I was rather at loose ends when I graduated from medical school, but since I was always good at chemistry, I chose a residency in infectious diseases, and eventually found myself conducting research in virology.

            Virology can be a dangerous profession. I worked on an island within sight of New York City, but the laboratories were several stories underground and isolated by a series of airlocks. We wore the earthbound equivalent of space suits, except that our air supply was pumped through a hose and our gloves, though consisting of several layers of rubber and Kevlar, were easier to manipulate than those of astronauts who has to contend with extremely cold temperatures and zero gravity. Many of us had had scares in which we had accidentally pierced some of our protective layers with a needle or a piece of broken glass, or has experienced a spill or small explosion that filled the room with lethal vapors. I had worked in virology for nearly forty years, and much of my daydreaming of late was taken up by thinking about retirement.

            It was near quitting time and I prepared to leave for the day by refrigerating several slides, turning off the electron microscopes and computers. I passed through an airlock and performed the arduous task of peeling off the several layers of protection, including the “space suit”, when I felt a brief, steady shudder that rattled the panes of the room. This sometimes happened when a large ship sailed close to our island and sounded its deep horn. I thought nothing more of it and headed for the elevator that would take me to the surface. I always enjoyed the lightness and freedom of movement after being confined in my portable environment and its stale, recycled air.

            The elevator opened onto the lobby with its turnstiles, which were curiously vacant at this hour when workers would all at once stream out of the building into the fresh air.

            Outside the sun was delightfully warm on the skin and the breeze off the Atlantic carried the tang of salt and seaweed. The plaza in front of the building was deserted. The parking lot was as full as it had been that morning.

            I tried to remember if I had missed an announcement about a practice drill of some sort or about an assembly.

            I went back into the building. Still no one, and even the security posts were unmanned.

            I swiped my card and re-entered the building. I saw flashes of blue light typical of a TV flickering in the corridor outside nearby lounge.

            The TV was tuned to CNN, which was showing a flow of images, may jerky, grainy videos taken by cell phones, but others of professional quality, but all showing the same phenomenon: people, singly and in masses, disintegrating, as if the chemical bonds between their molecules had suddenly lost their power of attraction. People separated into clusters of granules, then vaporized into the atmosphere without a trace. They fell apart and vanished.

            The films came from Johannesburg, Bombay, Tokyo, Shanghai, London, Paris, and even a short distance away, from New York City.

            There was no warning, no skies filled with alien spacecraft, no disturbance of the weather. Many cell phones fell through the hands that only a moment ago held them, and crashed to the ground where they continued to record empty street and sidewalks. There was no commentary.

            My heart pounded so fast I sat down on a couch to recover. I was sweating and my eyes must have been starting from my head.

            This can’t be happening, I thought, not on this perfect spring day, with no warning, with such alacrity. The human race, or a great deal of it, had simply vanished in seconds. The event must have occurred everywhere in the world at the same time: late afternoon in Manhattan, midnight in Europe, and on the morning of a different day in East Asia and Australia.

            I saw jet planes descending toward JFK and La Guardia, and others taking off. Surely this event could not be universal if the pilots if the pilots disintegrated while at the controls of large commercial jetliners.

            I panicked and ran madly around the building, down to the subterranean sealed laboratories. The elevators operated normally, the locks clicked open when I swiped my pass. Perhaps some of others like me had somehow survived this mass extinction. I shouted and called, picked up telephones, heard the dial tones, called numbers, but nowhere a single response.

            I don’t remember how I arrived there, but I found myself driving my car onto the ferry for Manhattan, as I had done hundreds of times before, and even felt the ferry rumble into life as the boat left the dock and proceeded on its usual route.

            I climbed the metal stairs past the little chain that held a sign “Crew Only Beyond This Point”, into the wheelhouse. Again no one, yet the helm and controls moved automatically and the ship glided across the waters as seagulls whirled overhead looking for discarded food.

