Prefer to download and print this story? Click here. Otherwise, enjoy!
It’s been 23 years, 4 months, 1 week and a day since I last heard another human voice over this channel.
Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Which leads me to believe that I’m the last man on earth.
It sounds so cliche, but sitting here among the rats, wolves, and ravens who I now call my companions, it feels more like karma than cliche. How else could the one responsible for ending the world come to be the only one left to record it’s destruction?
I have had to come to terms with that, Which hasn’t been easy. But I guess no one else had it any easier.
I’m not important, at least I wasn’t before. I was just a biochemist. Not a president, a dictator, or a king. Just a scientist. And my talents were overshadowed by my naivety… or maybe it was my hubris.
This does sound cliche.
In this last letter to no one, I aim to write my version of why things have gone so catastrophically wrong and leave one parting gift to the remaining life on this wasted and desolate planet.
How it happened:
Without imparting every piece of the political landscape– I wasn’t especially interested with politics unless it dealt with grant-related legislation– I can say that a major issue with the energy crisis split the UN more or less down the middle.
Asia and its allies versus the West and its allies, age-old fracture lines, new-age reason.
The tensions were mounting for some time before the split, and stockpiles of nuclear weapons were sitting in silos with blinking lights just waiting to annihilate the entire population of the earth a thousand times over. So, when the first move was made with the sinking of a few ships on both sides, the politics-people were looking for a less ominous solution.
Then there was little ol’ me. I was busy trying to end world hunger. Awesome, right? I had hypothesized that if we could break down cellulose (AKA fiber) into digestible parts, people in poor countries could get calories from readily available sources like grass! It was brilliant. What a solution! People getting their energy like the herbivores do, one step closer to solving the world’s second largest problem.
[blockquote id=”ec58192386c1482cc3c159f752e6cba7″ content=”The largest problem being how not to kill each other.” cite=”” hide_on_desktop=”false” hide_on_mobile=”false” animation_on_scroll=”{‹²›animation_enable‹²›:‹²›no‹²›,‹²›yes‹²›:{‹²›animation_type‹²›:‹²›fadeIn‹²›,‹²›animation_delay‹²›:‹²›0‹²›}}” __fw_editor_shortcodes_id=”657777f97cc68889e2ae6a0359a124d1″ _array_keys=”{‹²›animation_on_scroll‹²›:‹²›animation_on_scroll‹²›}” _fw_coder=”aggressive”][/blockquote]But there I was, merrily working away, making great progress on a finely powdered catalyst to turn fiber into food, when a grant I didn’t apply for from the military came in the mail.
“I should’ve been suspicious,” you say. Well maybe, but I thought: “feeding the troops in the field on grass, what a great idea! No more problems with sieges, or carrying bulky MREs!”
But no, problem number 1 always beats out problem number 2.
With the added financial resources and a brand new lab, our research leaped forward! How excited we were. There was one especially talented scientist who ran our experiments. I would’ve really liked to ask her out on a date back then. But as the project’s supervisor, I felt that it would be inappropriate to do. It seems so stupid now.
When we had our initial prototype formulated is right about when my team and I could no longer ignore the signs of impending war surrounding us: the angry radio announcers spewing their fury about the East; the nieces, nephews, and cousins signing up for the service; and the call from a 5 star general to bring our prototype to a meeting with the leaders of the West.
The sad thing is that even with the whirlwind of events and the heightened state of fear, I really believed that my product would be used to feed a hungry world.
The day of the meeting came, after a long night organizing the presentation together with that talented, wonderful woman. She and I went together; she would make the presentation, and I would answer questions about our operations overall. She performed magnificently, even allowing for my rosy-colored bias.
She finished the slides and then performed a short demonstration of our powder turning some lawn clippings into a pile of sugar, our President– the President himself– turned to me and asked the question they were really there for:
“Can we weaponize this?”
I was stunned, and it showed. So the President set off on a long-winded justification of how ‘’we didn’t ask for this war,’ and ‘the East is being unreasonable’, yadda yadda yadda. I looked at my colleague and she squinted and almost imperceptibly shook her head, no. I often imagine what she was thinking at that moment: ‘No, our research is to help people, not hurt them!,’ or was it less altruistic? Something like ‘they’ll take this from us!’
