"Guess I am dying before GTA 6."
The young man lying on a hospital bed sighed, his gaze fixed at the white ceiling.
The doctors had come this morning with their folder.
He had known, watching them arrange themselves at the foot of the bed with the careful positioning, that the folder contained nothing he wanted. Doctors who brought good news did not arrange themselves, at least in his observation of them in the past two months.
Doctors who brought the other kind took their time. They found their positions, maybe afraid that the patient might just loose it.
Six days, Dr. Harlan had said. At most.
"Actually I wish the World ends today!" Will said spitefully.
Bubble, the golden Pomeranian occupying the foot of the bed, looked up instantly. He had not even moved till now.
He was warm and round at the edges, and he had the composure as if he had decided the most useful thing he could do for the moment was sleep, and he was committed to this decision professionally.
Until he heard his dumb companion wanted the world to end. What kind of petty behavior was that?
The dog let out a sigh. Sometimes, Will was like that.
Will had found him three years ago outside a small shop near the university — a scraggly, underfed thing eating discarded chips from a paper bag like someone for whom starvation was merely a temporary inconvenience.
His ribs had been visible through his coat, eyes very dark and very calm. He had accepted half of Will's lunch without gratitude, as though this had always been the arrangement and Will had simply taken a while to locate his responsibilities.
He was sleek now. Well-fed. Round in the places where he had once been hollow.
He also judged Will constantly. This was the only problem.
He was judging him now, Will realized. "What would you know? You are just a dog."
Bubble held the look for another moment. Then, with great ceremony, put his head back down.
"It is not fair," Will added. Quietly.
And it wasn't. He was only twenty. He had not done most of the things that people did when they assumed that they had time.
He had not left the country. Had not stayed up until sunrise with someone worth staying up for. Had not done any of the thousand unremarkable things that others boasted about.
The world had nothing left worth waiting for.
Why wouldn't he want it to end when he was going to die? For him the world had no more of anything left. But just then a thought struck him ever so jarringly.
He was a Virgin!
And while he was on his small journey of thinking, he once again remembered that the doctor had said he had six more days, hopefully. Which implied five was also possible. Or four.
Though, he reasoned, the thing he was contemplating would not require six days.
It was a matter of seconds.
'Minutes,' he corrected himself internally, with some dignity. He wouldn't be making a quick job out of it, as it was the last thing he was going to do before dying.
Bubble sneezed.
"Nobody asked you," Will said, blinking and remembering the dog could not read his mind.
Nonetheless, he had made his decision.
He signed himself out at eleven-fifteen, against the collective opinion of three nurses and one very tired junior doctor who had explained, that discharging himself against medical advice was among the more creative methods she had encountered for accelerating one's own expiration.
Will had thanked her. Put on his jacket. Picked up the leash from the chair where it had lived for two months, alongside the unread pamphlet and the half-finished crossword and the get-well card from his company that he had not opened.
Bubble had not, initially, wanted to come.
But something shifted in those dark eyes and he stood, stretched with the unhurried ceremony he brought to all physical activity, and moved to Will's side.
He had decided, apparently, that leaving a dying person to wander the city alone was even beyond his detached principle.
Will had noticed this. He did not say anything about it. Some things were better understood than spoken.
The outside world was exactly as ordinary as it had always been.
This was the thing two months in a single room had not prepared him for. Not the grandness of open sky or the overwhelming sensation of freedom, but the complete, cheerful, almost aggressive normalness of everything.
The world had continued. Without him. Without adjustment or the slightest alteration of its pace. Eight billion people had gone about the unremarkable business of their days.
He found, walking through it, that this was both the most comforting and the most terrible thing he had encountered in some time.
He stopped at a petrol station and bought flowers. Yellow ones, the cheap kind that came pre-wrapped in cellophane with a small bow that had been applied by a machine. He did not know if his mother had liked yellow flowers particularly. He could not remember.
He bought them anyway, because they were there and they were bright and they smelled good. There were a hundred reasons one could make up to do, or not to do, for everything.
