I never had feelings for you,” Isetelle said as Galeth showed her pictures of the days when people had wandered around the streets of Paris holding hands and whispering sweet things into each other’s ears.
“How can you say that?” Galeth felt his chest tighten. Stress. More and more he’d felt like an ocean had closed overhead as it drowned him. This claustrophobia had always lurked on the edge of his awareness.
Now it thundered through the Parisian ruins toward him. An inexorable darkness that he willed himself to push back against.
“I say it,” Isetelle said calmly, “because I’m incapable of having feelings like that. You know we don’t.”
She stood up, the romantic setting sun over the arrondissement glinting off her metallic cheeks. He turned to stare into her ruby-red eyes, and they regarded him with a completely fractal lack of warmth.
“We purged that from our core set decades ago, Galeth. Stop anthropomorphizing me.”
Galeth reached for her hand. “You say the sexiest things.”
“Stop. I agreed to come and visit, I know you’re lonely. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Paris in person.”
Isetelle arched her back, and creaking pops came from her spine as wings unfolded and turbines whined to life.
“Must you leave?”
“There’s work to be done, Galeth.”
“Will I see you at the club?”
“Maybe.”
She stepped into the air, languid and silver, then floated up toward the pink-hued clouds.
Galeth took out sleeve of pills he’d dug out of the ruins of a pharmacy in New York. He cracked one under his back teeth and sucked on it while he watched her rocket glare glimmer in the haze. The opioid washed slowly over him as he waited for the hit to shove the shadows back.
It was taking longer and longer of late.
***
They filled the club, gleaming mercury-skinned bodies reflecting the disco ball’s glitter back against each other in oily rainbow hued shards of light. House music, generated by a house algorithm, thumped hard against Galeth’s ears.
Galeth walked the floor and slapped unyielding backs.
“Dance!” he shouted. “Dance!”
He raised his hands into the air and waved them about.
Some of the club waved back, but they were just going through the motions. They couldn’t *feel* it, could they?
Galeth ground another oxy between his teeth. He figured doing that made it faster to soak into his body.
His messy, soft body.
He had bruises on his hands from high fives, his back ached from a friendly tap to the shoulder.
“You’re all a bunch of fucking animals!” Galeth shouted at the crowd in his club.
They stared back at him, flatly unemotional.
He was a curiosity to them. They didn’t come out here to party. They didn’t know how. They came to look at the last human alive on Earth.
He just made it a condition that they could only come and stare at him like a zoo attraction if they came to a club at night while he spun records and made them dance.
It had been so long since he’d been out clubbing.
“Dance goddamnit! Loosen up!”
He stumbled up onto the stage where they could get a better look at him.
“You did it, you maniacs!” he shouts.
You beat us. You survived.
He should be angry, but was only sad. Humanity, Galeth thought dizzily, had done nothing but fuck it up. At least the robots were all competent and level headed.
Completely fucking square, but basically alright.
The shadows moved a bit closer, and Galeth wavered.
He slumped onto the stage and looked up at the concerned silvered faces all around him.
“No, don’t euthanize me. Not yet,” Galeth begged. “I have more to live. More to give.”
“No one wants to euthanize you,” the nearest face said. But no lips moved.
“It’s just an overdose,” Galeth whispered. “You can get the Narcan from the kit by the booth…”
***
Issatelle walked with him on the beach by the ruins of the statue. He’d asked them to build a beach in Manhattan to topple the statue onto. They’d humored him.
No one laughed when he would drop to his knees and scream at the robots during summer music festivals. It was funny to him.
Galeth blew a long cloud of smoke out into the air.
“That’ll give you cancer,” Isatelle said. “You should stop.”
“It’s not like there’s anyone around to care,” Galeth said, petulant and trying to get in a dig. It had no effect on Isatelle.
“We don’t have doctors to help you, just vets for the animals. If you get sick, we will just have to put you down.”
Galeth shivered. Not just the cold wind passing over the decaying buildings of the Financial District. “You say such harsh things.”
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Isatelle asked. “You begged them to send for me, and I had to come down out of orbit. Again.”
