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you?”

  “Specialists who work with children.”

  Abeiron frets. “Does anyone specialise in people like that?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “When there’s only one of them. Last survivors. When you couldn’t save the rest of the species.”

  Asha thinks about it for a moment. “No. We don’t have any specialists for that. There aren’t very many of them. Last survivors, I mean.”

  “But they do exist?”

  “Yes. Two, I think. Maybe three.”

  “What’s it like for them?”

  “It’s hard. But they were older when it happened. Children are much more adaptable. This will become his world. We’ll be his people. He won’t be alone.”

  Abeiron looks out of the window: they’re still far above the planet. The disc spreads out below them, a circle of green and blue and white. Pale cyan wraps around a coastline, signifying algal blooms and life thriving below. Abeiron only remembers such things in the whispered dreams that come from the souls of the dead.

  He looks back at Asha with tears in his eyes, and nods his acceptance.

  “Don’t say anything,” he says.

  “I won’t,” she agrees.

  EVACUATION CAR: Agvarterheer Column, 2,000km above sea level

  HD y272.m9.w4.d3

  Another funeral, in the makeshift temple aboard the evacuation lift: but this time there are only two attendees, for there are only two Yenoma left. Abeiron sits in a medical chair, his head strapped into place, though he can still speak with his own voice. Mel sits with him, and the other places are taken by the counsellors and medics who’ve been watching helplessly as a human race goes extinct. The only people they can comfort now are each other.

  As the last one who knows the litany, Abeiron says the words of remembrance as best he can. But his own death is near, and the weight of souls is almost too much to bear.

  “And they who have not died–”

  “not died yet”

  “They who have not died–”

  “why me? why did it have to be me?”

  “They, they live on in us–”

  “all dead! all of us dead! what was the point?”

  “We are all one soul–”

  “Mel! Mel! Where are you?”

  “Mummy!” shouts the boy as Abeiron’s eyes roll up in his head and he slumps down in his chair, slipping free of the brace around his head. A doctor runs to him while a nurse holds Mel back. The boy screams and sobs in his arms.

  But Abeiron is not finished yet. Even as a doctor rushes to him, he pushes himself back up in his chair with one good arm. After a moment to recover and with his head lolling to one side, he goes on.

  “We are all one soul,” he says. The doctor steps back. “And all souls… shall be one, when the trumpet calls them… to eternal rest.” He looks at his son. “All souls… shall be one.”

  He slumps again. The doctor holds an instrument against his forehead. Abeiron struggles to bring his eyes up to look at him. “Is it… time?”

  The doctor glances at the instrument and nods.

  “Mel…?” he says. Asha comes up, and Abeiron sees the concerned look on her face. “Just want… to see him…” Asha nods, and motions the nurse to bring the boy closer. Tears wash down Mel’s face as he comes near his dying father.

  Abeiron looks upon his son for the last time, but has no words. Only a smile. And then he waves him away.

  “No!” screams Mel. “No! Mummy!”

  Abeiron’s eyes fall shut, though he still breathes for the moment. The nurse tries to pull the boy away. But Mel fights and twists, and something tears from his sweater.

  He breaks free and runs to his father, jumping onto the chair before anyone can stop him, pressing temple to temple as he’d seen when his mother died and passed her soul to his father.

  Asha tries to move him, but the doctor shouts: “No! It’s started… you can’t touch them or they’ll both…”

  The boy clings to his father and drinks every mind of his species from him.

  AGVARTERHEER PORT: Mexiana Island, Mouths of the Amazon

  HD y272.m9.w4.d4

  The light of a fresh day washes across the port city, laid out beneath the massive height of four elevator strands and the anchor column leading back up to the Counterweight. A transit railcar runs out beyond the carriage yards and the freight portal and the hotels and the clubs, heading east to where the island meets the Atlantic.

  A small crowd of IU dignitaries are there to meet the last survivor of his species as he hobbles out of the railcar, leaning on a walking stick cut in half to match his height. Asha accompanies him and offers a hand, but he waves her away and limps on, step by step, until he comes to the water’s edge.

  Old minds look out of a child’s eyes. Beyond the quayside they see the endless blue of ocean, whipped up into a light chop by a breeze coming in from the south.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” asks a woman the child does not know, but whom Asha recognises as the head of the Refugee Service.

  “You can stop asking,” says the boy. “Oh, look at that…”

  They all look out at the sea. It’s still freshwater this close to the river, but a faint smell of distant salt comes in on the breeze. Clouds gather in billows and promise rain.

  He takes a lungful of the air. “Its so clean,” he says, with a little heartbroken smile. “Just like I remember… just like…”

  He falls, and does not rise again.

  Afterword

  This is a prequel of sorts to my novel The Last Man on Earth Club. If you want to find out what happens to the last survivors of dead worlds who don’t die as soon as they reach Hub, that's where to look.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Harry for spurring me to write this in the first place.

  Thanks to Kovid Goyal for Calibre, his excellent e-reading and conversion software, and to Guido Henkel for his invaluable blog series on e-book formatting.

  About the Author

  Paul R. Hardy is really a filmmaker, but he likes to write in his spare time. He's made eighteen short films, won a BBC Drama Award, co-wrote & co-produced an independent SF film called Triple Hit and also wrote Filming on a Microbudget, a guidebook for making short films. He currently makes local history DVDs, while writing science fiction whenever he can find a spare moment. The Last Man on Earth Club was published in 2011, to be followed by All That I See or Seem in 2012 (or possibly 2013, depending on how many spare moments he gets).

  The Last Man on Earth Club

  Six people are gathered for a therapy group deep in the countryside. Six people who share a unique and terrible trauma: each one is the last survivor of an apocalypse.

  Each of them was rescued from a parallel universe where humanity was wiped out. They’ve survived nuclear war, machine uprisings, mass suicide, the reanimated dead, and more. They’ve been given sanctuary on the homeworld of the Interversal Union and placed with Dr. Asha Singh, a therapist who works with survivors of doomed worlds.

  To help them, she’ll have to figure out what they’ve been through, what they’ve suffered, and the secrets they’re hiding. She can’t cure them of being the last man or woman on Earth. But she can help them learn to live with the horrors they survived.

  ‘This one won't leave you with the warm and fuzzies, but it will leave you thinking, and for me that's the mark of great science fiction.’ – Sift Book Reviews

  170,000 words