Rest
Outside the town, a simple group of structures was taking shape. The work was slow, even with the help of the neighbors, who provided the mortar to bind the rubble of ancient buildings together again. The neighbors! She was trying to find new, less-disparaging ways to acknowledge the creeps, on whom their survival continued to depend, and whose help was, now and then, still very much appreciated. They could, if they wanted to, rely on the collective for all their needs. But the two of them preferred to work by hand, lifting and building together. Time and effort were gifts, and she treasured being alive and awake; it didn’t matter how hard the work was. And anyway, the important thing was that the toil had ended. Her yearning against the crushing burden of eternal solitude was over: from now on, all effort was shared, and all effort would be joy. Her hands were becoming rough like his.
Nor did it matter that their own home was currently little more than four walls and a roof – it was a real house, made of real stuff, and it soon would have many rooms. The walls were thick and painted white with lime from the lowlands to the east. They’d settled a short distance from town, below the summit of a gentle rise. From their porch they could see hills to the west, and sometimes smell the sea. In the other direction was a long low valley with a great body of water stretching away to the north.
She soon learned that she was not the only living thing to have survived, and that the world contained somewhat more than memories and their avatars. The great redwoods, famously tall, vivid in her picture-book memory, could still be seen on the hills around the valley. She wondered how far descended these were from the trees that existed when she arrived. Or could it be that some of them remained alive since then, communicating ancient truths, root to root, across the forest?
A complete natural survey of the region would have to wait; there was work to do. And, anyway, for ages her view had been so constrained by the inward facing facade of her prison, the old town, that she wasn’t used to seeing great distances. She didn’t often look out across the landscape; it made her anxious to confront the expansive reach of the world.
As for the town itself? The games had ended: there was no longer any reason for her to pretend the townspeople were alive, or to interact with them at all. He also kept his interaction with that crowd to a minimum. But he did not avoid them altogether; there had been interviews between the collective and the artist, the content and significance of which were hidden from her. That suited her just fine. She didn’t have to fear any secrets with him, for on the day he became solid, he had also become (somewhat shockingly) transparent. If she wanted to, she could know his thoughts at any time.
As for the in-laws? She didn’t care anymore what was going on in their machine mind. If they trusted her to live her life, she could trust them with the rest of it. There was a new honesty and practicality to all interactions with the local population. They, after all, continued to serve as liaisons with the machinery of the world, and as a kind of techno-repository of folk wisdom about how the natural world works. In that respect alone, the creeps had job security. They were all settling into this new relationship: the code had functionally adapted to become supplier to the Do It Yourself enthusiast, and occasional urgent care facility for the inevitable DIY casualty. This is probably how it should have been from the beginning.
Between the two of them there was laughter. There was joy. She felt alive and free in ways that she had not believed was possible. And he: he was alive and free in ways that should have been impossible. But alive he was, and he wore an unrestrained look of happiness on his face much of the time. There were still moments when he got angry. But, it was a human anger, and that was alright with her.
Even before their home was finished, they’d begun designing other buildings. These didn’t look anything like the old architecture: as they envisioned a new environment, the old was slowly disappearing. The town was shrinking, but what remained felt more purposeful now, and was beginning to make a little more sense. On the night they met, at the moment of the change, the barrier that isolated the town from the wilderness had vanished. What was needed now was a new kind of building, one suited to the real world and the real people at the center of it. They were exposed: the view was better, the weather was worse; life was good.
Most days, the two of them liked to sit on their porch and watch the sun set over the mountains. On one of those days, as they rested in the dimming afternoon light, and felt the early chill of the coming autumn, she was distracted by a growing sense of unease. The wide world seemed in that moment more vast, more threatening, and she shuddered and leaned against his side. Something within her signaled that change was coming, and it was coming with a familiar, gnawing sense of destiny. The last time she had felt this way, despairing of her endless cycle of sleep and forgetfulness, she was fighting the power that kept her alive. At that time, she had reconciled herself to the possibility of death as she fought for her right to live. She survived that battle: her life had become worth living, even if she was now speeding toward her own death at something like a normal pace. Was this fact just now sinking in? The knowledge that she was going to stay awake, live her life in full awareness, and die – soon enough – as the last human being?
But that wasn’t it: she had no reason to grieve her passing, or the passing of the human race. There was little reason to fear the end at all – she had experienced something worse than death already and was now fully alive. What was eating at her?
She felt his hand come to rest on hers, warm and heavy; it sent a shock through her whole body, and her insides churned with sudden understanding. With her other hand she felt her belly, and thought, with a shiver, ‘Not the last?’
The following day, the two of them descended rough steps in front of their home, and passed through the garden gate to walk out into the welcoming silence of the landscape under the cover of a sleepy, saffron-yellow sun. They came to a place, past crumbled fields of stone, where pale white flowers lined a path along the rich ground, which unfolded ahead of them like a living carpet rolled out for a queen and her consort. She didn’t exactly discourage the impression: she strode along the path with her chin lifted and her eyes lowered. He bowed with such delicacy and seriousness that she blushed. He moved aside without raising his head – and then she was embarrassed. She made a dismissive sound in her throat and shook her head with a laugh.
Kicking off her boots and shedding her stockings, she took a few, more tentative, steps in the dirt. He stooped to gather a collection of stones into a mound. She walked on, down a gentle slope in the direction of a stream.
Before she’d gotten very far, the feeling of vulnerability returned, an awareness of danger that brought her to a stop. Her skin prickled as she consciously registered the sound.
A snake. It was a sound that she’d never heard before, but the warning was obvious: a thin, dry-but-ominous rattle that made the hair stand on the back of her neck. She searched in the direction of the sound, and saw the serpent at the edge of the grass. It was huge, almost as thick as her arm and twice as long. The beast was writhing, and she felt the sound of its rattle burrow into her head. Her sweat felt cold, and she shifted, almost twisting in response. Her insides kicked in protest, before solidifying against the threat. She did not move. Her fingers twitched, and she felt a power rise in her and knew that she had no need of fear. Primordial heat, lava-like, rose in her like anger, like wrath, like life. And as the serpent made a number of aggressive adjustments in preparation for a strike – head fixed in space; body coiling and contracting – the woman’s eyes flashed and her teeth shone in the sun.
