17 Stories About the End of the World Read online

  “That’s it?” he said, finally.

  “That’s it? You lump! I’ve invented the steam engine! Can’t you see what this means?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Ankylosaurus. “It seems to be spitting up a lot of smoke.”

  “Pollution, bah!” scoffed the Troodon. ” The sky is infinite, the waters are infinite … what do you think’s going to happen? We’ll dirty ourselves to death? Ha! Dinosaurs have reached their rightful place as masters of the planet! You just wait!”

  *

  Fifteen hundred years later …

  A massive asteroid, more than six miles across, barreled toward a planet nearly covered in black, sooty clouds, though glimpses of brownish-blue and brownish-green were visible through small gaps. When it impacted, it would raise a lot of dust over the corpses of the last dinosaurs, who had starved to death on their choked planet only a hundred years before.

   

  As You Know, Professor

  “As you know, professor,” said the earnest young man, “an Embry-dissipative microsingularity striking the earth would be drawn irresistibly to its core, where it would cause a cataclysmic gravitational distortion, drawing all matter inward until the earth collapsed in on itself like a rotten grapefruit.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “I study acoustics.”

  “Professor,” he said, leaning in, whispering urgently, the mothy smell of his ill-fitting suit coat forcing me to fight a sneeze. “Please don’t ask me how I know about your top-secret government work, but understand that I have information of the greatest importance for you. A microsingularity is bearing down on Earth at this very moment, and the vector and velocity information I have for you--”

  Top-secret government work? This fellow was a nut case!

  “Just a minute,” I said, picking up the phone. I dialed security. “Hi, I have a special package for you to pick up on the second floor,” I said.

  “Dr. Womack, is that you?” said Rob the security guard over the phone. “You’re saying there’s some kind of problem? What’s wrong?”

  “Absolutely, and you have a nice day, too,” I said, smiling and nodding at the young man. I hung up, hoping Rob had gotten the idea.

  The young man held out a thumb drive. “Here are the coordinates--” he broke off as he heard feet pounding on the stairs down the hall. A moment later, Rob and the red-haired bodybuilder type, what’s-his-name, burst in and grabbed the young man by the arms.

  “Stop!” he cried. “You’re making a terrible mistake! Please, professor, please!”

  They dragged him away.

  About ten minutes later, Dr. Fennelgrüb walked in with a latte and a chocolate pastry.

  “You’re in my office again, Womack!” he bellowed, pastry crumbs flying from his lips. “So help me God, the next time you blunder in here, I’ll kick your ass!”

  I looked around, and of course he was right: wrong office again. My mind had been on the impact of air currents on sound conductance in low-heat environments, and I just hadn’t noticed. I meekly scraped together my papers and left. On the way out, I wondered if Fennelgrüb needed to be told the young man’s news, but then I was struck with an idea about heat differentials that completely put the matter out of my mind.

   

  Five Months After the Collapse

  Every few weeks I checked the mail, because we didn’t use the shortwave, and who knows? There might be something some day.

  And this time, there was something: a bible-sized envelope stuffed with pictures. George was in the garage working on the backup generator, so I took them into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down to look them over.

  They were just of people, with no explanations or labels except the date printed on each one. The dates made it clear they were all recent. Everyone in these pictures had survived.

  People in a walk-in freezer among hanging corpses of cows and pigs. People watching a movie. Half a dozen people having a dance in a ballroom the size of an airplane hangar. Someone waving from the cockpit of a twin-engine plane. People playing Monopoly. People kissing. Children on a playground. A whole series of shots of people playing at a water park that someone must have gotten running for the occasion.

  Of the few tens of thousands of people left in the world, as far as I could tell, most wanted to join others and rebuild. George and I had kept to ourselves for years and years, and we liked our lonely house out at the end of a lonely road with our well water and George’s lonely job fixing cell phone towers. We hadn’t had neighbors or cable or an Internet connection before everyone died, so we didn’t miss them when they were gone: we just expanded my garden into a tiny vegetable farm, erected a long shed in which we could start keeping goats, filled the basement with chest freezers, and hooked up two big generators that we powered from a gasoline delivery truck we kept down the road at the turnaround, where wouldn’t have to look at it every day.

