Last Man on Earth

Joshua sat with his back to the wall, every breath a wet, rattling pull through cracked ribs. His shredded clothes, saturated and sticky with blood from burning lacerations, adhered to him like a second skin. But pain was only a muted echo. The end was near; soon, everything would be over—and it would be brutal.

Outside, they waited for the shield to fail. Their hunger pressed against his mind, keen to descend like locusts and tear through whatever remained of his soul, just as they had ravaged the rest of humanity. Joshua was the last one.

“The last one!” He cackled maniacally. Outliving the rest of mankind—the great and mighty pinnacle of creation—he felt a twisted sense of dark triumph. Fashioned in God’s own image, we had believed ourselves gods — and fallen, as Lucifer had fallen, by our own proud hands.

Arrogance had been our undoing. Shaking his head, he mused aloud, “If only they had listened to me. The nail in the coffin that killed the human experiment would have been nothing but a minor footnote. Humanity would have soldiered on, as they always had.”

Coughing up blood, Joshua knew he had only minutes left to record a final epitaph for his species. They had the potential to become far more than they ever imagined. “Instead, in our petulance, we chose the road to destruction time and again. Our final off-ramp on the highway to Hell led to total desolation—even down to the last microbe.” His words, with blood and spittle, trickled like rotten honey from his lips.

The stale air burned in his lungs. Each ragged breath hurt. Sweat and blood poured down his face, blurring his vision from the wounds left by the Cranial, Reticular, Overlay, Wet-wired, Neural-interface upon his brow. The device pressed into his skull like dozens of thorns. He needed it to interface directly with the system.

Only one task remained: reach the recorder at the head of the conference table. That would require two things he was utterly lacking — balance and strength. Spotting a rusty crowbar to his left, close enough to grab, he decided it would serve well enough as a cane for the few steps to the chair directly in front of him. From there, he could sit while enacting the final protocol.

If he fell, there would be no getting back up. For the sake of posterity — and for any who would happen upon his warning — he had to finish. Failure was not an option; there was too damned much at stake.

Pushing back against the wall, he mustered just enough strength to stand — barely.

This message, when sent to the Cerberus space station in geostationary orbit, would warn any alien explorers to avoid Earth at all costs. If they heeded his warning, it would save not only themselves but also prevent them from unleashing the horrific fate the human race had inflicted upon itself — and turning it loose on the galaxy at large.

After securing the unwieldy implement, drawing a deep breath, and uttering a silent prayer, Joshua lunged forward with everything he had, hoping he wouldn’t overshoot his mark.

He stood — miraculously steady, shaking in disbelief. “Thank you, Father, for small mercies.” Everything had to end with him. The monstrous plague that had hollowed out the world could not be loosed upon the stars. The fate of countless unknown lives depended entirely on this warning.

He took a step, but his leg gave out. Forward he fell, landing awkwardly in the chair, facing backward. “Ow… Ow…" The painful irony made him laugh. He had to turn around quickly. Closing his eyes, digging deep, he summoned what remained of his strength. Twisting and wriggling, he finally slumped, exhausted, in the seat. Blood bubbled in his mouth; he coughed it up, but he was sitting. Slowly, he strained to lean over the conference table.

He almost smiled — the command code had been his private joke from the start, lifted from Deep Blue’s winning move against Kasparov in 1997, the day a machine first outthought a man. Fitting, he supposed, given how things had ended.

He spoke to activate the system: “Command code Omega seven — authorization, 36 alpha, x-ray, bravo 5, then 37 Bravo, Echo 4. Activate memory core recorder.” The console rose, ready to imprint mankind’s last will onto a solid gold disk.

It was the exact date foretold on the ancient Qumran tablet, theorized to have been scrawled by John the Baptist. What a joke. Scholars laughed at it for decades — too specific, they said, too precise to be taken seriously. That strange, wild man, roaming the Judean wilderness, had inscribed this fateful day — the exact hour, even — buried in the sand for 2,200 years, waiting for us to find it. Waiting for us to deserve it.

