Only the End of the World
It was following the Great Divide that men and women stopped cohabitating. Men lived with men and women with women, and the sexes did not intermingle. Human sperm counts had dropped to a negligible level, and for many there now seemed little point to life as we had known it. The last baby to be born had died swiftly and without ceremony—cementing our doom—and so why continue the silly charade? Nuclear family nuked. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man—bullshit. And love? Where there is love, there is life—not the case anymore, I’m afraid.
Men love men, women love women, and no one is left unloved or unsatisfied. But love cannot restore the forests razed for lumber or the icebergs which passed into legend long ago. Or undo the damage wreaked by Progress and Innovation on the human reproductive system. LET US HEAL proclaimed our leaders. LET US HEEL is what they meant, and like good dogs, we obeyed. The rich became richer—hardly a revelation—and the rest became dust beneath their well-shod feet. Joke’s on them, however. A fistful of dollars now means nothing to no one. Mausoleums made of money are still mausoleums—where was I? The upending—scratch that: the end of civilization as we know it. We’ve spent centuries courting obliteration and at last the wedding day is here. Cue glimmer of hope/silver lining—this isn’t that kind of story, however.
But is there a story? So far it’s been nothing but exposition. A story was promised and a story here follows, but the story has only one purpose: to make a harsh reality just slightly more palatable. Without further ado, let me introduce a man and a woman of the Last Generation.
Ada is a barren woman and Steve a barren man, and they are the renegades of the last of humanity. Ada and Steve choose mutual attraction and so are cast out and left alienated from the lives they had known. I won’t waste time on standard love story details—how do they meet? what are their common interests?—since none of us have much time left. The common consensus is that they’re defying the norm—this wouldn’t have been the case for most of human history—and consequently they can never know true happiness. A familiar refrain throughout all of human history. Let nobody be happy who isn’t like everyone else. There must be a common enemy now (by which I mean a brief span of tens of thousands of years) that we dominate and decimate all other life. But let me not lose focus. Ada and Steve are happy, if harassed, and in love—and no, they won’t conceive some miracle baby, saving human life from extinction. What would be the point? Together they’ll endure the boundless repercussions of humanity’s reign of terror, and on a glorious day not far in the future, the very last human will be snuffed out. Good riddance!
There really should be an epilogue—the recovery of the planet, the healing of a wound—but let me not pander to those who might have done something and chose instead to rape and hoard.