The bus to the cemetery did not allow dogs. So they had to walk up to the sad place. Will found it harder then before to walk such distance.
The eastern section of the cemetery was quieter than the rest. The trees were older here, their roots lifting the path in long slow ridges, and the stones still fighting them to stay in place.
His mother's grave was under a beech tree that had grown significantly since he'd last visited, its branches throwing dappled light across the stone in a way that might have been pretty, if he were in a different kind of mood.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He set the flowers down and stood there.
The right words to be spoken in such places, he had discovered, did not exist.
There was the stone, the shadows, the silence and the air in places where people came to grieve, and that was all.
"I will be buried right there, Bubble." He pointed at the empty space beside her. "You will bring me beer and those skewers you love. Right?"
Bubble sat at his feet and said nothing.
Will lowered himself to the ground. His chest ached, it always ached now, and he pulled Bubble close without thinking.
Bubble, for once, allowed this without protest.
Will was afraid.
He knew this not because fear was new to him — it wasn't, he'd been afraid of many things throughout his life. It is said, fear is the only thing we humans are born with.
But he had accepted his reality. He was not going to make it... and after he did that, death, did not seem so much powerful.
But underneath the acceptance was the other thing. The thing he was actually afraid of... the thing all humans are constantly afraid of.
He would be forgotten.
Not immediately. His colleagues would remember him for a year or two. The nurses perhaps longer, in the vague way nurses remembered the younger ones who shouldn't have been there.
But the years would accumulate, and the people who remembered would age and forget and eventually die themselves, and then there would be nothing that had ever known he was here.
He had not invented anything or built or changed or discovered anything that would outlast the memory of people who would themselves be forgotten.
Albert Einstein would be remembered. Nikola Tesla would be remembered.
But the ones who remember them would not be.
He laughed.
What foolish creatures humans were.
He coughed.
The pain in his chest spiked as if his heart was being grabbed by a hand and squeezed... when he pulled his hand from his mouth there was blood on his palm.
He looked at it for a moment. Then lay back on the grass beside his mother's grave, and looked at the sky, counting the moving clouds.
It didn't make sense... but, sometimes that was all there was.
He was still looking at the sky when he saw the purple light.
He had thought, for the first slow second, that it was some trick of afternoon light. Or maybe a star.
He blinked. Looked again. It was still there, a deep bruised violet point in a sky that was otherwise perfectly ordinary, and as he watched it, the weird thing grew.
It was not a star, there could be no stars in afternoon.
It spread the way ink spreads in water, from a single point outward in all directions simultaneously, bleeding across the sky. The blue of the sky went first. Then the white of the clouds, absorbed and swallowed.
Then the sun itself, its light dimming and changing color until the world existed under a canopy the deep purple, and the afternoon was gone as though it had never been.
Will sat up, wide eyed and looked beside him.
Bubble was not there!
He looked down the cemetery path. Through the gate. Across the road and found the compact dog sprinting down the pavement with his ears flat and his entire small body committed to pursuit, fixed on a brown female dog being walked by a woman in a yellow coat, utterly indifferent to the sky, to the century, to anything except the object of his attention.
"Get back here, you dumbass!"
Will scrambled to his feet — his chest screamed at him, he moved anyway and ran.
He was not fast. He had not been fast even before the illness, and the illness had not improved matters.
Will caught Bubble's leash at the edge of the pavement and yanked.
Bubble came up short with an indignant sound.
And then the screen appeared.
It erupted in Will's vision without warning or invitation — enormous, translucent, suspended in the air directly in front of his face, filling his sight with blue-white light and golden text he did not have time to read.
Across the road, a black sedan slid sideways. The woman in the yellow coat had stopped moving. She stood in the middle of the road with her own floating screen in front of her face, and the car took her completely.
The second car struck the first. A third struck the second. A delivery van mounted the pavement and removed a bus shelter. From somewhere over the rooftops to the south came a sound that Will felt before he heard and when he looked up, a plane was no longer where planes were supposed to be.
