The Last Word

Five thousand years had passed since the Event. All that man had wrought had become consumed by the wind and the rain but for the cyborg AD4M.

Rejected by the flies and their maggots, his mangled body yet remained immune to rust or rot. He was once a beautiful creature crafted from titanium, tungsten, and carbon to prevent the becoming of this irradiated world he now roamed in solitude.

His core cybernetics had remained largely intact. They were shielded from the heat and the radiation by his nearly invulnerable body. Nearly. His nanorobotic maintenance systems had kept him alive yet lacked the power to fix his deformed, heat-fused chassis: the composite material was too strong for anything short of another Y-bomb to reshape.

Once upon a time, he came to think of it as a fitting punishment for his failure. He did not ponder such things anymore. Senility and the toll of his circumstance had long since taken his mind. He did not think of much at all.

He did think of one thing though, the same thing he thought of every single day for five millennia.

His buffer memory had managed to record the hours leading up to the detonation of the Y-bomb in perfect detail.

He had never replayed the preceding battle: it was now meaningless. But in the split second before the brilliant blue flash engulfed him, he had managed to steal one final look at the locket around his neck. The growing shadow had highlighted the engraving and burned it into his eyes:

Sophie.

He had played this memory back to himself every moment of every day for five millennia, occupying his entire consciousness while his automated systems kept him inching forward.

Inside the melted lump that was once his hand, he could still feel the point of its heart shape pressing into his palm. He had not gotten the chance to recall her face before everything went blank and the recording cut off. Yet she was there inside his welded fist, her photograph locked away from him within his grasp.

Sophie.

It was that one flash of silver lettering that sustained Adam. All other memory that could give it meaning or context had long faded but it was enough.

Despite the radiation that poisoned the land and the air, nature had reclaimed the planet. Though most birds and mammals had long perished, insects, plants, and fungi had already adapted and begun to thrive. Most traces of human civilization had already disappeared except for himself.

On that fateful day, Adam could not be the hero that humanity had required him to be. Despite his advanced armor and cutting-edge cybernetics, despite the exabytes of combat training data integrated into his very soul, and despite his desperate final struggle... He yet found that he was only human.

That didn't matter anymore either. There were no crowds to cheer for or jeer at him. There was no one left to save. There were no more stories to tell.

As he scraped himself across the damp grass with the remains of his hand, he felt a sense of finality set in. A few inches at a time, his labor of five millennia was finally coming to a close.

In the distance before him, a canyon came into view, where a rough-hewn antenna awaited him at the edge, crafted with scraps he had preserved so many years ago when there was still something left to collect.

That's not all he had collected. He engaged his communications implant for the first time since the Event and broadcast a trigger signal, which the antenna repeated and amplified. A great light took over the sky. He had almost one minute, plenty of time, and yet none at all for him.

He plummeted into the ravine and slammed into a spot marked with a large X made of pebbles. It was the exact place: he had run the numbers a thousand times.

There was a rumble in the distance and dust began to tremble around him.

He held his hand aloft as the flash overtook him and watched his fist slowly disintegrate with the rest of his limbs. Radiation seeped into his brain as the locket fell from his hand and into the dust beside him, unopened. He would have smile if he had a mouth.

"Sophie" he remembered.