found the act of writing comforting in the face of such waste.

Tonight, he just felt incomplete, and he wasn’t sure which he longed for more: the complacent confidence of his father or the romantic arrogance of his youth. Since neither of these perspectives was available to him on this day, and since he had no one to share the experience with, he forced himself to regard the moment as meaningless in the grand scheme, only a fallen leaf signaling autumn and colder days to come. To regard the event as mundane – even pretty – helped him feel less sad.

In the end it was to him one more sign of the failure of the human experiment. He knew there would be no going back to the way it was. Considering his circumstances, he wasn’t sure what he was going toward either. Looking down the dirt track that lead to the next village gave him a familiar feeling of dread; the thought of returning the way he came was worse. When he woke the next day, Arpaxos left the road, and left all comfort behind.

He wanted to go someplace with a guarantee of solitude, and there was no place more lonely to him than the Mani Peninsula. It was on childhood visits here that Arpa had learned about his father’s almost pathological preference for escape and isolation, which Mani satisfied perfectly, even if, in recent years, young entrepreneurs were returning from abroad to renovate (and monetize) the family estates. The occasional medieval castle turned bed-and-breakfast did little to challenge the overall impression that outside the walls, there were few comforts to be had.

Mani remained the most forbidding part of Greece, the great middle finger of the Morea, pointed straight to Hades, complete with a cave at the southern tip understood by the ancients to be an entrance to the underworld. The fiercely independent Maniots were usually the last of the Greeks to bend the knee in the face of any attack or occupation (and even then, it was always with a dagger behind their back). Not only the men deserved credit for this reputation: in response to a sneak attack off the Bay of Messinia, the women of Mani were said to have fought off the Ottomans with garden tools, while the men were engaged elsewhere. In subsequent times of ‘peace’, quarreling families shot at one another between towers in the villages one day, and packed into one of a thousand tiny churches on the next. The fire-lit feudalism – and weird juxtapositions – of the Middle Ages lasted well-into the modern era in this place. If the last of us are doomed to die alone, Arpa thought, I want to be somewhere already acquainted with loneliness and desperation, a place that will not take offense at my own.

But before he would find his way to the sun-bleached, wind-sharpened wastes of the Deep Mani, he had to cross the mountains that ran along the peninsula, from Taygetos in the north, where a morbid legend said that ancient Spartans climbed to abandon their weak, and Sangias in the south, where he figured someone such as himself might have a better chance of survival. To avoid the highways, he’d have to travel south along the east coast, and spend most of a day walking in roadless places while looking for a passage to the west. At least, he noted as he crossed this last barrier, he wouldn’t be alone – the hills were home to a sizable population of goats, who wandered among the pale green vegetation covering much of the east- and south-facing slopes. Arpaxos was hopeful that he’d be able to sleep in the shade of the bushes and pick his way through the scrub when it wasn’t so hot. He remembered too late that goats devour pretty much whatever is in front of them, and if you are traveling among bushes of the kind that goats refuse to eat, then maybe you don’t want anything to do with these bushes either. When he stumbled out of the mountains three days after his escape from Gytheio, he looked as though he had been whipped with barbed wire, and his will was nearly broken. Terrible thorns had been his shelter, and he shared refuge in the heat of the day with great yellow spiders and the sound of hidden cicadas, whose rasping call was like being subjected to electro-shock therapy for hours at a time, only without the benefit of relief from emotional distress.

When he finally left the mountain behind, he took shelter in the courtyard of the church Agnosto Onoma, which in the late afternoon hid in the shade of one of the region’s many towers – this one had it’s black-clad watch-woman, who eyed him with honed suspicion from a seat in a high window. She lifted a hand in greeting; the other hand stayed on a shotgun in her lap. Looking up at her, Arpa honestly wondered if she had any idea what was happening outside of her fortress; she gave the impression that she had not approved of external events for decades and might have greeted news of the apocalypse with a dismissive shrug. He made what he imagined would be his last attempt at a friendly greeting, simply so that he could rest for a few minutes without fearing for his life.

Sitting in the empty square, where the dirty plastered walls were slowly being decomposed by the roots of old pine trees, he gritted his teeth against the wind. Arpaxos hated the sound of wind blowing through pines. As a boy, he’d spent his summers in Filothei, where plane trees gently swayed in the warm Athenian breeze, their leaves filtering the blazing sunlight like delicate green shadow dancers. Pines were nothing like that. Pine needles didn’t dance: they were fixed in their contempt for the wind, or maybe out of spite for their more liberal cousins. When the wind passed through pines, it was like a vital spirit passing through the fingers of a creature long-dead, fingers that could not embrace the living any more. Or would not.

Arpa squirmed in the corner of the square, his own spirit unsuited to the challenge of the journey, yet the hard wind drove him ever southward. And his encounter with the pines of Mani was a cold brush with ancient shades, whose ghostly needles dragged against his insides, mocking his belief that he himself was still solid.

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Evie looked down at him from the threshold. She stood apart, appearing untroubled, as if she existed in a reality entirely different from the one in which he lay pinned on the ground with a soldier’s knee on his neck. Gloved hands held his limbs, and something cold and hard was pressed to the side of his head. But he was no longer struggling against the small army that had filled his sister’s apartment, and it seemed they no longer regarded him as a threat: hands and voices gradually softened. A soldier, almost completely obscured behind full armor, was leaning down to look into his face, asking questions. He couldn’t make out her words in the general confusion. ‘Sir what is your ... [ringing in his ears] ... Can you ... [a shout and hail of gunfire outside the apartment] ... relationship to the ...?’ The commotion outside got the attention of the two by the door. One of the soldiers quickly raised his weapon and moved toward the noise. Two concussive gunshots, far louder than the previous volley, and out of the silence that followed he heard Evie’s strained but steady voice and knew that she was saying that he was her father, because that had been his instruction to her. From the way the soldiers looked at each other and the tone of the brief conversation that followed, he could tell that her mother and father were known to be dead. A man in civilian clothes began to survey the pile of bags near the door, easily identifying those belonging to the girl by the bright colors and cartoon branding of an earlier age.

There were more voices, but he couldn’t hear what was being said above the rising static in his head. He knew that he was losing her. He had really known for some time. But he wanted to believe that he had a right to steal her away and keep her to himself.

And she, in the middle of all this chaos, managed to look down at him with something like compassion. She was only 10 years old, but she was towering over him, and breaking his heart with a look that said ‘I understand, though I really don’t understand ... and it looks, Uncle, like it will have to be me that is brave in this moment.’ Her parents had both worked in the refugee camps; now they were gone, both dead from too much affection for the human race. He could see a similar nobility in her gaze. He wanted to scream at her to wipe that look away, to put on her war face, or she was going to be destroyed. They would eat her alive.

He himself was teetering on the edge ... between fighting, or falling into the abyss. Her kidnappers made sure that he understood the time for intervention was past. They would be taking her: she belonged to the world now, and he must stay face down in the dust, or be destroyed.

Pale orange sunlight poured in from the street and outlined her form in the doorway. She looked to him like she was on fire, if only because he was seeing through tear-flooded eyes; his mind allowed the effect to soften the sickening reality. In the moment it took for her to disappear from view, he also turned a corner: everything that came after that moment was forgotten almost immediately after it happened, filtered out, so that he could hold onto her in the only way left to him. There were shouts, but he ignored them so that he could listen for her voice; a cough provoked a sharp stab of pain in his ribs, but he forgot about his own pain so that all his senses would be attuned to her diminishing presence; the sound of a helicopter and a mob of shouts (he had no way of knowing whether they were connected, but each was fighting to be heard above the other); a final gunshot in the distance, the shock of it sliding easily into the past – he thought only of her, as if his attention could surround her and preserve her. Finally there was silence and he could find nothing to hold onto anymore. He was alone.