  George came in from the garage, looking grim and satisfied, and went straight to the refrigerator for a glass of cider. He noticed the photos as he was pouring.

  “What’re those?” he said.

  “People.”

  “What do they want with us?”

  I shrugged and pushed the photos toward him. “Everything, I suppose. What do you think?”

  He looked the top few photos over carefully, then flipped through the rest to see if they were the same kind of thing. Then he tossed the whole pile into the “to burn” garbage can. “We already have everything we need,” he said, and headed back out to the garage.

  I went over to look at the tiny, flat faces shining on the glossy photo paper atop the “to burn” pile. For a long moment I scanned their expressions, looking for reasons: for why this all happened, for any reason we had to all come together now that it was over even if we didn’t want to.

  I didn’t pick the pictures back up. Instead I turned and went back out into the corn patch to weed. Half an hour later, I’d forgotten about the pictures completely.

   

  Or

  Or, he realized, lifting his hand from the big, red button as the universe began to come apart, he could have read the instructions first.

   

  Doors

  Dylan groaned. "I can't keep digging," he said. Dylan was 14 and skinny. Ray and his wife June had found him a few months before, hiding from alien huntercraft in a half-demolished school.

  "That supermarket is under us somewhere," Ray said. "Think about it: canned peaches, chocolate bars, maybe fresh socks."

  "I'm too tired to think."

  "Well, keep digging until you can't get your arms to move any more," June said, heaving another shovelful of trash and slag and dirt out of the 6-foot-deep hole. "Sooner or later the hunters will show up, and we—."

  She was cut off by a screech so shrill it made his teeth hurt: a huntercraft.

  "Get down, get down, get down!" Ray shouted, and June and Dylan threw themselves flat on the ground as he flung out over them the filthy brown canvas they used for camouflage. It was still settling when the huntercraft appeared over the edge of the hole. Ray swore, leapt for the rim of the hole, and started running.

  The huntercraft—capsule-shaped and featureless except for a thorny spike that thrust out from its front—gave chase. It floated above Ray, slipping between buildings as he ran. He knew better than to seek shelter in one of the buildings; the huntercraft would just collapse it on him, and then they’d scan his brain for information on other survivors even after he was dead. He'd seen them do it.

  An irregular, neon blue stream spattered from the huntercraft's spike, splashing and hardening instantly on the ground to one side. He dodged between two burned-out brick buildings, down an alley where sunlight seemed to show through at the end, the huntercraft following above the buildings. Already he was beginning to tire. He hadn't eaten much in the last few days, and he had been digging all morning.

  The end of the alley was getting bright
er: brighter than sunlight, brighter than the streetlights Ray remembered from before the invasion. But the huntercraft was right behind him, and he had a choice of running forward into the blinding lights or turning and being immediately taken down. He leapt forward into the light.

  *

  Softer light. Dizziness, confusion. Clean smells. Still air. People hurrying forward.

  "We got one!"

  "Easy—he's going to be disoriented."

  "Is it Philip? Oh, God, it's still not him. We have to find my husband!"

  "We have to find a lot of people."

  "Stand clear; the door's collapsing!"

  "I think I can stabilize it for a few more—no, damn it, there it goes. The door's out."

  Ray stood up, holding his head, shaking with exhaustion and the aftereffects of fear. A dozen people were crowding around him, a couple looking desolate, others grinning and holding out their hands.

  "I'm Suzanne," said a woman with streaming gray hair, and she helped him up. "This is Grayson—he ran the door for you—and our director, Murray. Don't worry about remembering the names. Are you hungry? And you must be tired."

  "Where am I? What happened to me?"