In merely ninety seconds, the road was red.
Will stood at the cemetery gate with Bubble pressed against his legs.
This was happening everywhere.
The sky pulsed once, deep violet, like a slow heartbeat.
And then the screen expanded and a voice came with it, from the air itself, perhaps, or from the frequency beneath sound. It was a rough voice. Old at its edges. Filled with authority and arrogance.
The voice read what the screen displayed.
✦ OFFICIAL SYSTEM BROADCAST — ALL RECIPIENTS — MANDATORY ✦
ATTENTION, INHABITANTS OF DESIGNATION: EARTH (SOL-3)
CLASSIFICATION: PRIMITIVE BIOSPHERE, TIER-0 CIVILIZATION
CURRENT GALACTIC RELEVANCE SCORE: 21 / 100
Humanity. How delightful that you're reading this. How surprising that you can.
Your planetary system SOL-3 has finally reached the threshold.
After an exhaustive review of your civilization's progress — conducted across 6,000 of your years, reviewed by independent Hosts, Assessors and Overlords, they have come to a verdict, that took less time to write than your species spent arguing about whether the planet was round.
You all have failed your Free Trial.
I am the system created to be responsible for all of you. So, Let me be honest with you, since no one else has had the courage for it.
Do not be discouraged. Most species fail.
You are, however, notable for how comprehensively you failed — having been gifted a temperate, resource-rich world of extraordinary natural abundance and choosing to spend the majority of your civilization era engaged in the following documented activities: warfare over imaginary borders, the acceleration of your own ecological collapse, the construction of approximately 4.2 billion hours of recorded content primarily featuring people falling down, and the near-universal neglect of your planetary maintenance obligations.
You had, oceans that fed you. Forests that cleaned your air without asking. Soil that produced food from seeds you dropped by accident, in your sleep, while doing other things.
We do acknowledge your achievements in medicine, architecture, music, and the occasional act of unreasonable courage.
But we are not happy with the things you did next.
You built weapons to give to your neighbors. You then used those weapons when your neighbors, predictably, used them back.
You divided your species — one species, the judges wishes to emphasize, one, the same one, all of you — into subsections based on the distribution language, color, caste and what not.
Then you all constructed entire civilizations of philosophy and law and theology to explain why this difference was not merely real but meaningful.
You are also the most complete embodiment of your own mythology of sin. Greed. Pride. Wrath. You didn't merely exhibit these tendencies — you institutionalized them. You built economies around the first. Governments around the second. Religions around the third.
Now, as the Verdict states.
Effective immediately, your planet of origin will be transferred to the Overlords. The 8 billion registered humans, in your nomenclature will be given a chance to migrate to the world of Ellara: a Tier-4 world, currently hosting 67 previously failed civilizations.
You will be given the opportunity to earn your continued existence.
You will, in all likelihood, provide exceptional entertainment to the almighty Hosts, Assessors and Overlord, currently tuning in for your species' intake event, which has been trending for three of your days.
Current expected migration success rate - 4%
The walkway manifests in three of your minutes.
Further rules will be explained upon successful migration.
Do not touch anything on the walkway. The System should not have to explain this, but I am explaining it anyway because your species' relationship with the concept of do not touch that has been, historically, aspirational at best.
Welcome to Ellara.
✦ END BROADCAST ✦
[WALKWAY MANIFESTATION: 02:47]
Will was more than just speechless, he didn't know if it was him or Bubble, but he might have wet his pants.
After a long pause, all he could manage was. "Holy cow? What in the name of alien invasion is this?"
'No fucking way, the world actually ended!' He thought with a grim expression.
'Curse it all, I should have asked for something else.'
Suddenly another screen opened in front of his eyes.
[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR"]
Your dumbass thinks its because of your wish, but unfortunately you are just a germ. This was scheduled six thousand years before your dad learned to jack off.
Reward: 10 Coins.
Will's eyes twitched as he read the notification. Before he could speak anything... the timer that about the walkway manifestation hit Zero and another notification entered his vision.