This is the End

This Is the End

By Corey Harland

She walked without much attention to where she was going.

The sidewalk was familiar enough that her feet handled most of the work themselves. One hand held her phone while the other occasionally disappeared into her coat pocket as she moved beneath the streetlights.

Cars passed.

Somewhere behind her, a dog barked.

She scrolled.

The message board had updated again.

Most of it was the usual garbage—arguments, advertisements, somebody complaining about something that had happened three states away. She flicked past each without reading more than a few words.

Then a headline caught her attention.

THIS IS THE END

She almost kept scrolling.

Almost.

Instead, she tapped it.

The column opened.

As humanity’s hunger grew—for easier access, better technology, and the holy grail of a longer life—so did its appetite for shortcuts.

In a world of advanced technology and dwindling natural resources, cloning animals, plants, and the other necessities of life became humanity’s primary means of survival.

There was still no answer for getting off the planet.

Eventually, there was barely enough left on it.

So humanity crossed one final boundary.

We began eating cloned human meat.

She slowed slightly.

“What the fuck?”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

She kept reading.

It wasn’t murder. At least, that was the argument.

They had never lived. They had no families, no childhoods, no memories. They were grown for consumption like cattle had once been, back when cattle were still economical enough to raise.

That decision led to today.

The clones have taken the planet.

What remains of the original human race has been divided into two primary classes.

The first are human computers—living biological processors maintained for their extraordinary capacity to store, interpret, and transmit information.

She stopped at the corner.

The crossing signal was red.

The second are considerably less fortunate.

They are game.

The little white figure appeared on the crossing signal.

She stepped from the curb.

Sophisticated, free-range, wild human game bred and released for the entertainment of wealthy Techs—and for the clones who developed a taste for the flesh of the species that once ate theirs.

A car rolled past as she reached the opposite sidewalk.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

There were only a few lines left.

Humanity wanted unlimited memory.

Unlimited resources.

Unlimited life.

Instead, we taught our replacements everything they needed to know.

Including what we tasted like.

She stared at that one for a moment.

Then came the final sentence.

This is the end.

She laughed quietly.

“Jesus Christ.”

Her thumb moved toward the comments.

Something scraped behind her.

She stopped.

The sound had come from somewhere beyond the reach of the nearest streetlight.

She looked over her shoulder.

Nothing.

Her phone vibrated.

MESSAGE BOARD UPDATED

She looked down.

A new headline had taken the top position.

HUMANS: DUPED PERSON GETS MAULED

She frowned.

“What?”

Something struck her from behind.

Her phone flew from her hand.

She hit the pavement hard enough to drive the breath from her lungs, but before she could scream, something rolled her onto her back.

She saw claws.

Then teeth.

Then eyes that looked terribly, impossibly familiar.

The claws descended.

They dug menacingly into her eye sockets.

Her scream collapsed into a wet gargle as yellow and white gushed through the red, mixing into a grotesque red velvet cream that poured across her grimaced face.

Her fingers scraped uselessly against the pavement.

Then stopped.

A few feet away, her phone lay faceup.

The screen was cracked.

Still glowing.

The message board refreshed.

HUMANS: DUPED PERSON GETS MAULED

Beneath the headline appeared a photograph.

Her photograph.

And beneath that:

Her reflection