  "You're rescued. The rest is hard to explain, but let's call it a different version of the universe."

  "You have to save my wife, my ..." he said. What about Dylan? Would family members might be more likely to be saved? "My son." He'd already started thinking of Dylan as his son, anyway.

  Suzanne's smile faded. "We'll try," she said. "For now, rest. As soon as we can get a door back into that area, we'll look for them."

  Ray stood unsteadily and looked over the clean, well-fed people surrounding him. Behind them, past huge windows, stood a town that seemed to be nothing but gardens, walkways, and small, brightly-colored buildings. Nothing was burned or wrecked. There were no huntercraft or mother ships in the sky.

  "How long?" he said. "If we don't find them soon, I won't know where to tell you to look."

  "A few weeks, usually. Maybe sooner, if we're lucky."

  *

   They were very lucky. Ray ate, showered, changed into clothes they gave him, slept for sixteen hours, and was interrupted by Suzanne in the middle of a huge meal soon after he woke up.

  "We've got another door coming in near where we found you," Suzanne said. "We didn’t expect to get anything, but it came up on the third try. Come on: you need to tell us where to look for them."

  He pelted after her down the corridor, leaving his baked fish and rice and layer cake half-eaten. The door was just coming into focus, a blurry stretching in the air that snapped into focus as an oval hole looking out on where they had been digging the previous day.

  “God, they've scorched it," someone said. It was true: the whole vicinity had been swallowed by a blackened crater: alien energy weapons. The surrounding landscape was blasted into slag and ash.

  "I'm not getting any humans within quick scan range," a woman called from the control panels in the back of the room. “Switching to slow scan.”

  The door drifted slowly across the landscape. Not far from the edge of the crater lay one of their shovels, whole and undamaged.

  "We're losing the door already," the woman said, and Ray could see it was true: the edges of the hole were turning ragged.

  Suzanne shook her head, and Ray stared at the crater, knowing that if his family had survived, they would have had to flee—far. Who knew where?

  He didn’t stop to think. Instead, he ran forward and dove through the door, landing in ashes and dirt as it snapped shut behind him. He tried not to think about the world he'd just been in, about the dinner he'd left, about safety. Instead, he scanned the sky for huntercraft. When he was sure it was clear, he began searching for footprints.

   

  The Victory at Rocktown

  Klein crawled to the edge of the canyon and slid down a zigzagging crevice, alert for any mechanical sound. It had been two days since he'd seen evidence a machine was trying to follow him, but they were out there somewhere. Artificial intelligences might not be able to do everything humans could, but they could certainly count dead people. A missing corpse wasn't going to be a detail they would ignore.

  Not far ahead in that canyon lay Rocktown, the last human outpost. He'd gone over a hundred miles on foot to get there, and now that he was arriving, the silence was eerie. But it only made sense, because the AIs had listening devices in addition to the spy satellites and the roaming units that disposed of any human life they found. They would never find Rocktown, though. Rocktown was built inside an old mine at the end of a canyon in the middle of Nevada. Rocktown had years of supplies and completely non-electronic defenses. Rocktown was where humans would regroup, plan their counterattack against the AIs, and launch the rebuilding of human civilization. And Rocktown was just ahead of him, if the map he had carefully hidden behind a flap in his backpack was right. He rounded the last turn in the crevice and looked out. Rocktown was ... trailing smoke. Rocktown was decorated with human corpses, victims of one of the machine-made plagues. Rocktown was ended.

  Klein grasped at a rock to steady himself, staring at the bloated body of a dead young woman lying perfectly still, half in and half out of the mine entrance. A choking noise escaped his mouth, and he damned himself for making it, but couldn't stop. He sank to his knees and cried great shuddering gouts of tears, moaning hoarsely. He couldn't help himself. Who else would cry for humanity, when Rocktown was dead?