            I prepared for a crash, but the ferry slowed and maneuvered itself gently against the wharf. The ramp lowered with its accustomed clang, and I hurried to my car, the lone vehicle in the vast hold, and drove onto the dock. I drove, crying and screaming, toward Grand Central Station.

            Empty of all human traffic  no pedestrians, no vendors, no shoppers, no tourists  only mile after mile of cell phones, purses, briefcases, chic shopping bags and packages  all dropped where they fell.

            The trucks, taxis and buses were empty. I stopped and hurried into a few subway stations  brightly lit, their clocks telling the correct time  and all devoid of life.

            The traffic signals still changed from red to yellow to green, but no one was left to obey them. I wove my car through the stationary traffic and eventually to my apartment. The elevator worked, the hall lights gleamed softly, and once in the apartment I heard the refrigerator humming.

            I checked the TV again: more film continued to flow across the screen in eerie silence.

            That was five hundred years ago.

            Since then I have learned a great deal, yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered.

            I did ascertain I was not in a coma or deep sleep, experiencing the mass extinction of the human race as a dream. I tested my blood, my vital signs, even the exact times of these tests. All was normal.

            I searched all over the world, but in five centuries never found another survivor. I went on TV, radio, even short wave, begging anyone to contact me. I never received a reply.

            I drove to other cities and found them as lifeless as New York.

            Flying had been my great passion in life, and I had earned my license to fly jet aircraft. I flew to the great cities of Europe and went on to explore the farmlands and small towns of everywhere from Portugal to Poland, and never found a soul.

            I flew grid patterns over Siberia, I looked for cooking fires and lights in Africa and the Amazon. Nothing but impenetrable blackness outside the cities, which for some reason, continued to maintain their lighting, elevators, subway systems and heating and cooling as if at any moment the residents would return. Nor were the cities overrun with animals or vegetation. New York today, after half a millennium, looks just as it did in the spring of 2011. Outside the cities the forests have returned, the wetlands have returned, and in the oceans herring swim in their millions and whales of all types are a common sight.

            Therefore, I am almost certainly the sole survivor of a mass extinction of humanity.

            I also discovered that my aging process stopped at sixty-seven, the age I was in 2011. My photograph today matches that of me five centuries ago. I also have no need to eat or drink. This led me to wonder if I were a kind of hologram with self-consciousness, but that hypothesis was proven false by the way I interact with the physical world: I can move objects, I can write coherently, I cast a shadow, I leave an imprint on furniture, and so on.

            This would point to my being a part of some plan by those who eliminated people from Earth. Am I to be kept for study? As an exhibit or specimen? Am I to be interrogated one day about how it felt to a human in the early twenty-first century?

            I know they want to preserve me and world I live in. I can walk into any subway station and take a train, driverless, to any station on any line. I feel the wind from the approaching train (I have even measured the pressure).

            I do not know what my lifespan will be. But I do know that they work with time scales unimaginably greater than humans ever did.

            They returned three hundred years ago. Not that I saw them: everything they do is automated. Who knows, they may send automated systems run by intelligent robots, while they themselves stay on their home planet and issue orders. Perhaps the order to exterminate the human species was issued a hundred-thousand years. In any event, with the powerful telescopes at my disposal I saw their ships materialize over the north and south poles of the sun. From there they unwound a black fabric, hundreds of millions of square kilometers in area that surrounded the sun, but left a wide empty space along the ecliptic, so that the Earth continued to receive sunlight as it traveled in its usual orbit. Two large hemispheres of fabric, one north of the Earth’s orbit, the other south of it, captured all the output of the sun’s energy that in the past simply radiated unused into space.

            Clearly they wanted Earth not only to survive, but also be the recipient of this gigantic source of energy for the enormous engineering projects they have planned for Earth.

            Then they left  without my ever seeing one of them. That was three centuries ago and nothing has changed.

