I used to work in an office. It’s a place where people were closeted to live out their lives in the old way, before the nightmare. But on reflection that too was a nightmare, so any distinction is unfounded. It is as if I am now classifying that which from a distance all seems the same. Much like the race from which I come, actually. I imagine that from space the Earth (what an arrogant name that is) looks at peace with itself. Now it is. Peace and quiet rule the plains and cold cities. Quiet like the silence before any man knew what speech was. It was the silence of a world without people. I used to curse the noise made by people around me. Cars (transportation devices which belch poison and rumble harshly), talking, shouting. This background hum of population is now gone, and the quiet which lies softly on the planet is indeed total.

In my job I used to communicate with people all over the world. To me, then, the world was small, just the click of a switch away. It was not a planet, it was a street. One long street populated by everyone in the world who had means to use it. Those who didn’t had no place in my world. The poor countries. The parts of the globe labelled The Third World. These places had no meaning to me. I lived in a small world of my own making, with people I knew although had never seen. Now I would give anything to see any one of them, but I realised that without a computer I wouldn’t recognise them. I didn’t know who my friends were. And the worst thing is I didn’t realise. I thought it was normal and would carry on until I was too old to care any more, by which time it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t know them because I would no longer want to. But I cannot give anything. I cannot even wish to give something, because there is no one to hear my pleas. There used to be. A woman who worked with me, whom I didn’t notice or speak to even though for six years she worked only a few feet from me. That was before, though. Afterwards, when we found each other, I was surprised but the first thing I asked her was still "How are you?" and her reply, so often given that I barely noticed, was still "fine." But now I think back, and that single word built my world up beyond measure. To be able to claim to be "fine" when all around was desolate. What a revelation that was! She and I were fine, and we were determined to be fine together for as long as possible. Neither of us quite knew why we were so resolute in our challenge of death, since there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to look forward to. In fact death was our goal, but like children before Christmas we seemed to lay awake in anticipation, dragging the long night out. I am still here, in the dark hours before the final dawn. We were waiting together until the waiting would be done.

To fill our time, so much time that it seemed that nothing would ever end or begin, we walked. We must have walked clear across a continent in that time. And we had nothing to do but talk, but talk was hard when everything you could talk about was no longer there. It was like trying to remember a dream, and we gave up after a while because it was too fuzzy. So instead we walked in silence, and I took to looking around. I know now that I should have tried to talk more about her, things she used to like, and things I liked. The problem was that there was nothing to like in the world, so the memory of things that had been fun were bitter seeds of a forgotten fruit.

Walking over the world, seeing plains and deserts and forests all silently lying under a sun, felt like the whole scene was waiting for something to happen. There was a prickly feeling in the air, as if any moment a horde of people would shout "surprise!" and leap from behind the trees and rocks waving banners. Now I know we brought that feeling with us, and had we not been there the plains and meadows would have lain under the blue sky, quite calm forever. It was us who shortened forever so much that it felt too small to live in. I liked seeing streams. Rivers were too slow, generally. Waterfalls were the best things though. I liked watching them for days, because the water gave a measure to time, gave my ears something to split up. I found beats in the tumbling water and used it to make time once more, and that made me feel at least part human again. I could sit there, watching the water shattering the sunlight until the sun went down. It was while a was there, grinning at the water, that I heard a noise. My ears seemed to be super-sensitive to any sound other than the quiet babble before me, and this noise was not one I could have ignored. It sounded like a wet sheet being beaten on concrete. I went to look. My heart was beating fast for the first time since it happened. We were resting in the mountains, which is why I found a waterfall. I walked quietly through the woods, but know now that was a little pointless, mainly because there was no reason to do it. Force of a habit I had never formed made me, and I stealthily approached the edge of a cliff not too far from where I had been sitting. I looked over the edge, and far below lay the twisted body of the woman who I had placed my entire faith in as the only other person alive in the world. She lay dead at the foot of the cliff, and my world, such as it was, lay with her.

I must have walked for days, not knowing where I was going or caring very much. I still cannot remember why I stopped myself simply leaping after her over the cliff. That would have been the right thing to do. Well, right in the stories anyway. But without us there would be no stories at all, so that I why I stayed alive. And that is also why I am writing this. It’s strange how a person can fill time and space with nothing but their presence. I had thought, as I have said, that the world was silent before, but when I was truly alone there felt like there was nothing in the entire universe making a sound. I looked into the night sky, and wondered whether or not the space between the stars is as quiet. There used to be a saying, before, from a film or something. In space, no one can hear you scream. It never scared me, because I was never in space. But there is so much terror in the paraphrase, On Earth, no one can hear you scream, that I shook myself to sleep and awoke with fear in my heart for months afterwards.

I found it strange that this person who I only knew for a few months is now the only person who I can remember knowing or caring about, even though about five billion other people just like her are equally as dead. Now I do not care about strange, all I know is that I have never in my life missed a person so much. I don’t think anyone has, since everyone else who has lost someone has had someone else to fall back on. Even if that person was no more than a name on a screen or a voice on a phone. I have no one else to fall back on, so I am just going to keep on falling.

It is becoming too hard to write any more. I can’t think of anything new to say. There is nothing left of what was and nothing it going to be. I will now obey my instincts and follow my species.