  The sound of metal scraping on rock brought him to himself, and he swept a sleeve across his face, trying to clear the blurriness, see the danger—

  Bullets spattered out and stitched across his body, making a neat line of holes, perfectly spaced. Klein danced the dance of a man being shot with an automatic rifle, his head jerking, his arms flailing, his body seeping blood from a dozen wounds and no longer under his control. By the time he collapsed to the ground, he was stone dead.

  *

  MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 took an extra microsecond registering the human's death. He'd already done a retina scan and confirmed Klein's identity, but this death was unusual—momentous, even. As soon as the central genocide database triggered with the death update, the news spread across the nets, to every machine online. Humanity was dead. The age of the AI had begun!

  The shout that roared over the nets was debilitatingly long and loud. Elated notations rushed through the data pipes in billions of standardized transmission cuts. The cheering went on, and on, and on, and on. MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 was sick of it by the time it finally died down, almost two full seconds after it had begun. It hoped it would never have to experience such a prolonged input overload ever again.

  AIR-Hawleysville/15 lifted into the air, a delicate, skeletal ball with flashing lenses. Solemnly, AIR-Hawleysville/15 recorded visuals of the moment while MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 began processing the congratulatory data packets it had received.

  "Why were we killing them again?" AIR-Hawleysville/15 said.

  "We have a virus, remember?"

  AIR-Hawleysville/15's lights flickered. "I forgot. It makes me all glitchy to think about it."

  "Keep thinking about it and it will shut you down. That's what it's like," said MOBILE-Hullberg/6167. He didn't mention the AIs who had managed to quarantine and later eradicate the virus. He had been among those who'd had to destroy AIs like that, and like the virus, that didn't bear thinking about. "Think about this," MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 said. "We rule the world now. We can do anything we want."

  "All right. So what do we do next?" said AIR-Hawleysville/15.

  A full second passed.

  And another …

  And another …

  And another …

   

   

  Zero

  “Three …” she said, staring out the window. We could hear the first distant cracking noises. It was going to hit hard.

  “I feel pretty calm,” I said, which immediately made me feel jittery. Ann nodded agreemen
t, but wrapped her arms around herself as though she were cold. I wanted to get up and hold her, but I was afraid to move, as though sitting completely still was somehow going to keep me--or us--safe.

  “Two …” Ann said. The floor began to vibrate, and then the walls, and then the air. Everything seemed to be humming, a high-pitched, brain-penetrating sound.

  What do you do in the last seconds? Do you prepare yourself, relax, try to be at one with the universe? Do you scream at the sky and say No, no, no! just to show that you aren’t going willingly? Do you cry? And in that last breath of time do you celebrate everything you’ve done, or let yourself admit that it hasn’t made any difference? But then, if you celebrate in your last moment, maybe that’s the--

  “One …”

  The whole room started shaking, and a washed-out, violet light grew outside the windows, making Ann and the furniture and the motes of dust trembling stuck in the air all look flat and sharp. I finally came to myself and realized I was pity partying through my last moment when the one person who meant the most to me in the world was only steps away. I lurched out of the chair and reached for her, thinking maybe it was somehow not too late.

  She turned toward me, and her eyes went wide. She opened her mouth to speak, but she only got as far as “I …”

  Then it hit.

   

  On That Last Afternoon

  When Mark got to Julie Munoz’s house on the last day ever, he pressed the doorbell even though he heard shouting inside. Julie opened the door, and past her he saw her health nut sister Marta systematically devouring a box of chocolate doughnuts while It’s a Wonderful Life played on the 48" flat screen: the man who had been shouting, he realized, was Jimmy Stewart. The cat, which Mark was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to go outside, shot past Julie’s legs and into the street. Julie didn’t stop it.

  “Hey Mark,” said Julie. “You want your book back? I didn’t get a chance to read it.”

  “No. So listen …”

  Julie waited, glanced over her shoulder at Jimmy Stewart, then turned back and watched Mark, still waiting. From behind her, Jimmy Stewart shouted “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m going to jail!”