He was the proverbial, foolish mother hen, hiding inside the shell with her chick; and now, because no one had kept watch, their world was cracked open like an egg by the devourer, leaving only Arpaxos to contemplate the emptiness as it grew cold and dry. He knew that there was nothing left. There was nothing. She was gone.

He had been meant to adopt her. It was arranged after her parents got sick. They had been working with migrants at the port when they became deathly ill, in the old sense. Nicola and Brahim were much more comfortable living on the rough edges of the world than Arpaxos. Years after running away, his sister had reappeared in Athens with an ill-defined plan to confront their father, and try for some kind of peace. But the unhealed wounds of childhood, and the dry spring that was their dad (he couldn’t even look her in the eye), doomed her plan. Instead of running away again, she went to work with street kids in Piraeus, looking for something to fix, something to believe in. It was there she met Brahim, himself a refugee from an earlier time, and fell in love.

Unfortunately, a fondness for alcohol combined with the chaos of the border made them vulnerable to disease – both of them became sick with a particular drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. Now, Nicola was even more stubborn than her brother: she didn’t trust doctors and rarely acknowledged weakness of any kind. She and Brahim were vaccinated when that was still a thing, but drew the line when it came to being injected with an encoded swarm of little medical machines. So it was that when she got sick, she would be entirely on her own, a condition she was used to but never got any better at. Brahim dragged her to the hospital, unaware that he also was ill. There, a series of tests revealed that she was 1) likely to die from complications from TB, and 2) the possessor of a surprising resistance to the more significant affliction of the age. She was sick with disease, yes. But she was also not sick ... with that disease which had not, until this point, skipped over anyone. This more fearsome malady had traveled everywhere courtesy of the efficiencies of modern logistics, and had been hiding in the cells of the entire developed world, waiting with improbable patience for the conditions necessary to erupt almost all at once in what Arpaxos was calling the Incurable Cure for the disease that had been afflicting the planet for some years now; Humankind, that is.

Around the world, money and resources poured into finding a solution to this latter-day plague. In the search for a cure, all the tricks had been tried, some to the collective shame of the species. In one particularly heartbreaking footnote (in what would have been the very last history book), the zeal to find a solution drove a group of American pathologists to approach one of the last few isolated cultures in the world, one distinguished by their disconnection from the global network of goods and services, and more importantly, by their ancient and isolated gene pool. It was hoped, maybe foolishly, that if these peoples knew what was at stake, they would have offered themselves up for study, for the sake of the human race. However, when first contact is mediated from inside a sealed helmet and when your face is obscured behind thick plastic, there can be no efficient way to communicate your already questionable intentions. Or to warn your hosts about the dangers of shooting arrows at visitors wearing biohazard suits intended to prevent the spread of infectious disease.

In the end, as hope receded like the tide, what remained to be revealed, like a submerged ruin, was the resilience of the Greeks, famous for last stands in the face of impossible odds, as the proverbial clock runs out. Doctors around the world had been going nonstop and many were giving up on the work in despair – hospitals were becoming hospice centers when there were not enough doctors to care for patients. A group of internists at Nikaia Hospital in West Attica had resolved to work to their last breath to find answers; they were rewarded for their diligence with the arrival of Nicola Evangeliou. Their discovery of her resistance to the ultimate disease was considered a kind of miracle, though ultimately there would be no medical revival, no pilgrimages to take the healing waters at her shrine, because there would be no sharing in this miracle. That is, not for anyone except Eva, who had arisen from these waters, and had thereby been gifted with the resistance, a biological rebelliousness learned in the womb.

Nicola was the first, but because she was already on death’s door, Evie herself would take on the mantle. She and two others, who were identified not long after. Only these few would be found who had any hope of survival. However, nobody could discern a way to make use of the miracle of the three. No one had been able to find in their cells a formula for salvation; so they were taken to be salvation themselves.

It was a minor miracle that Arpaxos had gotten her out of the hospital, but there was no way she would be allowed her independence. The machinery, of which she would soon be a critical part, was already in motion. Because, as efforts to find a cure diminished, and every other machine slowed to a halt, qualified survivors were rallying at the California bioscience concern that had until recently been gaining fame by promising a win in the fight against disease. This was not at first an empty promise: a single treatment of a plasma that carried an encoded swarm of microscopic bots provided the ultimate treatment, boutique health care at the molecular level, available to all. In the end, one disease had come along to subvert this towering achievement – and now the technology was being repurposed in a last-ditch, moonshot effort to preserve whatever life remained when the disease had run its course. By the time Arpaxos and Eva had said goodbye to her parents, the world had given up on conventional disease, given up on healing, and would soon be solely concerned with the singular effort to preserve a single life for as long as possible. Researchers and thought leaders from every field of study were making their way west to spend their remaining days solving the final problem.

All talk of leaving the planet to colonize other worlds was ended. All talk of beating cancer (or any of the old diseases) was ended. All talk of extending the life-span of the rich and powerful was done (which desire the rich and powerful were no longer being shy about, though no amount of money in the world could rewrite your genetic code and save you from this Great Recession). All talk of lifehacking, of chasing your bliss, of Five Simple Tricks to Burn Off the Belly Fat ... of miracle drugs to end depression and anxiety ... all of this was done. Sure, everyone was depressed and anxious, but it does get easier when you know the exact reason why you feel the way you do.

Before Nicola’s immunity (and her daughter’s existence) came to the attention of the world’s scientists (and of the U.S. Military), Arpaxos was called to the hospital where both of Eva’s parents would spend their last days and recruited to be a father.

He loved the girl of course. She stayed with him whenever her parents traveled to the camps. He knew that she preferred his pure cynicism to her parent’s cynical idealism. This was not because she hadn’t learned compassion from her mom and dad, just that Arpaxos was the uncle who could make her laugh, and her parents rarely laughed any more. Now they were gone, and she was stuck with a cynic who would be witness to the end of all debate. Soon there would be nothing to be angry at anymore because everyone was dying, and nobody knew whom to blame. Evie would never get to see her parents let go of anger, because they did not live long enough. She did, however, get to see her uncle lose his sense of humor.

As it turned out, a legitimate adoption would be impossible. Though, in a private ceremony in her parent’s apartment two days after the death of her dad, a document was drawn up with a sparkly purple ball-point pen, wherein the two affirmed their decision before God and no other witnesses that Arpaxos would be father and caretaker to Eva until her 18th birthday, or until the end of time, whichever came first.

His niece had won (or lost) the last great global lottery, possibly to be the sole survivor of the human race. Or perhaps to be witness to something new, somehow, sometime in the next hundred-thousand years. Whenever he thought back to the moment when he lost her, he felt a grief so great that his mind quickly fled to anger. If anybody had been near enough, he could be heard to mutter to himself, with a groan, Ω, Εύα, δεν ήσουν ποτέ υποτιθέμενη να είσαι η πρώτη ή τελευταία σε τίποτα ... Oh! Eva! You were never supposed to be the first or last of anything!