            I think some of this energy is used to project huge force fields around cities, like a semi-permeable membrane: air, rain, birds and my aircraft pass through the force fields, while plants and animals are unable to penetrate them. In fact, around the cities of the world you can see the outline of these domes, where the wild vegetation suddenly ends at an invisible wall. This is why Manhattan is not overrun with deer and bears and wolves.

            It is impossible to know how they think. Obviously, killing over six billion intelligent beings meant nothing to them, any more than slaughtering and driving off the American Indians from land we wanted bothered most of us. The Indians were in the way of progress. On the other hand, if they had surveyed our planet a hundred-thousand years ago, they would have found only a small percentage of the people who existed in 2011. Maybe the order to exterminate us was based on outdated information.

            I have long thought that they plan to make the Earth into a theme park or resort, replete with museum-cities. As for their will to carry out whatever plans they have for Earth, I can only compare them to human beings who, historically, have been difficult to keep focused on long-term projects. If in the late twentieth century the world’s scientists and politicians had proclaimed a united one-hundred-year effort to destroy or divert a comet on a collision course with Earth, I am almost certain that squabbling, national pride, greed, ethnic and religious tensions, and a general inability to focus on a threat generations away, would have led to the collapse of the project long before the comet became visible in our skies. Just think about our inability to do anything about global warming.

            Another possibility  more wishful thinking than a realistic hypothesis  is that they have stored the information in the DNA and molecular arrangement of each disintegrated human and will reconstruct them in the future. This is a version of the bodily resurrection fantasy of Christianity, and about as likely to be true.

            I have the run of the Earth. I have visited every corner of it over the centuries, with the exception of Antarctica, where I am afraid to fly. I have visited the Louvre and methodically read every card and description of every exhibit from Egyptian to Græco-Roman to Medieval to modern times. I have gazed long at the Mona Lisa, and at the Impressionist paintings at the Musée d’Orsay. I have examined the paintings at the Uffizi in Florence, the museums of Rome, Milan and Venice, and those of London, St Petersburg, New York and Chicago. I have listened to all the works of Baroque and Classical music performed by the greatest singers and musicians. I have read all the great and even minor works of literature and poetry the world over.

            I am beginning to wonder if I have reached the limit of what the human brain can retain. What is there to look forward to? For five hundred years human knowledge and artistic development have been frozen as they were in 2011.

            English, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and five thousand other languages and dialects have ceased to be spoken. They no longer have readers or writers.

            I fly in total darkness between cities. Never once did I see a single fire or flash of light. I have had no one to talk to for half a millennium. My own outlet is to talk to myself or watch virtually every movie ever made. For example, I have watched all fifteen-hundred or so film noirs ever produced.

            I may live for thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. I have tested committing suicide, but all attempts fail. I cannot be poisoned, I cannot stab or slash myself (the wounds heal as quickly as they are made), I cannot be crushed or electrocuted or shot or suffocated. They want me to live, but they do not car about the fact that as a human I am a social animal and require interaction with others to maintain mental health. I cannot share wit or sarcasm or irony. By now I have watched and listened to the great comedians and know their films and routines by heart.

            There are, however, some advantages to my situation: the BBC no longer spews depressing news. There is no more genocide, ethnic cleansing, religious strife, war, famine, theft, serial killings, corruption, hypocrisy, exploitation, abuse of women and children, tyranny, ideology or vulgarity.

            The world is quiet, and steadily grows cleaner and cooler. I am waiting to see what they do when a new ice age begins. Are the vast solar panels going to heat the Earth and its sole human?

            My greatest fear is that they will transport me to their world. It would be a torture to see them, the cold-blooded murderers of humanity and its achievements and future. I could never understand them or fathom their purposes. No doubt their appearance would be frightening and disgusting.

            Tomorrow I will fly to Venice, to a Venice deserted and in no danger of sinking. I will sit on the steps of the Salute and watch the gondolas bobbing at their moorings. I will look at the empty harbor and the empty streets. And I will wait for them to come for me.

June 14^th, 2011

Quiberon, Brittany, France

© Robert L. Fisher, 2011