Post-Human Trilogy

outsiders. “Okay. Okay. So you don’t want to be penned in a room—you don’t want to hurt us? Prove it. Protect us. I’m placing you on recon duty with Alejandra, starting now.”

“What?” Rich asked, seemingly choking on the saliva in his newly moist mouth while Alejandra smiled faintly.

“You will work three-hour shifts in a rotation. You’ll be paired with one of my men.”

“Hey, hold it, bud. We’re not in your army,” Rich replied.

“We don’t take orders from you,” Djanet echoed.

“You said you want to help. You want to protect us? Then start doing it. You can cover a larger perimeter than any of us can, and you can protect my people if there is anything hostile out there.”

“You’ve lost your mind. If you think we’re gonna—” Rich began before Old-timer stepped in.

“No, he’s right.”

“You have to be kidding me!” Rich replied, after sharing the shock with Djanet in exchanged expressions of dismay.

“They saved James. They saved us too. We owe them. It’s time to earn our keep.”

“Oh, man,” Rich sighed as he turned away, kicking the dust up from the concrete floor on his way back to his cot.

“Okay. I’m ready,” Old-timer announced to the lieutenant before exiting with Alejandra.

Old-timer took a moment to survey the sludgy moonscape in the wake of the end of civilization. He turned his head 180 degrees to absorb the miserable panorama. The colossal cloud of black destruction still hung heavily like a rotting body over the region and gave no sign of abating. The sun bled orange somewhere behind the black curtain, but its rays couldn’t penetrate. “What is our objective?” Old-timer asked Alejandra.

“We’re here to report if we see anything—anything at all.”

“That sounds like it might be a little boring.”

“It wasn’t last night,” Alejandra replied with a slight smile. She hoisted her rifle over her shoulder and set out to climb a nearby hill.

Old-timer trudged over the unnatural surface, following close behind her for a few minutes in silence, before stopping altogether. “This air…is hard to breathe,” he commented.

“Just take it easy, or you might get sick. Let me know if you get tired.” Alejandra turned and began deftly stepping up the hill again.

Old-timer watched her as she walked, deer-like, and thought to himself, Should I? “Oh what the hell?” he said under his breath before lifting off and flying to catch up to Alejandra. “I’ve got a better idea,” Old-timer said as he expanded his magnetic field so it caught Alejandra like a web and carried her off the ground.

“Oh my God!” She gasped as he gained altitude and let her float under him.

He didn’t physically touch her; rather, he allowed her to glide by herself over the grayish terrain.

“It’s like I’m flying.”

“Not quite. It’s too bad you can’t control it. The feeling of freedom is incredible,” Old-timer said gently.

“What do you mean?” Alejandra rolled onto her back, wearing a smile, relaxing on her cushion of magnetic energy. “I can just point!” She rolled back onto her stomach and pointed to the left.

Old-timer veered to the left until she retracted her finger. She pointed to the right, and he steered to her whim over a rocky stretch at the foot of a large embankment. Alejandra guided him towards it, finding a fissure that opened into a small cavern. “I could never have seen this any other way—a new perspective,” she said.

Old-timer smiled for a moment, but then he remembered. He should not be feeling so— electric. She was an empath—she would feel it too.

“No, no, please don’t do that, Craig. Don’t let your doubts get in the way.”

“I can’t help it,” he replied. Before he knew what was happening, he saw Alejandra gesticulating wildly; he had taken his eye off of her for a moment, perhaps out of shame, and missed her directions.

“Craig!” she finally shouted before they bounced off the far wall of the cavern and ricocheted down to the ground. Alejandra was thrown against Old-timer, and he held her in his arms as he disengaged his cocoon.

“You’re a terrible driver,” she said to him.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she replied. “Are you going to let me go?” she asked, smiling again. It was as if the smile controlled him. He shook his head slightly and released her from his arms. Alejandra turned to another fissure in the cavern and looked at the obscured sun as it tried to burn through the blackness. “It’s an amazing color, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Old-timer agreed. He looked at the bloodied orb and watched the black smoke as it rolled and wafted with a putrid thickness. For a moment, the smoke seemed to form a mask across the eyes of the sun, as though the orb were a thief.

“You’re still feeling guilty,” Alejandra whispered.

“Yes,” Old-timer replied, nodding slightly.

“Guilty because you lived. We all feel that.”

“Guilty about more than that,” Old-timer admitted. “You know that.”

“I would never have said it,” Alejandra replied.

“I know, but you would have known it. I’m not an idiot. I know you know.”

Alejandra took a moment to digest this as she stepped to the ledge of the fissure, displaying her impressive agility, and looked down into the dead earth below. “It won’t always be this way. Life will have to go on.”

“What do you mean?” Old-timer queried.

Alejandra ignored his question and continued, “You have an extraordinary power, Craig. So do I. Just now, while we were flying, I felt my own exhilaration as we skimmed the Earth, but that wasn’t the feeling on which I was concentrating.” She turned and fixed her deep blue discs on him, eyes filled with so much depth. Little lines caught the light and shone like waves on the horizon. “I was soaking in your feelings for me…and I loved it.”

“I-I…” Old-timer stammered but couldn’t find the words to reply.

“You’ll never know what it is like to actually feel someone else’s attraction, someone else’s love. Not what you imagine or what you hope might be real, but actual love. It’s intoxicating. But if you could feel it…” She walked toward him and placed her hand on his face. “If you could feel it, you’d feel it now.”

A picture of his wife suddenly flashed across his eyes. He turned away quickly. “No! This is insane! You’re just a child!”

“I’m far from being a child,” she replied.

“I’m sorry. I just mean…to me, you are so young. So, so young. Please understand. I’m nearly 100 years older than you. I’m from a completely different world.”

Alejandra paused for a moment, her eyes fixed on the poisoned sun and the corpse-like Earth. “We’re from the same world now,” Alejandra replied.

Her words suddenly made the nightmare around him tangible. Old-timer’s eyes fell on the death surrounding him, and he shook his head slowly at the thought of all that had been lost. “How can you people let yourselves die? What is it about death that you can possibly find appealing?”

“We don’t find death appealing,” Alejandra replied, turning quickly to face Old-timer but remaining patient.

“You’re surrounded by it now. This is the reality of it. It’s terrible. Our species evolved and stopped death. Why do you choose to die?”

“We don’t choose to die. We choose to live.”

“That makes no sense.”

“We choose the honor of living life as purely human.”

“Is that to suggest I’m not human?”

“You aren’t.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, you are something else. When you stopped death, disease, when you connected yourself to your machine-collective, you gained a great many things. You also lost a great