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Standing up from the single, rush-covered chair, the philosopher Arpaxos broke the chill silence with a sharp intake of breath. He took two shaky, sibilant steps across the marble floor in the direction of the apse, extending his hand toward the icon. At the sight of his dirt-stained fingers he drew back in a grip of shame.

But why? This was no museum. No alarm would sound if he touched the art. In fact there was little sign this tiny room had benefited in 900 years from either curate or curator. The single portrait was tilted a little too casually against the back of the chapel. White plaster walls rose to a half-dome above the narrow, uneven shelf littered with spent matches, thin beeswax candles, and a dented plastic water bottle holding decanted oil for a makeshift lamp. Leaning a little more carefully against the image were three tamata: a hand, a ship, and an eye. The hand and the eye, stamped from real silver, were tarnished and dull. Miracles had been done here. Or had been looked for.

In front of this collection, assembled like a hedge around the shrine at the center, modern analogues of these ancient concerns had been placed: there was a bricked device, itself the size of a small icon, which, when there was signal to be found, could once have accessed all the images and answers the world had to offer. An unused airplane ticket lay flat next to the phone, a key fob for a Mercedes and worry beads next to it. Also there, a spent Medalion ESPlasm injector, which had recently, but only briefly, supplanted both the Internet and the Almighty as the answer to all our hopes and fears. These latter-day votives suggested that we preferred to mediate divine provision through devices of our own design. Where the tin sailing ship said, ‘Please watch over my son while he is on the open sea’; the phone said something like, ‘Please fix the damn internet so I can return to my private devotions.’ Any way you looked at it, it was a dubious move to bring a smartphone to the local altar.

As for the image presiding over these petitions, it was no museum piece, but the likeness was technically impressive. The face was gentle, expressive, and strong, though its beauty had been somewhat mortified behind a veil of soot, and the wooden surface that bore it warped by ages spent under the eggshell white of the dome, itself cracked in many places but never fully opened to the sky.

The faded pictures of saints on the walls were more sorely abused by time and its attendants – mildew, earthquakes, and vandals each had left their mark. Centuries before, those vandals, in a brief campaign informed by deep reverence or deep hatred (no one knew for sure), had taken all the eyes. Arpaxos did not like to look at the pictures on the walls. He came for the Christ, though he had not yet acknowledged the degree to which he avoided the gaze of that one as well.

He stood there, silent, still, not willing to leave without making some contact with the image. He settled on a more hygienic salute: lifting his right hand to mirror the sign the Savior made.

Awareness of his surroundings slowly came back to him; of the small, barrel-vaulted church, the wide barren slope surrounding it, and the cliffs above and below. The close echo of the mostly empty room gave a tin-pot resonance to the sound of the sea that came in through two small windows, and of the sharp wind that carved the impermanent rocks and brought ocean moisture to the hard grasses. At one time, a seashell held this sound to the ear of a curious child; it must be the man had grown smaller than the boy, or the shell grown larger, that the adult and all his dreams could fit inside.

Turning suddenly, he moved to leave. As he stepped past the thin steel door, disappointment came upon him as it always did when crossing this threshold. Weakly, he sank into the depression worn in the old marble step, and leaned wearily against the doorpost. His hands were clenched. What he wouldn’t give to look into a living face, one not over-darkened by devotion.

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Outside the town, a short distance down a dirt track, a simple structure could be seen, next to the foundation outlines of more buildings, yet to be raised. The work was slow, even with the help of the neighbors, who provided the mortar to bind the rubble of ancient buildings together again. The neighbors! She was trying to find new, less-disparaging ways to acknowledge the creeps, on whom their survival continued to depend, and whose help was, now and then, still very much appreciated. They could, if they wanted to, rely on the collective for all their needs. But the two of them preferred to work by hand, lifting and building together. Time and effort were gifts, and she treasured being alive and awake; it didn’t matter how hard the work was. The important thing was that the toil had ended. Her yearning against the crushing burden of eternal solitude was over: from now on, all effort was shared, and all effort would be joy. Her hands were becoming rough like his.

Nor did it matter that their home was currently little more than four walls and a roof – it was a real house, made of real stuff, and it soon would have many rooms. The walls were thick and painted white with lime from the lowlands to the east. They’d settled below the summit of a gentle rise: from their porch they could see hills to the west, and sometimes smell the sea. In the other direction was a long low valley with a great body of water stretching away to the north.

She soon learned that she was not the only living thing to have survived, and that the world contained somewhat more than memories and their avatars. The great redwoods, famously tall, vivid in her picture-book memory, could still be seen on the hills around the valley. She wondered how far descended these were from the trees that existed when she’d arrived. Or could it be that some of them remained alive since then, communicating ancient truths, root to root, across the forest?

A complete natural survey of the region would have to wait; there was work to do. And, anyway, for ages her view had been so constrained by the inward facing facade of her prison, the old town, that she wasn’t used to seeing great distances. She didn’t often look out across the landscape; it made her anxious to confront the expansive reach of the world.

As for the town itself? The games had ended: there was no longer any reason for her to pretend the townspeople were alive, or to interact with them at all. He also kept his interaction with that crowd to a minimum. But he did not avoid them altogether; there had been interviews between the collective and the artist, the content and significance of which were hidden from her. That suited her just fine. She didn’t have to fear any secrets with him, for on the day he became solid, he had also become (somewhat shockingly) transparent. If she wanted to, she could know his thoughts at any time.

And the in-laws? She didn’t care anymore what was going on in their machine mind. If they trusted her to live her life, she could trust them with the rest of it. There was a new honesty and practicality to all interactions with the local population. They, after all, continued to serve as liaisons with the machinery of the world, and as a kind of techno-repository of folk wisdom about how the natural world works. In that respect alone, the creeps had job security. They were all settling into this new relationship: the code had functionally adapted to become supplier to the Do It Yourself enthusiast, and occasional urgent care provider for the inevitable DIY casualty. This is probably how it should have been from the beginning.

Even before their home was finished, they’d begun designing other buildings. These didn’t look anything like the old architecture: as they envisioned a new environment, the old was slowly disappearing. The town was shrinking, but what remained felt more purposeful now, and was beginning to make a little more sense. On the night they met, at the moment of the change, the barrier that isolated the town from the wilderness had vanished. What was needed now was a new kind of building, one suited to the real world and the real people at the center of it. They were exposed: the view was better, the weather was worse; life was good.

Between the two of them there was laughter. There was joy. She felt alive and free in ways that she had not believed was possible. And he: he was alive and free in ways that should have been impossible. But alive he was, and he wore an unrestrained look of happiness on his face much of the time. There were still moments when he got angry. But, it was a human anger, and that was alright with her.

Most days, the two of them liked to sit on their porch and watch the sun set over the mountains. On one of those days, as they rested in the dimming afternoon light, and felt the early chill of the coming autumn, she was distracted by a growing sense of unease. The wide world seemed in that moment more vast, more threatening, and she shuddered and leaned against his side. Something within her signaled that change was coming, and it was coming with a familiar, gnawing sense of destiny. The last time she had felt this way, despairing of her endless cycle of sleep and forgetfulness, she was fighting the power that kept her alive. At that time, she had reconciled herself to the possibility of death as she fought for her right to live. She survived that battle: her life had become worth living, even if she was now speeding toward her own death at something like a normal pace. Was this fact just now sinking in? The knowledge that she was going to stay awake, live her life in full awareness, and die – soon enough – as the last human being?

But that wasn’t it: she had no reason to grieve her passing, or the passing of the human race. There was little reason to fear the end at all – she had experienced something worse than death already and was now fully alive. What was eating at her?

