The Last File Left

He didn’t know how long he had been standing there.

What windows were left were tint black and peeling, a vast, bleak and ebony wall, its broken mirrored gaze projecting little more than dust and air.

Sunlight trickled through, just barely, like the last bits of water through a rust laden pipe, and the man was glad there was no way to feel the heat from that star, whose waves had bent and buckled the sky.

He chuckled. No sound fell from his lips – not one carbon speck was hurried along. The motes that fell in the scattering light drifted onward and downward, like souls in eternity. Could you, he wondered, really call it standing? It seemed absurd. It wasn’t floating, that much was certain. They had patched that up quickly – too much bumping about. May as well have been bricks with wings, he mused. All those freaks in the air, unaccustomed to flight, gussied up in outrageous, decadent splay – what a crowd! Everything one could possibly hint at, in bold italics, screaming proud, a legion of signal jacking Promethean mall rats, polished to a sheen, impeccably rendered – hypertextured, swathed in color so bright that in some cases persons still linked through their flesh would have fits and shut down, their avatars frozen for days in one spot while the poor schmuck behind it bled out from their ears, nose and eyes. Massive hemorrhaging owing to scarring, Noah’s flood in the brain, neurochemical soup washing out, breaking down.

The thought brought with it a tinge of nostalgia. He grinned. Those were the good days, for him.

Outside, the wind picked up with a gust. The aerosol haze, made to dance crazy onward, flew out the caverning roof, to the sky, fraying red–orange, and bruised, rimmed in purple and blue, neon pinks greens and yellows dashed about, set on fire; though the disk of the sun was below the horizon, still the night blazed with light, the very fabric of heaven writhed with polychrome maggots, churned like eels round a chum ball, coursed like Hokusai’s waves. One good storm’s all it took, he recalled. One good blip from the sun, and a radiant mass roughly three planets wide knocked the world from its poles, all those efforts at progress screamed like hell to a halt, and there was nothing left anymore, but to crumble.

The box still remained. Looming fifty feet tall, just shy of a cube, slate gray, lined in lead almost ten inches thick, the last bastion for hopes long since withered and died, its walls held all that remained of that world of flesh rending bliss that the man still recalled. The kernel of Paradise, teeming with life, was gone; those who laid bodies aside in the mad rush for deathlessness so long ago, had floated away, as would chaff through the air.

They sold us a line! He punched at the sky. The hand flickered subtly. Must be getting out of range, he thought, and frowned. The box had its limits; the signal fell off after a couple of miles. Size was not emphasized, the focus was quality. The spokesman and prophet of the entire ordeal had been firm on the issue of corporeal smallness. You lived on forever, what of it if Home was just twenty blocks wide? “The real world, so-called, and its laws do not matter! What matters is happiness, free and eternal!” His words, once so sensible, their eyes full of light, gouged pits and ground glass in the mind of the man, as he turned on his heel, heading back towards his cell.

“Be whatever you want!”

I’m a ghost, the man sobbed, not a wrenched note forthcoming. The Paradise vocal banks had fried in the storm.

“Go! Do whatever you want!”

He had almost arrived. A labyrinthine range of concrete and steel, the remains of that future promised so long ago, a city left scattered like childhood blocks knocked down to the ground in a fit, as obstruction, laid chalk white around him, bleached pale through the years. He made his way solemn and silent along, as a mourner through tombs, all his thoughts facing downward, when, in the utmost peripheral of vision, shown a small glint of light in the dust of decay.

He turned, and bent down. Amidst the refuse was a small chunk of metal, half covered in dross, with flecks of what might have been copper remaining. It looked, to the man, like a dollar store trinket, repurposed aluminum, electrically plated. It was heart shaped, ugly even when new; how much more so now that the decades had changed it? Even so, the sight cheered his heart, as a songbird might lighten the load of a hearer half-drowned in the depths of a viscous depression. Forgetting himself, he reached out his hand. It’s really very beautiful, isn’t it?

The fingers closed, and fell upon air.