The End

“The human race didn’t end with a shout, it didn’t end in a ball of flames, it ended with barely a whimper. For so long, we had narrowly avoided one extinction event after another. World wars, the threat of nuclear armageddon, and pandemics of global proportions. But the human race had pulled through it all, kicking and screaming, with determination to survive. We’d learnt, we’d progressed, and each disaster brought us more and more technology. Some of it was used for good, but some of it was used to inflict suffering on others, who by accident of birth we didn’t deem our friends.

“Most people thought that war or environmental pollution would be the undoing of the human race, but the reality is, we actually don’t know what caused our downfall. Our best and brightest worked their whole lifetimes on the problem, but no one ever found the answer or a solution.

“I am the last of us. I was born six months after all the other children started dying. While I was a helpless, unaware infant, surviving while no other babies did, every country in the world tasked their scientists to work on the problem. They had many theories, virus, bacteria, fungi, prions, radiation or even biological warfare. But no one could figure it out, and no one could stop it.

“Our downfall marched unstoppably on, babies started to die before birth, and then the women couldn’t get pregnant at all and soon every human under twenty years old was gone, except for me.

“My country asked my parents to make the ultimate sacrifice, to let me go, so I could be studied and help them find the cure. It broke my mother’s heart, but she genuinely believed it was for the good of all mankind.” She paused and cleared her throat, absentmindedly wiping away the tears that were rolling down her cheeks.

“I’ve been hidden away my whole life, protected from people who may try and steal me away to experiment on, as even though I was studied, poked, prodded and tested, at least they didn’t hurt me. My DNA sequence is in every laboratory in the world because, as the earth’s last child, they hoped my biology would hold the answer.

“But it was all in vain, they never found the solution, and I remain the youngest person on earth.” She stopped speaking and looked around the room, her eyes roaming over the possessions that were now the sum total of her life. She took a deep breath before she started talking again. “The problem is, I am now also the oldest.” She looked across at her reflection in the mirror, taking in her wrinkled skin and pushing her grey hair back off her forehead. No matter how many times she looked at herself, she still didn’t recognise the old lady who looked back at her.

“I was hidden away in the cold north to keep me safe from the chaos that reigned, and over the decades, I have watched the world implode, as the knowledge that there were no children to leave our planet to brought out the worst in our species. The strongest took everything they could from the weak; possessions, money and often their lives. Dictators who had shown a modicum of self-control before the children stopped being born, lost that sliver of restraint and unleashed hell on their neighbours. I genuinely do not know how we did not end up obliterating ourselves in a nuclear holocaust.

“I begged to be allowed to rejoin my family when they had run out of things to study on me, but my guardians would not let me, as there was a bounty on my head, with many people convinced that a sample of my tissues would be all they needed to reverse what was happening. So I watched from my gilded cage as civilisation broke down. I have been moved more times than I can recall, either because my hiding place had been discovered accidentally, or someone had offered one of my guardians enough money, or another reason for them to break and divulge my location.

“From my isolation, I have only been able to observe the decline from afar. I have watched news reports about countries ripped apart by civil war and attacking neighbours they had been allies with for centuries. When mankind had nothing left to lose, they reverted to their baser instincts of kill or be killed. We as a species disgraced ourselves and have overshadowed centuries of achievement with a few decades of chaos.

“I lost touch with my family twenty years ago, we used to be able to email each other, and they’d send me photos of the state of the real world. Then one day, it stopped, I sent them hundreds, maybe thousands of messages, but I never heard from them again.

“I have watched the human race dwindle away, from billions, to millions, to thousands, and then to a handful. I lost communication with the last group of survivors over a decade ago, as they all died of old age. So now it’s just me left on this planet. We are not a species that are meant to live solitary existences, we are meant to be with our family, either the one we were born with or the one we choose. I play music and watch old films to try and pretend there are other people left with me. But the reality is, I am alone in this huge empty world.

“I hope whoever is watching this video treats this beautiful planet better than we did, and the time without humans has allowed the deep scars we inflicted on it through our foolishness and greed to heal. Please be better caretakers than we were.

“The poet Dylan Thomas once wrote the words, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light’. We have raged as a species, and we fought with everything we had. But it is time to accept our fight is over, and the light of the human race has gone.”

She glanced down at the photos of her family inside the heart-shaped locket lying open in her hand, she closed it, squeezing it tightly for a moment, and then put it back around her neck. She reached out, stopped the phone recording and placed it into a waterproof box, packing a solar charger with it. She didn’t know why she’d felt the need to leave the video behind, as no human was ever going to find it, but she hoped maybe there was something intelligent out there that would one day stumble across the earth and learn about the human race who were its first caretakers.

She looked out the window, saw the sun setting, and marvelled at the beauty of it, and for the millionth time, she wished she had someone to share it with. She took a final look around the four walls that had been her home for so long and protected her from the elements. She’d always thought she would be nervous when the time came, but she was totally at peace.

She walked past the thick coat hanging on the back of a chair and her boots lying on the floor and walked out the front door. She paused for a few minutes on the porch, making sure she didn’t want to change her mind, but her feelings didn’t shift, so she stepped out into the snow and walked away from the house. Each step she took was slower than the last as the cold seeped into her bones, her mind became fuzzy, and she couldn’t remember what she was doing out there. She walked until she reached her favourite place and sat down in the snow on the bank of the river, watching as the last rays of light dropped below the horizon. Her hand went to her neck and clutched onto her locket, seeking comfort in the familiar object. She lay back on the ground watching the stars appear as the sky darkened. She felt the cold stealing more and more of her body heat until she no longer felt the chill. Her breathing slowed until finally, the earth was no longer the home of the human race.