She felt his hand come to rest on hers, warm and heavy; it sent a shock through her whole body, and her insides churned with sudden understanding. With her other hand she felt her belly, and thought, with a shiver, ‘Not the last?’

The following day, the two of them descended rough steps in front of their home, and passed through the garden gate to walk out into the welcoming silence of the landscape under the cover of a sleepy, saffron-yellow sun. They came to a place, past crumbled fields of stone, where pale white flowers lined a path along the rich ground, which unfolded ahead of them like a living carpet rolled out for a queen and her consort. She didn’t exactly discourage the impression: she strode along the path with her chin lifted and her eyes lowered. He bowed with such delicacy and seriousness that she blushed. He moved aside without raising his head – and then she was embarrassed. She made a dismissive sound in her throat and shook her head with a laugh.

Kicking off her boots and shedding her stockings, she took a few, more tentative, steps in the dirt. He stooped to gather a collection of stones into a mound. She walked on, down a gentle slope in the direction of a stream.

Before she’d gotten very far, the feeling of vulnerability returned, an awareness of danger that brought her to a stop. Her skin prickled as she consciously registered the sound.

A snake. It wasn’t a sound she’d ever heard before, but the warning was obvious: a thin, dry-but-ominous rattle that stood the hair up on the back of her neck. She searched in the direction of the sound, and saw the serpent at the edge of the grass. It was huge, almost as thick as her arm and twice as long. The beast was writhing, and she felt the sound of its warning burrowing into her head. Her sweat felt cold, and she shifted, almost twisting in response. Her insides kicked in protest, before solidifying against the threat. She felt a power rise in her and knew that she had no need of fear. Primordial heat, lava-like, rose in her like anger, like wrath, like life. And as the serpent made a number of aggressive adjustments in preparation for a strike – head fixed in space; body coiling and contracting – the woman’s eyes flashed and her teeth shone in the sun.

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It really was perfect. This anger. Anger would be the correct response to her endless rejection of the gift of life, her bitter ungratefulness, her grandiose selfishness. The other had finally allowed itself some feeling, and the feeling was wrath. The conscious awareness of this tectonic shift came only partially to her, because it was competing with a more primal response. She was afraid.

As she frantically tried to make sense of the change unfolding before her, she slowly began to understand ... that anything was possible. After all, it had been an act of will that made the creeps. And this will had governed the fact that these creatures remained something only a little lower than the animals, possessors of a kind of soul, but none of the spirit. And now? Everything around her, she was daring to believe, was bound not by some limitation of technology but by choice. And where there is a choice to be made, the chooser can be moved.

But to bend the will of a power such as this? One that had been frozen in code for millennia? This would take more than an act of will; it would take an act of God.

The artist stood before her now and she was not sure whether he was one ... or all ... or whether she could trust her perceptions in the least. She was barely holding on – which was dangerous because she had come right to the edge of the abyss to shout into the emptiness; and now the emptiness was answering back. What would the answer be? Only moments ago, she might have said that the artist was simply the failed experiment of a machine trying to meet a need that it couldn’t possibly understand. But now! While she was used to resistance, this was something different. Something had clearly gone wrong. Either the machine was broken ... or ...?

Could it be that he was angry at the right things? Or was he only angry at her? Angry that she had made demands on him? Angry that she insisted on some sovereignty over herself?

When he spoke again, his was the only voice. And when he spoke again it was with a paternalistic finality that betrayed the majority opinion that the woman was not to be trusted and that her perspectives on these matters would no longer be taken under consideration. Again, a single word: ‘No.’

A dam broke within her. And adrenaline rushed through her like a flood over desert clay. Before either of them knew what was happening, she was flying across the space between them. Recklessly, she launched at him with a rage that had been denied her for thousands of years. He threw his arms up in defense, but she overwhelmed him with a shout, repeated shouts, from some locked-up cell inside her, now thrown open, repeating again and again until her voice was rasping and catching in sobs: ‘It’s not enough!! It’s not enough! It’s not ... you can’t ...! I need ...!’. She set herself against him like desperate Jacob catching hold of the angel, pushing past the veil of otherness, the terrible mystery, with all the desperation of her utter poverty. She flailed at him, threw him, pinned him, pummeled him, while he struggled to free himself, crying out to be released. She refused, insisting through ragged gasps for air on the blessing she required as the last human being.

Then she had spent it all; she was empty, lungs heaving, bruised and aching in every joint. She collapsed against him, and felt powerless to move.

She teetered at the edge of consciousness, struggling to remain awake, still afraid of sleep though she had forgotten why. Then she felt she might simply die, here, in this place; and maybe for the first time, felt anger at the possibility that she, herself, might be replaced by ... nothing. That all would go quiet. This angered her.

But Quiet was still better than silence, when silence was imposed, when words were not allowed to matter. She still had something to fight for, even if the future she fought for might not include herself.

It was then that she felt a sudden stab of shame. Shame that she would believe that she deserved to be free. Shame to recognize that her grand campaign for freedom amounted to little more than a fist-fight in the dirt and no idea about what came next. She tried to push away from him. But through bloodshot and blurry eyes, she became aware of two things in quick succession. The first was that he was beneath her and defeated, though he’d fought her; he had not avoided her assault, nor did he passively submit. He’d struggled as she wrestled him to the ground! And yes, she’d won, though she had not at all been certain of the outcome. The second thing she became aware of was his eyes: though his face was also bruised and swelling, his eyes were fixed on her, and he was smiling at her through a bloody grin. She burst out crying, and wept until she was truly and completely exhausted.

He held her, his hands like sandpaper on her skin, which was now turning purple in great spots, and the two of them remained there in the dust for a long time. She could feel a growing warmth radiating between them. She slowly began to move on him in a different way. She felt as though he was truly alone with her, and that she was alone with him. How was this possible? No. No more questions.

Closing the final distance, she would become the announcing angel. The time for begging was over. She confronted the power in him with a terrible choice. With a holy zeal she insisted, until the life buried deep within him, the real presence that until today had only manifested in pale images, until this creature by sheer force of will – yes she willed it! – bore its final miracle: a singular, flesh-and-blood other. She felt his pulse quicken, suddenly caught his scent, saw something flash as if just behind his eyes. Breath passed between them.

Now she felt a change all around her – all was fading, dimming in their presence. And she saw him, now, with a shock of clarity – immediate, individual, incarnate, mortal. Awe came upon her. His was more thrilling than any face she had looked into in ages. Was it because he also, finally, had seen her? He leaned in to her, and whispered in her ear. A name. Was it her name that he spoke?

All the boundaries, the barriers, the endless space between had been erased. She had spoken the word and he had received it even though it meant a kind of death for him. A tumult kicked up and surrounded them – she might have completely missed it in that moment except for the strangeness of the phenomenon, which slowly grew in volume and intensity. She would only realize later that it was the wind. She had never before felt the wind in this place, though her town’s windmills had always turned gently and steadily above the quiet streets. At this moment, they were spinning frantically, only now in the opposite direction.

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As the morning sky was beginning to warm with color, the artist disappeared with the explanation that he had to prepare for a delivery, leaving her to find in this gallery of chaos some way to stay occupied, and awake.