Whatever she was thinking, if I had only listened to her, she would still be alive.
They would all be.
But to my everlasting shame and insurmountable guilt, I let the President finish assuaging the leader’s collective consciences and said:
[blockquote id=”ec58192386c1482cc3c159f752e6cba7″ content=”It could destroy their crops.” cite=”” hide_on_desktop=”false” hide_on_mobile=”false” animation_on_scroll=”{‹²›animation_enable‹²›:‹²›no‹²›,‹²›yes‹²›:{‹²›animation_type‹²›:‹²›fadeIn‹²›,‹²›animation_delay‹²›:‹²›0‹²›}}” __fw_editor_shortcodes_id=”c8b971cac355eff3e392b41bf6eb1aa5″ _array_keys=”{‹²›animation_on_scroll‹²›:‹²›animation_on_scroll‹²›}” _fw_coder=”aggressive”][/blockquote]The generals and leaders smiled and nodded, and for a moment I felt like a hero.
‘The President is pleased with my research! There are kings in this audience and they’re pleased with me.’ The people who ruled the Western World were all applauding my efforts together!
I turned to look at my colleague and she let her head fall down. It looked like someone had just shot her puppy and her best friend.
I guess I killed them too.
So we set to work. We designed spinning canisters that could be dropped in a field and disintegrate all the plant matter in a 50 ft radius. The military coined the term Bio-disintegration Weapon or BW. I never got to name the food version.
I was sure to build these canisters to reduce the destruction to targeted areas. I was worried that if we simply crop dusted the powder and let the wind take it, that we’d run into wildlife conservation issues. I tried to think of every contingency, but the military wanted the weapon ‘yesterday’ and people were already dying on both sides.
We got the product together through the Herculean efforts of my team and then the miracle of the modern war machine executed the largest production run of all time. As reserves they told me, setting my modest quantity recommendations aside.
The war had begun in earnest for only a month when they bombed the BW. It was everything the leaders had hoped. It razed crops and cover in minutes leaving no radiation or human casualties. I was uneasy but happy to serve my country. Ending the third world war with a smaller death count than most border disputes.
But so it was, that the very people I had designed the product to feed, had the chemical devouring their food instead.
I had made the West agree to set aside food reserves to feed the people of the East once the war was ended, which was one recommendation they actually followed. But I was trying to fix the world’s second problem while fueling the world’s first.
My beloved colleague was lost to me after the first shells were dropped. She quit the very day the news was spread. There had been no negotiations with the East– No warning of what was in store– and her conscience couldn’t bear it any longer.
That’s the last time I ever saw her.
The war went well for the West. There were millions on millions of starving people in the East and so ceasefires and treaties were hastily being signed. ‘Hurrah. Hooray. The end is near,’ the papers said.
[blockquote id=”ec58192386c1482cc3c159f752e6cba7″ content=”How prophetic.” cite=”” hide_on_desktop=”false” hide_on_mobile=”false” animation_on_scroll=”{‹²›animation_enable‹²›:‹²›no‹²›,‹²›yes‹²›:{‹²›animation_type‹²›:‹²›fadeIn‹²›,‹²›animation_delay‹²›:‹²›0‹²›}}” __fw_editor_shortcodes_id=”5f304ade3857a723d01fec1ef1d8e220″ _array_keys=”{‹²›animation_on_scroll‹²›:‹²›animation_on_scroll‹²›}” _fw_coder=”aggressive”][/blockquote]To that point, the largest global tragedy was some already hungry people getting hungrier, and the largest personal tragedies were only the loss of my purpose and a little unrequited love, but those are both quite common in the scientific field. So, how did the most civilized of world wars come to end in the destruction of 99.9 percent of terrestrial species?
It’s all in the science of catalysts.
A catalyst facilitates a reaction, but is not consumed in the process; that’s what makes it a catalyst. That fact shouldn’t have mattered in the original use case; I had designed the catalyst to be edible, so in small quantities, it would simply be consumed with the sugars it produced, no cleanup or waste. Brilliant, once again.
The problem was, nobody eats weapons. It devoured the crops, then fell to the ground in the mushy pulp and waited to dry.