“Today marks a truly momentous event in mankind’s history — the final hour of this once prolific species. Today, I, Joshua Mechach, the last human alive on Earth, am about to die.” He winced, shifting his weight. “We thought we were wise enough, intelligent enough, and mature enough to become as gods. We were so wrong.”

“We proved to be little more than petulant toddlers with weapons of mass destruction. I’m not talking about our nuclear or chemical nightmares. No. Our crowning achievement made those horrors look like child’s play.”

His face distorted with anguish as he pleaded, “PLEASE. If you land here and survive what we left behind, learn from us. For God’s sake, do not repeat our mistake. I beg you — don’t let our pain be for nothing. I hope I can finish this record and get it to the orbital vault before the last generator powers down the Faraday shield. The orbital platform should keep this record safe for at least fifty thousand years.”

Pausing, he drew a slow breath. “You have no reference for what Project Ascension was. What I’m saying probably sounds mad. But I assure you: I am lucid. The danger of approaching this cursed, dead rock is astronomically greater than you think. PLEASE — stay away from the third planet of the Sol system. If you land here, you are as good as dead.”

His body spasmed. Ragged breaths escaped him, followed by deep coughs.

“As I was saying, we thought of ourselves as gods. Project Ascension was our final act — a plan to unlock our mental and spiritual potential by raising human consciousness. We wanted to transcend our flaws and become transhuman through technology. We were fools.” Joshua moaned, flinching from a cramp.

He steadied himself and continued. “In theory, everything worked. We ran billions of simulations to rule out error. We were meticulous because we knew what was at stake. But we missed the most critical variable: chaos.” He laughed hysterically, coughing up more blood. “We barely understood the physics of Earth, much less the metaphysical factors. We were children playing with matches in a pit of gasoline.”

“We installed the infrastructure in secret, labeling the systems as global internet upgrades. There was heavy resistance from conspiracy theorists and religious groups. In retrospect, that resistance wouldn’t have been a bad thing. Hindsight is 20/20.”

He struggled to open a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Finally, the lid relented. He took a long swig. It burned all the way down — the same way it always had, which struck him as either a comfort or a joke. Probably both.

“Once all systems were functional, it was as simple as flipping a switch. We chose World Religion Day.” He chuckled sarcastically. “Not that we ever came close to getting on the same page.”

He set the bottle down, voice heavy. “The initial effects were minor: disorientation, headaches, blurred vision. Then the positive benefits seemed to take hold — clarity of thought, deeper insight, a greater feeling of peace. Worldwide conflicts suddenly ceased. It looked like we had succeeded.”

“But shortly after, the anomalies began. People exhibited supernatural abilities: superhuman strength, spontaneous healing, and telekinesis. Worst of all was telepathy. People were NEVER meant to read others’ unfiltered thoughts — far less to be bombarded by the ceaseless mental musings and hidden nightmares of dozens at once. When these manifestations became widespread, society collapsed. Instantly, like a house of cards. Survivors scattered. The planet became a world of hermits.”

“We, the developers, were exposed and hunted. After six months in hiding, we created a prototype inoculation — it gave individuals control of their new abilities, filtered out the clutter, and restored a modicum of sanity. Desperate remnants of humanity — roughly ten percent of the population — lined up without question. Our engineered nano-virus seemed like a miracle. It limited the flow of energy along neural pathways. We had achieved our goal: a golden era of limited godhood for the human race.”

“But there was another side to that coin.”

“Those who refused the inoculation — mostly due to religious objections and deep distrust of forced vaccines — were deemed a threat. The nanovirus manufacturer fostered the rumor that the uninoculated were undermining the others’ abilities. The lie that we had to be ‘pure’ was propagated to ensure maximum profit and control. What ensued was the most vicious genocide in human history.”

Shaking his head, tears streaming, he recounted the horror. “Mobs of savage, sadistic — I hesitate to call them people — descended on the objectors. They didn’t just kill them. They gloried in the most heinous, disgusting acts, slowly torturing their former friends and family. The more agony they inflicted, the more they craved those terrified screams. By the purge’s end, there was truly nowhere left to hide.”

“It was then that humanity’s long catalog of sins closed its ledger, and collected — with exquisite, merciless precision — every debt we had deferred.