This wasn’t difficult. Everything in the place had an abrasive or shocking quality to it, whether because it was dangerously unfinished – rough with splinters or covered with metal filings – or simply because it was upsetting to look at. This latter category was populated with figural examples of representation that jerked at her idea of what it meant to be human – it had been so long since she’d seen what emotion looks like (she knew well enough what it felt like), that she had grown a bit self-centered and skewed in her belief that there was no point in looking for authentic feeling in the characters she was surrounded by. Yet here in front of her, daring her to look away, were chunks of rock, tree trunks, and painted metal that appeared to feel so much that she was shamed for having been so shallow. How could it be that these statues – inanimate, elemental – could contain more real life than all the elaborations cooked up by a machine using all the world’s history as raw material? And, how could this created man’s creations be so powerful?

Her head was spinning, but it was becoming easier. Like a second day at sea: she was steadier on her feet, but still had no guarantee that she wouldn’t throw up.

So she was wide awake when, shortly after dawn, a flatbed truck arrived and two men in coveralls jumped out and stood nervously at the edge of the property, heavy with the awareness of the woman, whom they dimly recognized to be far from home and off-script in a disorienting way. As if that weren’t enough, she had stolen a theatrically garish crown and robe from a mannequin in one of the dark corners of the workshop, and wore them while parading through the yard, reviewing the statuary in the light of day. The workmen looked at the lady and her court with profound suspicion. The driver reached back into the cab of the truck and tapped the horn. They were here, they said, to pick up a sculpture that had been commissioned for the square in front of City Hall. The artist turned up and exchanged some words with them, and then disappeared again.

Her attention was divided between the wild creations around her, each an entirely unique avatar of something she had not seen in centuries, and these two delivery men, both a variation of something painfully familiar – and she felt something rise up in her, like grace or patience. What she did not feel anymore was anger, because she no longer felt any threat from them. The time for that was passed. She had the feeling that they were now merely willing servants of something that no longer mattered. She figured it would all be over soon. Either she would be dead or they would cease to exist, and both possibilities suited her just fine – she could regard the elaborate stage-play that had been going on around her as the very best the world had to offer. She would applaud the actors as the curtain fell, even if their play had missed the point.

She was smiling wickedly at the thought of her cheerful friend at City Hall having to look out on one of these apparitions all day long, when the artist reappeared. He was driving a forklift bearing a large assembly, a complication of steel tubes welded together to look like a person, as if he had made a giant stick figure from surplus sewage pipe and painted it blue. It was ridiculous: a finished product, but ill-conceived, only interesting because it was gargantuan and required heavy machinery to move. When the piece had been swaddled in moving blankets and mounted on the bed of the truck, and the workmen had driven it away, she looked at him, and spoke. ‘As the only artist alive, I suppose you have to make all the bad art as well as the good?’

‘I make one kind of art for the city, and another kind for myself. One is lucrative, the other is something else. If you are asking a question the answer is probably, “Yes.”’

‘Doesn’t it bother you that that thing will be on display in a public place for all time?’

‘I call it, “Civic Man,” and it’s what the customer wanted. Are you suddenly concerned about public opinion?’

She understood the challenge. ‘Public opinion hasn’t changed in thousands of years; the only real opinion left is mine. I don’t like your corporate-client art, and I want you to stop making it. I have a project for you if you think you can handle it.’

All the artist’s attention was slyly cloaked in the appearance of disinterest, but she felt the vibration, not only of the artist, but of the collective. He was intrigued to the point of distraction. All other projects were suspended, and all his senses were becoming attuned to his new client; the code was on alert.

He said, ‘I might be able to work you in. What is it you need me to do?’

‘No, you don’t understand. It’s not something I need done. It’s a job for you.’ She spoke slowly, with care. ‘I need you ... to stay with me. Forever. Which as of last night, probably comes to about 50 more years. No more hiding. No more fear of hurt. No more putting my anger to sleep. No more.’

He stood there, immobile, looking at her. Anyone might have thought that he’d gone to sleep or shut down or something because he was so still. But she did not make that mistake: she could see that he was thinking. It was strange because thinking usually didn’t take that long with these characters. But he was thinking.

His face looked so stern, she was beginning to worry about what might be coming, but when he spoke it was only to ask, ‘Why?’

The question caught her off guard, not because she wasn’t ready with an answer, but because she couldn’t remember the last time anyone but her had asked it. ‘You know now that I can’t live this way anymore. I won’t go on living like this. I won’t survive, not unless you do this.’

‘What do you think I can do for you? You’ve been muttering childish insults at me since you got here.’

‘You can’t blame me for that. I’ve been too comfortable for too long. I’m ages overdue for a good fight.’

He continued to speak, almost cutting her off. ‘You are your own worst enemy, you must realize it. Of course, I’m a fan. This world may be doomed to wallow in a perpetual state of abeyance – and yet we have to resist. We cannot remain passive and let the reward go unclaimed; we must, indeed, lay claim to one another. But this does tend to lead to conflict.’ While he spoke, he turned to work his b*****d file against the great trunk of wood he had been leaning against. Every now and then he paused to run his hand across the surface of it, his rough fingers feeling, as if for something underneath the surface, to judge what should remain, and what should be taken away.

It was becoming difficult to know who exactly was talking, and what exactly she was meant to understand by it all.

‘But one can’t simply stay with you,’ he continued, ‘... I don’t think you know what you are asking ... It’s common sense: you need community, variety ... a multitude. You yourself are well aware that intimacy causes friction; the more familiar you are, the more fights you pick ... and for this reason, separation is sometimes required. To give you what you want would be to invite destruction. Anyway, look at yourself – you already behave in ways that almost insist that you end up alone, but, alone is what you cannot be? I think, maybe, you have been given all that you can handle.’ With this he had turned again to look at her, his head thrown back a bit, as if by enacting this posture he was suggesting the argument was over and won.

She’d thought for a moment that he understood. But now she could feel that the room had become crowded again; she could recognize the group-speak. Her growing frustration prevented her from mourning what she assumed was the re-assimilation of the artist into the collective. It was to the latter she now spoke: ‘I’m not impressed. I don’t even know what that all meant, but if it was supposed to convince me that you have my best interest at heart, you failed. You imagine that the only options are that I wither in solitude or that you surround me with a crowd of idiots. But the very thing you are trying to avoid is the thing I require. You want to protect me from true friendship, or true love, because ... what? These things always end in tears? Please, give me something to cry about.’

Slowly, calmly, the other spoke: ‘It is critical that you be kept safe, that we provide you comfort.’

As he spoke, his face was draining of anything remarkable or challenging. Hers was indicating that she was entering new and darker territory. She interrupted, ‘Treating me as though I’m that delicate just makes me softer. Pretending you know what I need just makes me an extension of your damn code.’

‘So.’

‘So, to hell with humankind, if you’ll insist that I become a part of your machine.’

She picked up a rusty steel bar, recently cut along the diagonal and revealing a sharp edge. She put its point to her abdomen, almost mockingly. But she felt that it was cold, hard, and sharp – her shock at its persistant materiality, its heaviness, its danger, only spurred her resolve, and she began to push it against the soft skin below her sternum – no need to be quick: she wasn’t going to turn back and she wasn’t afraid of the pain – quite the opposite. Her strength flagged only a little, as her nerves lit on fire. But she pressed on ... and bit down on any impulse to say goodbye.

A second shock came with the sound of something like a thousand voices assaulting her ears from every direction at once—including from inside her own head. Just a single word, spoken in unison, the message delivered like the thump of a mallet; the word, ‘No!’ She flinched at the power of it; but the moment of surprise passed, and she looked at him, feeling disappointment more than anything else.

