Last Man Standing

Ian Barnes

A windy day. Low clouds are moving fast among the hills. It’s cold. There are patches of snow on the ground. In a broad valley between the mountains there’s a small house made of stone. There is smoke coming from the chimney. The man who lives there is very special. He’s the last man alive, the last human being. All the others are dead.

When he dies, that will be it: the end of humanity.

All cultures are now dead cultures; all languages, dead languages. There is no-one left who knows how to play the violin, or the piano, or the guitar. No-one who can sing flamenco, or opera or the blues. No-one who knows palaeontology or particle physics, or partial differential equations. No-one who can make etchings or oil paintings. No-one who can weld, or make a dovetail joint. No-one who can write an employment policy or a payroll system. No-one who can design a ship, or a rocket or a skyscraper. Or a gun, or a bomb. It’s all gone, except for what he holds in his head.

The great libraries and museums are still standing, filled with books, films, videotapes, sound recordings, paintings, sculptures, musical instruments: the accumulated knowledge, wisdom and creative outpourings of billions of humans over the many centuries of recorded history. But once this last man dies, there will be no-one left to look at those pictures, read the books, listen to the music.

Perhaps, one day, someone will come to this planet from elsewhere. Will they even recognise the remnants of human civilisation for what they are? What would the Mona Lisa mean to them? Or Chartres cathedral, or Shakespeare’s sonnets? Perhaps they would have more luck with Einstein’s papers? But then surely if they can come here, they must have already worked that stuff out.

Or perhaps, in a few million years, now that humans are out of the way, some other species will evolve intelligence and consciousness. Perhaps the dolphins? Perhaps the rats or the cockroaches? And what value are they likely to put on the creations of humanity? Of the species that drove millions of other species to extinction just so that they could have four-wheel drives and microwave ovens, so that they could eat too much, so that they could acquire large numbers of coloured pieces of paper. If there’s anything like genetic memory, the first members of any new race of intelligent beings on earth would probably do their best to destroy anything that remains.

*

He lives a simple life, this last man on earth. Unlike his ancestors, he lives lightly on the earth. He grows some grains and vegetables, struggles to harvest enough during the warm months to last through the winter. He keeps a few goats, for their milk and cheese. He can no longer bring himself to kill them for their meat, although after the murderous excesses of the last few centuries, this crime wouldn’t amount to much.

He would like to be able to use electricity or natural gas to heat his house, but of course none of that is working any more. They had to shut down the power stations and the oil wells when there was no-one left to run them. Same with all the farms and factories, fishing fleets, airlines, railways, schools. For a while he was able to keep running his little truck, using stockpiles of petrol, oil and spare parts, but one day when it broke down he wasn’t able to get it running again. For a while after that he rode a bicycle, until it too went beyond his abilities as a mechanic. Now if he wants to go somewhere, he walks. But where would he go? There’s nobody else there.

He keeps a cat, for the mice but mostly for the company. It helps with the loneliness, a little. Not much though. Hermits have always been able to choose to end their isolation. Castaways have always had the hope that they would be found. But for him there was never any choice, and there is no hope. All the other people are dead now. There is no-one else out there.

Sometimes when the wind blows around his little house on the plain between the mountains he hears what sounds like voices, and the sound is comforting, at least for a moment. Perhaps that’s why he chose this place to live out these last years of human history. Because sometimes, in the middle of doing something else, for a fraction of a second he thinks that he hears another human being calling out to him, shouting to him from outside, and his spirit lifts with false hope.

It’s a hard life, but a simple one. He’s healthier than he was when he was a young man, living in the city, surrounded by adults, the only member of his generation.

*

When it became apparent that the birth rate was dropping all over the world, some people were pleased. An end to the population explosion; disaster averted. It wasn’t until quite a few years later that the demographers realised that so few children were being born that the species was in trouble. Of course there were all sorts of theories. You can think of them for yourself: some weird effect of pollution, an unexpected outcome of genetic engineering, hormones in the food supply, divine retribution, fluoride in the water, alien invasion... A thousand explanations, some crazy, some plausible, none confirmed. And in any case, no remedy. Humanity was doomed.

For a while there was chaos, an end to morality. Orgies of frenzied sexual coupling, in the desperate hope that some pregnancies would result. After a few years that was replaced by a sense of defeat and quiet resignation.

As the numbers of people dropped, as more and more people reached old age and died childless, humanity closed in on itself. Small countries closed down, and the last few people, old and middle-aged, moved to where some things still worked, to where there were still enough people left who knew how to keep the basic necessities of life working. Eventually there was just one small city, in which the last few thousand human beings struggled to live out their lives.

In many ways these last decades were humanity’s finest time. All greed and lust for power were gone. Anyone who wanted wealth beyond imagining could just take it. Whole countries were there to claim. Any ordinary person could just walk into a museum and walk out again with a priceless work of art. Indeed the whole idea of putting a price on a work of art became ludicrous — as of course it had always been.

As the numbers dwindled, politics disappeared and people started to co-operate in the way utopians had been imagining for millennia. With no heirs to pass their wealth on to, with no future historians to praise them for their great deeds, people finally started to behave in a decent way. After centuries of politics, wave after wave of murderous utopianism, in the end it all turned out to be pretty simple. People cared for each other. They stopped seeing each other as a threat, and instead saw their community as their only hope, their only comfort. They worked together, an ever-smaller community of sad but strangely peaceful people, simplifying and cutting back.

The last humans born on earth had each been welcomed by their parents as a priceless gift, in a time when so many couples were childless. They inherited the earth, and lived peacefully together on it. And then, miraculously, to one woman in that last few thousand, a baby boy was born. They hoped, of course, for more children, prayed that they might produce a mate for that last golden boy, prayed that by some miracle, whatever had gone wrong would sort itself out, that they might still produce a fertile Eve with whom their young Adam could father a new human race. But she was never born. When the last woman went through menopause, he was twelve years old. When the last of his parents’ generation died, he was forty-four, and from then on, he lived alone.

Can you imagine his life, in those last thirty-two years? His parents’ generation had prepared things well for him, trained him to take care of himself. Who among us could be completely self-sufficient for half a lifetime? While the useless satellites circle endlessly overhead, while the computers and cars and domestic appliances slowly rust in the cities, while the factories and shopping malls and hamburger restaurants gather dust, he digs his garden, plants and harvests his crops, cares for his goats, makes his own bread and cheese, and thinks his solitary thoughts.

Sometimes in the evenings he picks up a book and reads a few pages, but not often, especially over these last few years. For of course almost everything written was about people — plural, about relationships between people. And for him, for the last man on earth, there are no people to have relationships with. No, most evenings he just sits and stares into the fire, and sometimes he talks a little to the cat.

And then one day, aged seventy-six, the old man slips while he’s out with the goats. He breaks his leg. It’s a simple injury, or would be if there was an ambulance to take him to a hospital, doctors and nurses to care for him. But of course there’s no-one. It’s a terrible effort for him to drag himself back to his little house. He manages to set the bone, but he no longer has the strength to cook for himself or to fetch firewood from outside. And so at last, asleep in his bed, he dies a peaceful death from starvation and hypothermia. A small, everyday tragedy, the extinction of a species. Life goes on.