The sterilized metal nib slipped from the plastic gear, and Luko bit down on his lip. He’d already worn his bottom lip raw, a crimson rash spreading from just above his chin to his normally pale, thin lip. His gloved fingers curled around the cold steel tube of the stylus, angled awkwardly for hours and stiff, clinging to it as if from a cliff face over a foaming ocean below. He maneuvered the nib back into place, and micrometer at a time, turned the gear. The magnetic gossamer material, the ancient sound recording technique that Luko marveled at with each new cassette, ticked back.
He’d been at this for over three hours. He’d been at this for weeks, really. They’d found the nineteen tapes in a dig site just off of campus, a home in what had been Bristol, a town in the north of what had been the United States of America. Perfectly preserved under the bed of the teenaged daughter of the house, the tapes doubled the City University of Outer York’s collection.
Six weeks in, and all he had to show for the painstaking effort was constant neck pain, tingling fingers, and a pile of the detritus of sixteen tapes. Polyester plastic and fragments of magnetic strip littered one side of his workstation. There had been three of them working on the project at the start, Luko as the lowly graduate assistant, but then the north woods had caught fire, the smoke turning the air thick and acrid, and many on the campus had fled south.
Luko had no one to the south. He had no one at all. His parents had died in the quake five years earlier, and his brothers had taken the latest generation ship out. They knew by then that there were no more detected viable destinations, but hope was a funny thing. Better to die off slowly in a metal tube with the off chance that you’d magic upon some undetected Eden than to disintegrate on a planet long since dead itself.
After another hour, he was so engrossed in his task that he failed to hear the sirens. The graduate students and associate professors relegated to the climate-controlled subbasement had requested several times for a dedicated speaker in the workspace, but the cost was just too high, or so the director of the department had told them with her shoulders up at her ears and her eyes full of unprovoked panic.
“It’s emergency speakers or three graduate assistants. We can’t afford both.”
This had struck Luko as disingenuous as the cost of graduate assistants was basically nothing, but he’d stayed quiet, letting the vocal students take charge. He’d opened his mouth to interject a handful of times but found that each time he remembered how to manipulate his voice box to produce sound, the river of the interaction had moved miles downstream.
When he finally noticed the faint hint of the alarm, he knew it was too late. Whatever threat, solar, interspecies, extraterrestrial, existential, or some as yet unexplored realm of danger, would already most likely prevent his escape to the nearest shelter six blocks away. Luko paused his work, tilted his head like mammals had done for millennia, and thought maybe he heard a buzzing. Or a rumbling. Something faint and constant. Nothing to be done about it; he resumed his duties.
Finally, the tape re-spooled, cleaned, thoroughly examined, Luko had no excuses left. All that remained was to play the tape in the machine. In his three years in the department, two of which had been spent exclusively working in the Audio Restoration room with the cassette tapes, he’d only ever heard two tapes play anything other than the sound of burning magnetic strip. Time had not been kind to the magnetic strips. It had been even less kind to the compact discs that followed. They had not yet found a reparable compact disc and only knew that they contained audio files based on the documents found with the flimsy little discs.
As he placed the cassette into the tape deck, he heard the crack of the casing and knew before even looking that the casing corner had broken off. He had become an expert on the sounds of cracking plastic or shredding tape. He set his tweezers down with a disheartened sigh, the first sounds he’d made in, what, days? Goodness, he thought. It had been three days since he’d made an utterance. He had just enough residual humanity in him for the thought to nag at him.
The buzzing grew more distinct, more immediate. He’d learned in school many years ago of an animal, yellow and striped with black, or was it black striped with yellow? He couldn’t remember. It had a silly name to the children. He thought of the buzzing bees he’d seen recordings of in school, and it made him shudder at the thought of millions of these swarming, angry creatures returning from centuries-buried graves to exact their revenge on the species that had doomed them.
The floor vibrated beneath his feet. The siren had ceased its wailing in the building above, or maybe had vibrated off its hinges. Or maybe it had melted away with some solar flair. They’d known for a few generations that the clock was running out. Several clocks were running out. Several hundred fuses, lit generations before, had been meeting with hundreds of piles of explosives. Each year, another debt came due. Environmentally, economically, socially, the end had been nigh and then beyond nigh and then, when they finally realized that the true end, the final final moments were upon them, Luko and his ilk had scrounged for whatever meaning they could make from the meaningless. For him, he’d found the archives and the collection of salvaged antique recordings from the 20th century, and he figured it was as good as any other distraction.