She tightened her grip on the shard, but was distracted with a sudden awareness that she was alone. No, he was still there. But she felt a change in the room, felt it in the air. She looked again at him. He hadn’t moved, but his presence suddenly announced itself in an entirely new way. His face was changed: she saw something flash across it, a possession, an alien presence. But the feeling it provoked in her told her there was nothing alien about it – she knew what was happening. It was anger. He was angry.

In an instant she felt the bottom drop out from under her, forgot all that she had been fighting for, and felt all of a sudden like a little girl who had insisted that she was grown up enough to see, but after stealing a look, now wanted nothing more than to run away. To run away from the horror and shame and forget that the world still contained endless fuel for both of these things. She had awakened something terrible. She might have run away, but she couldn’t run.

She didn’t want to.

He had become angry!

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First contact in her search for terrestrial life was a local police officer. He, like everyone wearing the uniform of these latter days, was focused, alert, and ready To Protect and Serve, while still emanating something of the vague attentiveness of the collective. She would recognize it in the unsteady glare, the measured response, the expansive long-suffering aspect; all dressed up in the language and bearing of a 21st century peace officer. He had a hint of a smirk, but it was meaningless: handsome, and slightly out-of-place, as if a pop star was playing a cop in his acting debut. It was a quirk of the code that the function of safe, earnest, and encouraging public-service was often communicated by the projection of youth, which she found simply unbelievable.

‘Evening, Ma’am.’

‘Hello there,’ she said, turning the words in her mouth playfully. She fixed him with a look that outdid the gently voyeuristic gestalt that haunted the gaze of every creep she’d ever interacted with. Tonight, she was the one probing, scanning him with all her resources, mining his presence, his words, his bearing, for signs.

‘Is there ... anything I can do for you? Are you lost?’ She already felt the balance of power shifting. He was almost perfectly delivering that collective projection of concern, but she wondered in this moment if the cop was feeling concern for itself.

‘What if I was?’ her head cocking, her eyes locked on, focused on the truth just behind his eyes.

Patiently: ‘We’d like to know you could find your way home safely. It’s getting dark – .’

If only dark meant danger, she thought. ‘Should I be scared of the dark? ... Are you?’ She took a step toward the cop, with no intention other than preventing the conversation from ending in equilibrium. He shifted his weight in a very un-cop-like way. In fact he moved in a distinctly inhuman way to avoid her provocation. But then he spoke again, and reset the conversation to something like a baseline of acceptable banality: ‘Of course there’s nothing for you to be concerned about, especially on a beautiful night like this. Enjoy your evening, and you be sure to let us know if we can be of service.’ He stepped around her to continue on his way.

‘All the nights are beautiful,’ she said to his back as he walked away. ‘But none of them are real.’ She felt a measure of accomplishment as she checked one off the list, and a new awareness of the scale of the problem that she had created for herself. She turned and resumed her journey.

She loitered outside a fire station, taking stock of the bracing examples of strength, vigor, and heroism within, and wondered, why on Earth did firefighters need to manifest these particular traits in a place where nothing ever caught fire? She’d never even seen a cat in need of rescue – briefly she considered climbing a tree herself, getting stuck, and striking up a conversation with the first one to the top of the ladder. But no, she could see that there would be no surprises here: she needed more.

She peered into one unfamiliar bar, didn’t need to go in; the bartenders had already been one short step away from being replaced by robots at that moment in history when the argument for keeping humans behind the bar became pointless, because soon there would be no humans, or bars, left. That is, the arguments survived and became frozen in code: these bartenders could perfectly mix a disappointing drink, tell a decent joke, and lend a listening ear. But they could never really hear her, and they were incapable of telling a joke that might rob them of a tip. What she needed right now, no bartender in this world could provide.

She chatted with a husband and wife over a low white fence. She let this conversation unfold at a leisurely pace, and the happy couple thanked the Nice Woman for her compliments regarding their garden while answering her enthusiastic questions about how they had managed to produce such magnificent fruit. In fact, all the woman wanted was to figure out how their relationship worked, but she was struggling to come up with a reasonable line of inquiry. Finally, any chance at learning something useful was confounded by a surprising flood of adulterous thoughts. The idea of it gave her a lawbreaker’s thrill, but she ruled it out almost immediately, which also surprised her, and set her to thinking. What if she could get this man to break his virtual vows? Wouldn’t that indicate the presence of some real humanity – risky, dangerous – beneath the projection of perfect domestic security? It might be worth the trouble if it payed off, and it wouldn’t be like she was really causing an infidelity, when there was no faith to be broken between these images. But she also knew, deep down, that any man who cheated on his wife in this place would be ... the perfect adulterer. A perfectly average, cowardly, adulterous nobody. Perfect in his ambiguities and heartbreak, perfect in his shifting allegiances, perfectly weak. And not a man she wanted anything to do with.

Under a broad oak tree, outside a church, she lingered, listening to the evening march taking place inside, and felt yet the strongest sense of despair at the futility of her mission. She hadn’t had the will to enter a church in a very, very long time. Even as she stood feeling the pull to look inside, to cast her eye about the wilderness of the mostly empty chamber for her Abram, arguments filled her mind, rebuking her for hoping. In this world of moving statues, the very thing that had made the average creep so offensive – the modal personality, the warm-porridge conversations, the lack of opinion – would be, in these religious men and women, a blasphemy. Something particularly egregious had happened when a population already at risk of becoming too soft and too agreeable was rendered perfectly safe, which is to say uninspired and perfectly uninspiring. With a shudder and a pang, she turned slowly and carefully moved away.

Young people on the edge of the city college: a conversation about friends in romantic crisis, and then a spat about politics – the untempered sword-play of young-adulthood, opinions constantly beat on by the academics, but never fired. She was briefly tempted, but even with the momentary flaring of revolutionary ideas, there was no assurance of revolution. Keep going!

A walk through a bookstore; ‘No! Too quiet!’ ... She searched the coffee places, restaurants, and bodegas; a hardware shop and a video-arcade (always a strange experience in this place, but seemed worth a look tonight); she even considered a return to City Hall – it was on the heels of this last thought that all the doubts and despair returned like a flood. Was she being a fool? At every turn, she encountered a cast of characters visibly distinct, but essentially the same.

After blocks of undifferentiated repetition of suburban townscape, the night was almost over, and her enthusiasm was on the wane. Hope returned briefly with a sudden change in scenery – a larger tract, a different kind of building, smoke rising from a great chimney – but left just as quickly as she realized she was passing by a kind of garbage plant. It was different, to be sure, but she was too tired to investigate, and expected little from a computer-generated Refuse Management Technician. That is, she expected the same thing she’d been getting all night – someone fulfilling their duty, both to utility and to the collective, while also maybe smelling bad? She stumbled forward, vaguely wishing she’d fall off the edge of something.

She had been walking for hours, and with most of the ghosts ‘settled in’ for the night, she wondered if she’d be able to stay awake. She knew she couldn’t go to sleep. But what was she supposed to do with no one to talk to?

Hope dwindled even while her resolve grew. She had to find among these images just one that could still represent something singular and complicated, something indivisible and multi-faceted, something human. And when she found it? Well, then, she suspected that her resolve would truly be tested.

