Issue 8, January 2011
Song at the End of Humanity: Listen to Robert Eccles read this story
Song at the End of Humanity
By Joe Jablonski
Weak with disease festering within his body, the last man on earth picked up a dusty old guitar from the corner of the small dilapidated room he called home. His steps took him across floorboards worn and leaning from lack of maintenance. After living this way for so long, life only seemed normal at a fifteen-degree slant. The last man held no delusions that he was not long for this world. He could feel his body in its last struggles for life. He didn't so much fear dying; he just wanted to feel something—anything—before the end. This moment belonged to him.
After taking a deep breath, the last man closed his eyes and plunged into song. The first notes filled the air; a soft, soothing tune.
As fingers formed rhythms, the last man pushed out all external noise from his awareness. The sound of ocean waves brushing up against the beach outside, raindrops on the roof, the steady hum of a makeshift generator, wind-blown branches scraping the walls; at this moment, none of them existed.
Notes and sounds began to resonate into melody, driving the song faster. He was a slave to the music as his fingers plucked away.
With the music came a memory. He thought of the wife he once had, her soft porcelain features clear in his mind. Every fight, every conversation, every time they made love played simultaneously to the soundtrack of the mechanical rhythms his fingers produced. He could even remember the smell of her as if she lurked in the room with him at this very moment.
As the rest faded, the last image was the look of her face on her death bed. How she gazed up at him with eyes pleading what her mouth could no longer speak.
He played for her that day, as he played today, and in those final hours he watched her pass to the sound of his music. When she died, that part of himself died with her. From that day to this, he had never picked up his old guitar.
This happened in a time when the sky was still blue.
He continued to play through the pain, his cheeks stained with the tracks of tears not noticed.
Thoughts fueled emotion fueled music fueled thoughts.
He remembered the loneliness of twenty years in solitude: all the desperation, all the hunger, all the pain, all the death he had seen, all the hardship. The last man was happy once, before the atmosphere ignited, burning humanity out of existence.
He played harder and harder, faster and faster until his fingers began to work apart from his mind, encapsulated with all the joy and despair of a lifetime. With every passing minute the song became more complex, a reflection of his own conflicting inner turmoil.
The low E-string broke and he didn't miss a note.
A multitude of faces assaulted him, driving back the tears, each a survivor like himself, those he was forced to kill in the aftermath of the end of the world, their death the price of a life he never wanted.
The music drifted on a plane of new enlightenment and his mind expanded further. The disease in his body wanted to reject the effort, but the last man pushed through his own failing. Lights, like the negatives of tiny singularities, began to dance behind his eyelids.
His awareness was now drifting through an infinity of everything lost. His impending death marked not only the last human, but the end of so much more. This one song on this shitty old guitar carried the weight of all humanity, the billions of lives and ambitions that went nowhere forever.
Finally, his thoughts shifted to a daughter, from the day of her birth until the day of her death. She died with the rest of the world. Her entire life was a blur within a second of reflection: a first step, the first word, her smile at her third birthday party—his last happy memory. It was almost too much to bear. His heart skipped and the rhythm skipped with it. Despair threatened to rip him apart.
Sadness fueled anger fueled fury fueled sadness.
The music formed into a raging torrent far from his control; the last man was but a spectator to his own functions.
That's when he was finally able to let go. Brain synapses began to flicker like an undulating current. New connections formed, multiplied and spread to parts of his brain previously virgin of thought. He became conscious of himself as an entity apart from the body.
On and on the last man played until the music became a furious cacophony. The remaining strings broke, snapping him from his reverie, his fingers numb and bloody.
As the last note of music the world would ever know began to fade into oblivion, the last man felt his soul fade with it.
Something happened then.
His consciousness detached itself from the baggage of the body and screamed across the void. He drifted along sound waves as they merged into particles and he merged with them. These particles of soul and song spread out across the scorched firmament and for one perfect moment, the miracle of what humanity could achieve existed in this dying world once more.
Only a shell of withered flesh and grey hair remained behind, completely drained of life and emotion. His soul was free from that emaciated flesh and without it, the last man was no longer a person, only an object.
The shell of the last man dropped to the floor, taking the old guitar with it, and lay there, deceased. It didn't matter. The last man didn't need his body anymore. He was free in a way he never knew existed. Within the echoes of his last song, the last man would live forever.
Joe is 29 and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and kids. He has work published or forthcoming in a variety of markets including M-Brane SF, Title Goes Here:, Short-Story.ME! Genre Fiction, Aurora Wolf, and Theory Train.