Before moving to the last tape, he paused, his hands frozen. The dust particles hung in the air, motes of reminders of what he would soon be. He looked over at the pile of discarded tapes. Earlier in the day, he’d mentally prepared himself for the cleaning up, carefully repairing the cracks, playing mortician to tapes that would never play again, had not played in a thousand years, but would be put on display or, most likely, end up cataloged and placed in the sealed storage room beneath the library with all the other remains. But now, he saw them and, with a wrench of some bile in his bowels, a complete reconfiguration of his sense of self and place in the universe. He saw himself as the byproduct, the waste material of a species long since departed. The humans had all gone, and all that was left was broken rubble.
But he had one more tape, and, suddenly, that tape and its ability to function as designed took on a level of import that no other object ever had to him. If he could get it to work, then maybe it had not all been for nothing. The walls shuddered, and, with a crash in the distance, the flow of air into the space from the ducts ceased. He did not have days or hours to prepare this final tape. He had minutes. Maybe even just moments.
The first tape Luko had ever refurbished had failed to work at all. In fact, it fell apart as he lifted it to place it into the tape deck. Upon reflection, Luko was thankful that his first tape had failed. Later, during a moment of existential dread, wondering why in the failing world he would spend his hours hunched over the relics of a culture that had died a thousand deaths, so removed from his own existence that archeologists could just barely speculate what it meant to live in a world of plastic and glass surrounded by noise, he’d finally understood. His peace, the itch that his hours attempting to repair cassettes that were almost certainly doomed to fail, the itch that it scratched was primordial. It was the human need to put order to chaos. He took these castoffs, lost items from a lost civilization, and he slowly and deliberately made them whole. He was less interested in what was on the cassettes than he was in the cassettes themselves, as objects of a bygone time, artifacts of a world that had not known it was dying.
The final cassette was the least faded of the set. It had a clean, transparent casing with the magnetic tape already spooled to the beginning, and the faintest remnants of lettering. Luko had tried to make out what it said when he’d first cataloged the find, but it was impossible.
The buzzing and vibrations were a rumbling storm of noise. Luko felt the heat funneling in through the newly formed cracks in the subbasement’s foundation. A chunk of the ceiling crashed down on the far table in the workshop. Wafts of amber smoke, stinking of polyester and loss and something underneath it all, something sad and sweet and familiar, something ancient.
The lighting dimmed on and then off, the bulbs unable to withstand the vibrations. The disaster moved closer in, and Luko felt it, a heat or a pulsing or a radiation. He felt he was the last human alive on the planet. Of course, he thought, that’s absurd, but alone, the residue of generations, and he too was an artifact being discarded for maybe some alien race to discover under the rubble of the proverbial bed, to be poked at and twisted back into shape but to never work again.
He flicked on the battery-powered emergency lantern. He didn’t bother with the sterile wipe-down or the final checklist, but placed the tape into the cassette player and enjoyed the tactile feel of the click as it slid into place and the clunk as the tape deck closed.
The floor shuddered viscously beneath him, and the plaster of the disintegrating cement now poured into the space and slowly and then less slowly obscured the tape player with a blue haze. He pushed the play button, feeling it lock into place, and felt through the tips of his fingers the steady movement of the gears spinning. And then the music, distorted by hundreds of years but clear enough. It started with rhythmic tapping on a cymbal, then layered onto the metal a simple melody, a balance of mood and movement. A woman’s voice, almost talking, a growl, and then the chorus voice. “I saw the sign. It opened up my eyes. I saw the sign.”
Luko sat in the ever-growing pile of rubble, and he wept. Across millennia, a culture lost a dozen times over had gone to great lengths to create this music and its crude delivery mechanism. He pictured a him a thousand years ago, before interstellar travel, before the near-total abandonment of Earth for stars and planets unknown, sitting in his bed, eyes closed, the music filling the space. It must have been important. Luko imagined that millions, billions of people would sit around and listen to this very song. Maybe it was sacred, a song at the heart of a lost civilization, the key to understanding their rituals and practices and daily lives. A prickle on the back of his neck and then a sting as the ceiling crumbled, holding desperately to its last vestiges of structure.
The song lost out to the vibrations of the end of the world, and Luko wept for more than just his own loss. The species would carry on, but without this once-important part of its legacy. What continued on, he thought, but a genetic code and ghosts of worlds long since destroyed? Before it all ended, he got a snippet of pulsing bass and pop lyric, and he was happy. And he was human. Maybe the last true human.
JM Franklin - Writer 