In our quest to purge dissent, we had descended into unspeakable depravity. Once the innocent were gone, we turned on one another.”

“As the purge continued, the most unforeseen thing happened. In engineering the ‘immortality’ aspect of the ‘cure,’ we did the unimaginable. The quantum code in the virus actually tethered the recipient’s souls to Earth’s energy field. In short, we had turned our world into a prison for the damned — a hellish ball of perpetual death.”

“Where once there had been life, now there were ravenous specters, wights of death, seeing any living thing — no matter how small — as a meal for their unappeasable hunger.”

“We discovered, quite by accident, that electrified Faraday cages offered protection from these roaming wights. Twelve cities of refuge were established worldwide. But human carelessness and system failures claimed them one by one. Witnessing city after city succumb to a savagely violent end — death at the hands of these cruel, sadistic spirits was far from quick. These malevolent, demonic beings feasted on the fear, pain, and suffering of their victims. I can still hear every scream of decades-long torment. It was truly Hell on Earth.”

Joshua wept. “Father, forgive us, for we did not know what we were doing.”

The lights flickered in time with the pulsing generator, gasping for its last drops of fuel. Knowing he had seconds, Joshua mentally issued the command to save and launch the record to the orbital platform. With the sound of klaxons and alarms, the rocket fired, carrying his final words into high orbit.

Asking his Heavenly Father for one last dispensation of grace, he begged for an escort for the rocket. “Father, unto your hands I commit my spirit.” The generator made its final, hopeless gasp and fell silent. The Faraday fields collapsed.

The multitude of the damned descended upon him with unrelenting vengeance.

With his last breath, he hung his head and uttered, “It is finished.” Then he screamed — in eternal fear, terror, and agony — as the innumerable souls, the dregs of all human pain and suffering, devoured him forever.

Epilogue

Krixx huddled alone in the dim glow of Cerberus Station’s comms bay, his gleaming scales flickering with unease. The rest of the archaeology team had already descended to the blue-green world below, eager to sift through the ruins of what their probes had promised was a dead civilization ripe for cataloging — and plunder.

The golden disk had finished decoding. Joshua Mechach’s final words leaped from the translator in a ragged, blood-choked voice — arrogance, ascension, nano-virus, tethered souls turned ravenous specters—a planetary prison of the damned.

His tentacles froze on the controls. “Fools,” he hissed, but the word tasted like ash. He keyed the emergency channel. “Surface team, abort! Do not — repeat — do not engage any structures. The planet is infested. The dead are hungry. Return to orbit immediately!”

Static answered. Then a single voice — Dr. Vael, the lead archaeologist — came over the feed: “Krixx, you should see this! It appears to be some bunker. We’re cutting in now. The inscriptions are—”

A shriek tore across the link. Not one voice. Dozens. Wet, ripping sounds followed — layered with something that could only be described as ravenous, truly the most unsettling noises he had ever heard. They shook him to the core of his soul.

The comms filled with an unmistakable symphony of prolonged agony: bones cracking, flesh tearing, minds unraveling under psychic assault. Vael’s final words dissolved into a gurgling wail that seemed to stretch across compressed time.

Krixx slammed the cutoff, but the screams did not stop. He sat motionless, staring at the dead console. On the planet below, his crew was still dying — would always be dying — forever, if the human’s warning was to be believed. He pressed his tentacles to his auditory membranes. It made no difference. The silence was louder than the screams.

He was alone. The station’s orbit was decaying — thrusters damaged long ago by micrometeorites, a problem they had laughed off, certain their ship would carry them home before it mattered. There was no way home now. No long-range beacon remained functional enough to reach across the void.

He ran the calculations once, then again, hoping for a different answer. There wasn’t one. Fifty thousand years of recorded warning sat useless in the vault, and within days, Krixx would join the dead on the surface — whether he chose to or not.

Below, the third planet of Sol turned in indifferent silence, its biosphere long dead, its new guests already learning what mankind had learned too late.

Krixx pressed his brow to the cold viewport and whispered the only prayer his species knew: “May the Void take me quickly.”

It wouldn’t.​