The Last Man on Earth
by Ian Reeve

I'm the last man on Earth, thought Edward DeCoda.

By which, of course, he meant the last human being. There wasn't a city of women somewhere else on the planet. There was just him. The last person. The last human out of all the teeming billions that had once lived here. The last of the creatures whose over-evolved brain had come so close to ending all life everywhere.

Some people, back in the day, had claimed that humans were the only creatures capable of creativity and imagination, he remembered. They had thought that that was the difference between mankind and all the animals that still roamed the planet. The goats and horses, the cats and wolves. The thousands of species that still inhabited the Earth despite the centuries of industrial devastation that mankind had inflicted on it.

He smiled to himself as he remembered how the truth had gradually dawned on the human race. As the human population had dropped and animal populations had rebounded, as those people who were left came more and more into contact with the wildlife around them, they had seen the truth for themselves. The animals who were about to reclaim the Earth were sophisticated, intelligent beings. They were creatures with complex inner lives, capable of advanced problem solving. The higher animals even had a sense of wonder, they were astonished to discover, although anyone who had ever seen a dog admiring a sunset had known that already. They weren't capable of true creativity, of course. They had no way of creating art, of creating beauty or of telling stories, and the evolutionary pressures that had led to those abilities evolving in humans were unlikely to ever repeat themselves, but even so, Edward didn't feel that he would be leaving the world empty when he left it.

There was a herd of deer crossing the street ahead of him, he saw. Picking their way warily through the grass and small, shrubby plants that filled what had once been a major highway. They turned their heads as they made their way across the new wilderness, watching for packs of dogs; the new apex predators that were growing not only more numerous, but also more efficient as hunters as every generation shed more of the features that had been bred into them by humans over the centuries to make them better pets. There were three of them now, he saw, watching from the crumbling pillars that supported what remained of an overpass. These ones looked to be descended from German shepherds, he thought, to judge from their domed foreheads and upright ears. Edward took a tighter grip on his rifle in case their attention should shift to him.

Looking back at the deer, he saw one of them staring at the bright flowers of a rhododendron bush; one of the few foreign garden plants that were still able to survive in Britain as the local wild plants took back the land that was theirs. The plant was toxic to deer, Edward knew, and the deer had to have known that as well, but it stared anyway, clearly entranced, either by its scent or by its visual beauty. He watched as the animal studied the flower as closely as the greatest human artist had once done, but then it lost interest and ran to chase after its fellows.

What it didn't do, Edward noted, what none of the animals did, either predator or prey, was look up at the towering buildings rising all around them. To a human, they would have been awesome relics of a civilisation that had passed. Something unnatural that had been imposed upon the world by intelligence. A human would probably have wondered about the people who had once lived in them, thinking about the lives they had led, the dreams and ambitions they had once had. To the deer, though, they were nothing more than features of the landscape. As smart as they were, some concepts, some leaps of comprehension, were simply beyond them. They had no conception that the buildings were qualitatively different from the natural cliff faces that rose above the coastlines of the world. That they were the product of purpose and intent rather than the uncaring forces of nature. Edward didn't feet that this failing detracted from the animals, though. After all, there were so many things that had always been beyond human comprehension, and this hadn't kept mankind from having a pretty high opinion of itself.

The buildings weren't being ignored by everything, though. They were full of birds, roosting in places safe from the predators that couldn't climb the blocked stairwells and elevator shafts. Even now, a vast flock was erupting with a clamour of flapping wings from what had been a residential block of flats, he saw. Exiting through what had been the windows but were now nothing more than holes in the greenery that had turned the building into a vertical jungle. They wheeled around above him, filling the air with their raucous cries. Dark specks growing smaller as they rise higher, silhouetted against the deep blue and fluffy white clouds of the sky. The cries faded as the birds either passed out of sight or landed somewhere to rest their wings, until peace was restored. A silence broken only by the faint whisper of wind in the trees.

Yes, the world was healing, he thought with quiet satisfaction. Animals and plants that had been on the verge of extinction were growing in number. Toxic chemicals were being cleansed from the environment, and vast tracts of farmland, of bland monoculture, were being replaced by complex ecosystems, steadily progressing towards the local climax community, which was temperate forest.

As the ages went by, he knew, new species would evolve to replenish the diversity that mankind had impacted upon so heavily. Maybe creatures as strange as Proboscidipparion, the trunked horse that had died out five million years ago. As large as Paraceratherium, the twenty ton hornless rhino, and as fierce as the entelodon, the so-called hell pig. He wished he could be around to see them, but it was enough to know that they would come. Creatures that would almost certainly never have existed if the world had still been occupied by humans.

His communicator beeped and he answered it. It was Pete, up on the space station. "How long you going to hang around down there, Ed?" he asked. "Your family's wondering if anything's happened to you."

"Yeah, sorry," Edward replied. "Just having a last look around. Saying goodbye to the place."

"You'll be able to look around as much as you want," Peter reminded him. "Just like everyone else. The drones will be sending footage up to all the moons and habitats."

"It's not the same as actually breathing the air," Edward told him. "Feeling the wind on my face. No-one else will ever feel this. I want to be able to remember it in the years to come."

"Yeah," the other man replied, sounding wistful. "I remember my last day down there. There has to be a last day, though, and it might as well be today. Your family's missing you. Time to go to them, Ed. Time to leave."

"I know," said Edward reluctantly. "Okay, I'm on my way. Be there in a couple of hours."

He went back to his car, climbed in and told it to take him to the spaceport. As it rose, it gave him a grandstand view over the whole city, which now resembled a forested landscape of valleys and mesas. A river cut through what had been a major financial district, he saw, where an underground stormdrain had become blocked, the water forced to travel overland instead. Buildings, undercut by erosion, had collapsed into it, making it bend and wind like a serpent. It was lined by tall reeds, and a shopping centre had been flooded where a family of beavers had built a dam across it. The river that had no name because it hadn't existed when humans had still lived there.

The car landed on the edge of the spaceport, and Edward got out to walk to the spaceplane, waiting for him on the runway. It opened its door for him as he approached, and Edward got in, making his way to the passenger section at the back. This was the last shuttle still operational. The others, up in orbit, were being dismantled, their components used to build larger craft with smaller engines that would be used for traveling around the solar system. With the Earth now empty, there would never again be a need to carry a human being up from such a deep gravity well.

There was a plaque mounted on the wall. Edward glanced at it as he sat down and buckled himself in. It was an extract from a speech given by King George XII to the Council of World Leaders announcing the formal launch of the Rebirth Project. “The Earth gave birth to mankind," Edward read. "Served as our home during the youth of our species. Protected us. Nourished us. Now that we have matured as a species and taken our place among the stars, we show our gratitude to the Earth by leaving it and allowing it to heal. Allowing the biosphere to restore itself, until the damage we caused in the ignorant youth of our race is erased by the passage of time.”

The words made him feel happy, and he settled down in the comfortable seat as the engines fired up and the autopilot went through its pre-flight checks. A few minutes later the spaceplane was hurtling along the runway and then up into the air, leaving a world that was now empty of human life.

Soon, Edward thought, he would be reunted with his wife and his two young children. His family, who were citizens of the solar system and who, one day, when the first ark ships broke free of the sun's gravity, would inherit the galaxy. As the spaceplane rose, though, he couldn't resist one last glance through the window at the planet he was leaving behind. The beautiful blue and white globe upon which no human foot would ever again tread.