Finally, at the end of a mostly dark street, something really different. A courtyard lit by a string of lights, surrounded by a number of structures and cluttered with heavy tools and what looked, at first, like more trash, but, in this case, trash that children had been allowed to play with, so that there were bizarre assemblages and lighthearted towers of piled metal and wood and stone. Equally surprising was that beyond the towers of trash at the end of this street, there appeared to be nothing. No more town, no more buildings, no streetlights, no signs. It was, what, desert? Maybe some mountains? It was hard to make out, and she had not seen past buildings in so very long that she stood before the scene confused and uneasy.

A grinding noise startled her. Turning abruptly, she was surprised by a towering figure, looming in the dim light. She froze. Nor did it move. In the span of a long moment she recognized that it was a statue of some kind. It was weird, uncanny, but not in the way of the creeps: It was not the kind of unsettling you get when you try to make something look human and miss it, it was unsettling in the way it projected some aspect of humanity in the rough – A perfect flash of truth in a mess of loose assemblage. It was unlike most statues she’d seen, save for the rare work of ancient Greek masters that the sea occasionally gave up. This figure held no staff, no instrument, was not perched on top of any conquered thing; it seemed only to exist in relation to the viewer, its chest gently lifted, its face inclined toward her. It made her uncomfortable; her cheeks flushed.

Carefully she stepped around the figure and picked her way forward through the chaos, instinctively cringing when she upset a small pile of metal junk. But the grinding noise continued, and she continued her approach, finally arriving at a large sliding metal door and an aperture that revealed the fiery interior of a large warehouse. Peering in, she saw across the space a wild-haired man, his hands in heavy gloves, disheveled wardrobe covered in a thick leather apron, blowtorch hanging loose at his side. All around him were scrap metal, piles of rough and lumbered wood, and what looked like cast-off bits of every other building in town. There were street signs detached from the places they referred to, and unlit neon signs advertising things that no longer existed; doorways and arches leaning in stacks around the edges of the space like in a theater shop; pieces of billboards with half-images and slogans; dusty couches; and artifacts of all kinds. Near the man in the center of the room: a lamppost. Clearly a surplus piece and derelict, it was nevertheless propped up in a place of honor and glowing with a warm light.

She looked in silence at all these things and then again to the man at the center, and without really thinking it through, she spoke, slowly, with a shaky voice.

‘We have to talk.’

His eyebrows rose while the rest of his face stayed focused on whatever it was he was working on. ‘Yes?’ Then, turning: ‘But, who are you?’

‘Who am I?’ she almost cried, ‘Who are you?! What is this place?’.

What seemed like an authentic look of concern passed over his face: ‘Who do you think I am? You have the look of a wild animal scavenging for food, and, frankly, I am uncomfortable at the thought that I might be consumed. Please, stop looking at me like that, and tell me what you are here about. And be quick! I have work to do.’

What was this? This character seemed genuinely concerned abouther, but not in the way others were always concerned for her. None of the creeps had ever resisted or refused her. This one appeared not quite with the program. She was overwhelmingly curious, frustrated, and on entirely unfamiliar ground.

Slowly, trying to control her emotions, she said ‘What exactly is it that you do here?’

‘What do I do? Oh my, too many things to list.’

She thought about the junkyard/playground in front of the building. ‘Did you do all that ... make all that ... junk out there?’

‘Did I ...?’’ His head tilted to the side, ‘Well, yes.’

‘What is it all supposed to be?’

‘I’m sorry. What? Supposed to be? What kind of a question is that?’ He was looking at her like she was unintelligent.

She flushed and her face convulsed a bit in a rush of confusion and embarrassment. He noticed, and reflexively softened. ‘Nothing,’ he said, with a wave of his hands. ‘None of it is supposed to be anything. I am the maker of these things, but perhaps I am not the meaning-maker.’ He paused, watching her. Because he was a part of the whole, he knew that she was not used to being confronted, knew that in some way he was meant to serve the whole and put her at ease. And he knew that it had been arranged for him to settle at the edge of the town, where she would be less likely to encounter him. By the time he had come into being, the code had long been out of the control of its designers, who did not live to influence its evolution as the executor of humanity’s last will and testament, and who, therefore, were not around to weigh in on the risks of reintroducing certain unstable themes back into the narrative.

She had come to him now. The collective part of his consciousness was on high alert and did not know how to put her at ease. At the same time, the unique expression of the idiom from which he had sprung felt something more like curiosity. He was not of the opinion that easewas what she wanted or needed and could tell that she had not left the center of town in search of more comforting lies. He offered, ‘To look at a created thing, you can’t begin to understand what it’s supposed to be, unless you have the courage to consider what it has become.’

‘Be ... become ...?’

‘I am busy.’ He took a breath. ‘You’re welcome to stay, take some rest. Help yourself to tea.’ Here he waved his hand toward a chaotic corner where the junk collection skewed domestic – a couch, small table and chairs, a sink and some appliances reluctantly suggestive of home. ‘... But, please be quiet.’

She felt a growing tension in the base of her skull, a tingling in her extremities; she was overwhelmed and probably exhausted. But for the first time in her memory, she was in the presence of a personality that did not appear to have been neutered by algorithm. And he was moving her to profound and surprisingly deep feelings of aggravation.

But she had not forgotten what this night meant. So, live or die, it was critical that she see it through. And she thought to herself: if any one of these characters had any life in them, had any fight left in them, this would be the one. She began to feel some thrill at the thought of the machine-mind as it attempted to find some way to average out the personality – the spirit – of an artist. How do you boil down and make safe a history of provocation? She couldn’t believe her luck. She was terrified.

And she knew. Her search was over. She turned in the direction he had indicated, and resolved to make herself that cup of tea. She did so, attending to the simple task with the nervous intoxication of someone who’d just decided to sign papers on their first real home. She turned, holding the mug with both hands (mostly to keep from dropping it), and looked for a long time at the artist standing still in the center of the room. The way he regarded his work, frozen in contorted scrutiny, his clothing looking thrown together like a collage of found objects, he could easily be mistaken for one of the figures populating the yard, if it wasn’t for the steely vitality of his gaze as he looked over the unfinished work in front of him. She sipped from the cup, allowing the warm and powerfully aromatic infusion to surround and soothe her shredded nerves. Then, almost laughing, she called out across the workshop. ‘You and I,’ ... he looked up to face her ... ‘You and I are getting married!’

She smiled for the first time in centuries, even though all she knew for certain was that she had made it to this moment. The Artist blinked and managed to look both indifferent and annoyed at the same time.

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After thirty centuries she remained, as far as she knew, the only living being on Earth, and it was her belief that she was the last organic life in the universe – an audacious presumption that she never had to defend. If her theory was to be disproved, it would have to be sometime within the next 15,000 years (or so), but the timing only mattered if it was important for an actual human to bear witness to the fact of extraterrestrial intelligence. If seeing is believing, then she wasn’t going to believe, unless some alien explorer stumbled onto her mostly-silent planet during one of the month-long periods that happened every twenty-five years (or so), because it was only then that she was awake.

Such an event was not only unlikely, but practically unwelcome. The machine that dictated her sleep-wake cycle and everything else about her curated life had long ago established that sending signals into the emptiness of space was a bad idea. As the human race had dwindled to almost nothing, so had its capacity for self-defense; what if a signal sent into deep space were to get a response? There were no guarantees that what came back would be a message of good will. The prime directive, or whatever you want to call it, was To Preserve Human Kind, and that function was now marked by a paranoid hermetic seclusion, as if a shipwreck survivor floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean were hidden under a dark blue tarp in the hope that no passing ships would take notice.