Then the long-cursed east wind began to blow.
Historically, the east wind was the harbinger of swarms of locusts, but this BW dust cloud was so much worse. It spread like shadows in the night and consumed crops, wooden structures, paper products, linens and everything else made of that precious cellulose.
The East’s general disorganized state after from its food scarcity and the reverse logistics of ending the third world war that they were unaware of the problem until it was impossible to contain.
I don’t know, but I have wondered how much of that BW run they dropped on those unsuspecting civilians. I wonder if the military forwent the focused canisters and dusted it like agent orange. I wonder if they saw how it took down the thatched roofs and wooden skeletons of their homes but felt okay knowing it didn’t hurt the people. Whatever really happened, the reach of this, my chemical monster was far and unyielding.
Then the news broke that the old world was dying, we all hoped that the ocean would protect us; that the vast blue would be wide enough to prevent the new world from the same fate. But like times before, the ocean could not keep the invaders at bay.
It was true that water significantly hinders the catalyst, but once dried it began working just as well as ever. And slow doesn’t mean stopped either.
As far as I can tell, the only oxygen-producing life forms on earth are the cyanobacteria. It’s always the bacteria that weathers these cataclysms, isn’t it?
When those trade winds brought the dearth, we took to greenhouses, then covered ships with all our food reserves. We bought humanity and a few lucky food species some time, but the numbers of mouths and the amount of reserves just weren’t enough. People starved, fought, and died. Like they always seem to do.
So how did I survive you ask? Well, I was no longer the hero; I was the mad scientist that had ended the world. So I wasn’t especially popular on the ships. I volunteered to return to land to study a way to counteract the catalyst. ‘Maybe I really could!’ I had told myself then, but it only took a few months to see that there would be no saving the plants, or the animals that relied so heavily on them.
The cold fire had burned the world around, all the way to the arctic circle. The only remaining life was scavengers and predators, eating their fill of carcasses, unaware that it would be their last meal.
***
I built a little oasis near a spring. That’s where I sit now. I’ve planted grass and a few other hardy food species I brought with me from the ships. I have greenhouse walls and misters constantly running to keep the catalyst out.
The remaining plant life on earth is in less than 400 square feet. I have two hardy weed trees that sprouted on their own once the protection was provided. My hope for plants is that this chemical breaks down one day and this little oasis can spread to fill the earth again. I chose only the most tenacious, invasive species that hopefully can withstand this mass extinction. Some of the grass has grown out into the world, but it usually disintegrates with the next storm.
The only animal life I see anymore are rats, wolves, and ravens. The hardest, most tenacious animals. It’s funny how these carrion eaters have been signs of death, disease, and disgust for countless civilizations, but now they’re symbols of life to me. I’ve welcomed the rats and ravens into my little oasis, as many as could fit and they’ve multiplied beautifully.
The couple of pairs of wolves prefer to stay outside in the open and eat the young rats that leave out of curiosity. The ravens eat the plants that I prepare for then and the corpses of the rats and wolves that die.
This little oasis with its little food chain is what has kept me alive, running the numbers and making sure everything stays in balance all these years.
Admittedly, life was a lot better at staying in balance before I dealt with it in the first place.
But I’m getting older and the radio messages I used to get from the ships, in the beginning, have long ago gone silent.
Could there be other people out there? Maybe. But I’ve lost hope for that, years ago. So my last will and testament to the world that I destroyed is to the rats, wolves, and ravens.
I hereby bequeath my little garden of heathen to you with all its fallen graces. And I pass the torch of dominion from my destroyed species to you. Humans began in a garden and here we end. From Adam to a dam, struggling to hold our self-inflicted destruction at bay.
In true mad scientist fashion, I have created one last gift to send you out from this garden with my blessing.
A fiercely infectious disease.
No, this is no dark burial right, turning my garden into my pyramid or crypt. No, this disease will not kill all of you, my little pets. Maybe some, but the cyanobacteria will infect your skin, and provide you sugars in exchange for your warmth, hydration, and protection.
You will be ravenous, but have energy; starving, but will survive. And in your searching for food, maybe you will be able to fill the world once again.
Oh, my little creatures, I hope you treat it better than I did.
-the man who ended the world.