Reboot
Starting Over. Again.
Return to Start Here
This is my first attempt at flash fiction. No idea if this is the way it’s done or not, but it was fun to write anyway.
Half of humanity was confused.
The other half was confidently wrong.
The only person who ever had it right was a homeless man named Peter, who lived under the overpass on 44th Street.
And even he got the timing wrong.
Otherwise, he would’ve come with me to Betelgeuse when I offered.
Instead, he was vaporized with the rest of humanity when the great comet hit and turned Earth into a mist of regrets and melted asphalt.
“There goes my mortgage,” I said.
That made me happy.
“Oh, and my job.”
That made me happier.
Those weren’t problems for me. The real problem was—I couldn’t remember the one thing Peter had been right about. And so, as the last living human being in the universe, all I could really say for my species was:
“We were right once.”
But I couldn’t remember about what.
It didn’t go down well at cocktail parties on Tellarius.
Still, there was a quaint Eldarran who found me amusing for a time, even though our bits didn’t fit together exactly right.
Of course, that didn’t mean we didn’t try.
The thing was that despite the distraction of trying (and failing) to mate with an alien species, I was convinced that the thing Peter knew—the thing I couldn’t remember—would have saved the galaxy from the Vorgh when they came, devouring planets and shitting the remnants out on nearby moons.
It wasn’t that the moons cared, being non-sentient rocks. It was more the principle of the thing.
I mean, wasn’t there a book on planet-devouring etiquette?
Even for hordes of giant locusts masquerading as intelligence?
Okay, that last bit wasn’t true. They were intelligent. They just weren’t very smart.
On the other hand, they ate half the galaxy and then spent the next nine thousand Solar years defecating on dead rocks.
Eventually, we convinced them to move on to a different galaxy and, to my knowledge, the Vorgh are still drifting in the void on their way there.
But I hoped they died off on the way, to be honest. They were the most unfriendly of all sapient species I ever ran into.
Now, the careful reader will have noticed that I must have lived at least nine thousand Solar years in order to be telling this story.
That might not surprise some of you.
But for anyone who actually knew the human species—it was nothing short of a miracle.
Humanity had spent the better part of three million years trying to evolve into something better than we began, making almost zero progress and, at times, working backward for millennia at a time.
So the fact that I had traded the last remaining Twinkie from Earth for immortality seemed to have made all that effort a complete waste of time.
And now that the Earth had been gone for close to ten millennia, I was convinced my earlier supposition was, in fact, true.
I based this on my life as the last surviving human—immortal, annoyed at my own existence, and employed as a food service worker on Tellarius.
It turned out this was the only valuable skill set humanity ever truly possessed as a species.
I had taken an aptitude test in Eldarran.
So I knew this to be true.
So, to all the food service workers out there—no matter your species, or which quadrant of the galaxy you came from—don’t feel alone. You, all by your lone self, have already accomplished everything humanity ever managed to achieve over the course of three thousand millennia.
And yet, I sat there in Noman’s Land—a pub where punching yourself in the face with a liquor bottle was the customary method of toasting—and I didn’t actually feel all that accomplished.
That was when I met Grizelda.
I won’t say she was beautiful.
But I will say she was less ugly than most.
That might’ve been because our bits did fit together.
In any case, we enjoyed a whirlwind romance—if watching her tear the heads off live Tellarian rats with too-sharp teeth can be called romance.
We had a great time for a while.
Although there was no oral sex involved.
For… reasons.
But this story isn't about the romance. It's about the discovery of the artifact and how it changed everything.
For one, I could have brought back Earth, fully intact.
But I chose not to.
Remember, I was convinced that the entirety of human development had been a colossal waste of time.
The artifact, a relic of some lost civilization, could birth a planet from dust. I could have done that.
I supposed it is possible that some other humans escaped the planet before it exploded into three trillion shards, but if there were any humans out there ten millennia later, I was convinced they would have agreed with me.
Despite being unqualified for anything else, I cashed out my retirement, bought a ship, brought Grizelda along with me, and started a scrap mining operation near Tellarius.
Most of it in near space had been picked clean, but there was still a lot left in the asteroid belt.
It was just trickier to get to it without dying. Which was always a possibility. Immortality doesn't mean you can't die. It just means you mostly don't.
Until you do.
I mean, I could have taken Grizelda to a new planet and tried to populate it with her— recreate Earth in my own image, or our joint image. But given some limitations to the relationship, this would have created an entire world sans oral sex, and I didn't think it would end any better than the first Earth.
So while the story didn't end up being a romance with Grizelda and her proclivity for biting me at inopportune times, it did end up being a love story of sorts, as I spent the next millennium scouring the known worlds for someone like Grizelda, but who wouldn’t leave permanent scars after lovemaking.
I already had the artifact, of course, and kept it with me at all times, knowing I could use it to turn any planet with a suitable sun into a replica of Earth, but I was missing my Eve; and given the chances of a permanent end to procreation as the result of Grizelda's amorous manner, I chose to seek out a mate.
Strangely, her name actually was Eve.
I met her in a mining colony in the Astrid system, while drowning my sorrows in a distilled liquor from a cactus planet not unlike blue agave.
She sat down next to me and said, “I'll have what he's having.”
It was enough to cause me to look. At first, I thought she was triplets, a side effect of space tequila, and I thought I was in for a lucky evening. She looked much more like me than any of the interstellar girlfriends I’d had before. She might even pass for human in the right light.
“I'm Eve,” she said.
“Adam,” I lied.
She totally didn't get the joke.
“You know you’re the only one for me.”
“I believe one of my ribs belongs to you.”
“You’re the only woman in my world.”
None of it came across as funny.
She thought I was serious. And she fell in love with me rather quickly—much to my surprise.
But I didn’t mind at all.
She kissed me without drawing blood. And that was kinda nice.
To make a long story short—we did go create a new world, and we became Adam and Eve.
But I’m convinced ours wasn’t the second time.
I’m pretty sure it’s happened many times before.
And I’m asking you—please, for the love of every atom in this tired cosmos—
Get it right this time.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.