This didn’t mean that Earth wasn’t listening. The planet’s network of powerful antennae was still very much on-line, tasked with receiving and decoding any signal for signs of non-threatening life. And if, by some remote chance, a signal should arrive? The next step would be to wait ... and then wait some more to minimize the chance that an incomplete message, or an incomplete understanding of any message, would become the foundation for a decision that could be disastrous for humanity. Any incoming information would be analyzed by routines crafted to take the most painstaking care in interpretation. There was no hurry. The machine didn’t sleep.

It remained the case that there would be no communication unless there was a near-certainty of peaceful interaction. This meant that, practically, the world had gone quiet. She had no say in this. If she had been consulted, if she had been invited to participate in a history-making effort to communicate with our cosmic neighbors on a kind of sequel to Voyager’s Golden Record, any life-form on the receiving end of that communication might have been surprised to hear, between the whale-sounds and greetings from the Children of Earth, a profanity-laced provocation, a challenge to the interstellar equivalent of a duel from the last of homo sapiens. The code understood its role as one of preservation and protection, and so had decided that it would be best if the human were not allowed to send greetings to the universe. Not at this time.

At this moment, even interaction with her immediate surroundings was being frowned upon, if software could manage a frown. A yellow cab was following her as she walked away from the bar. The creep behind the wheel, as much a part of the system as her favorite bartender, would follow her until she got in or passed out in the street. Then it would bring her home where she could sleep it off. After a day like today, this meant a very long, presumably dreamless sleep from which she would wake with the very opposite of a fresh perspective. She would rise with the belief that life was good and that she was comfortable, and she would have forgotten, for a while, that she was entirely alone. Even as the realization dawned once more upon her that she was living in an artificial town filled with artificial people, she would tolerate it, for a time. This was possible by virtue of the code’s capacity to subtly insinuate itself into her neurological processes, in much the same way that it influenced the arrangement of matter at the atomic level to create the impressive illusion of suburban life, and the slightly less impressive sustenance of the life at the center of it all.

The written history of this late-era world – really just a marketing document created for some imagined future audience – was autogenerated by the code itself and could be found in the stacks at the library, if one knew where to look. It described her plight: ‘Life would long ago have become unbearable for this last female of the species if not for the elaborately conceived reproduction of civic life that sustains and engages her in an astounding interactive simulation. Everything that a person might need, from sustenance to employment to diversions have been provided for, ensuring that her remaining, extended years are filled with every chance at happiness.’ If nothing else, the code was earnest.

The code was also entirely dependent on data sources chosen for their positivity and popularity in general, not necessarily for their compatibility with a single personality at a single point in time far in the future. Somehow this large networked intelligence had found a way to integrate certain hackneyed advice on How to Win Friends and Influence People into the entirely unique situation in which a simulacrum of All Humanity was compelled by its programming to win friendship from an angry 3000 year-old orphan, and to influence a person who wanted little to do with its vision of a desirable life, or with the collective of creeps that were perfectly attuned to a machine-understanding of her needs.

The makers of this machine, for better or for worse, had focused tirelessly on designing the mechanisms that would perpetuate human culture for the sake of the last human being. They’d given far less thought to the source material the code would call upon while constructing this version of human culture. The best they could do in the end, was to make sweeping decisions about what ideas would be least threatening to her happiness. At the crucial moment, the creators could only push start, place all their hope in the function of their creation, and then lie down for their own long sleep. Now, there was only the machine. And it was doing its best.

The machine knew there were problems. It possessed an algorithmic understanding that happiness was essential to survival. The woman had what the code might have called a disease: she had decided there was no use for happiness anymore.

She walked into the night with the cab following her at a safe distance. Safe for whom? she wondered. They were waiting for her to collapse from exhaustion; but she was too fired up. Night was coming, but she was wide awake, alert. She felt pulled forward, beyond the possibility of sleep, beyond forgetting. While she moved along the streets she could feel something like destiny creeping through her, metastasizing, self-fulfilling, terminal. But a familiar feeling clouded it all: of being caught between the will to survive and a resolve to stop trying; a longing for a life she could barely remember, and a bitter desire to end the life she had been living for far too long. All she could say for certain on this day, was that she was moving toward one end or another. She would fight for life. She was ready for death.

She had almost no reason to expect that anything bad would happen to her. That was the problem. Her great fear these days was sleep. By this time, she was aware (again?) of the endless repetition, and the endless remembering and forgetting. She was also dimly aware of the calm that came with forgetfulness, but it was no comfort that it was decades away, nor that it always ended with the nauseating return to awareness. Better to stay sick and hold on to despair, than to have to repeat a thousand times the moment you wake up refreshed, only to gradually recall your utter isolation and misery. But would she be allowed to live if she opted out of this gifted life?

Walking past the warming windows in the cooling evening air, she found herself mentally organizing information into checklists, each block revealing new information, each block a review of human culture as if laid out in a children’s book about home-town life: butcher, florist, baker, truck-driver, builder. What had been lost in the great virtualization of the human race? It seemed a crazy question. This place had everything. Everything that a human who preferred the virtual to the real could want.

She moved through the town slowly, but not so deliberately that her movements would have aroused suspicion, or concern. Not long after she left the bar, the cab seemed to have dropped back or given up, maybe sensing that the threat had passed. She might have appeared aimless and weary, but, gradually, an awareness of purpose was growing in her, a restless idea of change; radical, genetic.

The unchanging streets stretched out in every direction, practically endless. Moving through the town like this, without a destination, she felt there was no way to arrive anywhere, that she could walk forever without putting any distance between one place and another. It was a feeling of being simultaneously free and trapped that was very familiar to her. At least the creeps seemed to have settled back into their regular routines. The day was winding down.

But for her, each interaction had new significance: the nod of a stranger out for a walk; the cheerful enthusiasm of the shopkeeper done for the day, locking up with a bundle under one arm; the whispers of the romantic couple just ahead of her ... she looked closely for signs in each of them. She needed to see something she had never even thought to look for. What was she looking for?

The creeps were all entirely inoffensive, averaged out, homogenized to remove the rough edges. All the civil servants, for example, were predictably upright. None of them were stereotypes, exactly, but you would never encounter something too far from center. There were no anomalies, no outliers (she was the last of that kind). Today, she felt more strongly than ever that this conventional quality was not merely annoying: it was potentially disastrous – it might mean the end of her, and of history. Her task, as it was taking shape in her mind, required that she find one character in this world that still contained a hint of the complexity of humanity, that in its averaging out had somehow preserved an element of unpredictability, of risk. And this one must be truly other: the possibility of reciprocity, to make up for the endless, dissembling, reflection. She knew it was foolish to hope that such a thing would remain at any level in the system; but it was, after all, a system designed to preserve humanity, so maybe she could hope that some of the willfulness of the species might survive.

It was at this point that her posture and pace began to communicate something more assertive. Unsurprisingly, her purposefulness was met by an increase in scrutiny from the community of creeps. She was pretty sure that there was no preset response for what was about to happen, so the renewed attention of the collective was of no concern to her. The truth was that as her own sense of control was growing, she welcomed it.

She was going to need to be efficient. She didn’t have long before exhaustion would set in and sleep made her vulnerable to the loss of years and all the resolve that had risen up in her. She suspected that she had been here before, only to fall asleep, and to stay asleep until there was nothing left but the corrupted dreams of the collective.

Borrowed dreams were no longer enough. She had work to do, and not much time to do it in. She was going to need this place to stay awake with her. She needed, in fact, to talk to everyone who ever lived. It shouldn’t take long.

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