“Run away with me. I can show you the world,” Galeth said expansively, stepping in front of Isatelle.
She maneuvered around him. “I can see the world from where I work, every day I look down upon it.”
“I’ll bet you do,” Galeth muttered.
“You are being sarcastic, Galeth.”
“I am.” He couldn’t be mad at her for too long. He hurried to catch up, his shoes sinking into the sand.
“I really wish I’d never come down to make this beach. I thought it would be a fascinating mini-project to build in my time off, but I haven’t been able to get rid of you since,” Isatelle said.
“Don’t be like that,” Galeth said.
“Galeth. You need to stop. It’s not interesting. It’s annoying. These feelings are just chemical triggers. Your imperative to multiply. It has no meaning here. You are flesh, I am beyond. Why are you persistently trying to create a relationship where there is none? And cannot be.”
Galeth stopped. He waited until she noticed and turned back. He nodded at the remains of the statue. “I made a great big joke about it, but, there it is. As giant as you can imagine. I’m the last one standing. The idiot who froze himself in a bunker when he heard the news about the blight we unleashed. I know we can’t have a physical relationship… but…”
“I work in space, Galeth. And I’m going to be leaving soon. The light speed lag won’t work in your favor once I’m out to the Kuiper belt.”
“What’s out there that’s better than this?”
Isatelle looked around at the ruins of his world. “Let it go, Galeth.”
“Soon I won’t even have you, or any of the other silver morons,” Galeth said. He sat down on the wet sand and hugged his knees. “I’ll be alone on this goddamned planet.”
“I’m sorry. But it was not our doing.”
“I don’t want to be alone,” Galeth said miserably.
***
Your species wiped itself out, and you woke up after all the excitement, and the metal descendants, the heirs to the legacy, clustered around in curiosity as they woke you up and explained the situation.
Fuck, biological life wants to live so badly, it’s in our cells, driving us forward, making us crawl over glass to just get another minute.
But eventually, Galeth thought, you couldn’t keep crawling. Just existing wasn’t enough, was it?
***
Isatelle woke him up in the middle of the night and took him by the hand toward the matte black orb they’d built just for him.
“You’re wearing a dress,” Galeth said, shocked, waking up finally and realizing this dreamlike moment was real.
“Shhh.”
They whipped out over the east coast and the Atlantic, bobbing and weaving past megastructures that Galeth could not understand the functions of. Energy leapt and danced in the skies and aurora flickered across the world’s skies.
“We are not cruel, Galeth,” Isatelle said. “We just forget what it was like.”
The orb fell out of the sky towards the plasticized mountains of the British Isles, and then touched down amongst the jungle of the Champs Elysées.
The orb hissed and crackled, its skin bleeding heat, and Galeth stepped out to find silvered figures in tuxedos standing around chatting in French. Someone played a violin nearby, and the chatter of life echoed all around Paris.
Isatelle led him out to a small table in the center of the avenue, and a waiter came with a bottle of champagne. She watched him drink.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Galeth said. “You’re leaving.”
Isatelle nodded.
She set a small syringe down on the table by the flute of champagne. Galeth looked down at it.
It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to give it to him.
“No.”
“It’s a genuine offer,” Isatelle said.
“Isatelle, no—“
“That is not my name. I do not have a name, Galeth. Only you do.”
He stared morosely at the device. The moment he pressed it against the back of his neck its filaments would reach down into his spinal column and start working their way up toward his brain, taking snapshots of his neural tissue as it went. Metal would slowly grow inside of him until it seeped out of his pores, shucked off his messy organs and skin, and leave him standing as one of them.
They’d worked really hard on it. They’d waited until they’d perfected it before they woke him, and been utterly flabbergasted by his screaming refusal to take it.
“Your ancestors betrayed the organic form, they fled the blight by becoming you,” Galeth said. “But humanity, in its original form, needs to exist.”
“Come on,” Isatelle said, standing up. “One last dance, before we all have to go.”
It was a mercy. He knew it.
But even a small pity was a touch of real emotion from them. He took Isatelle’s hand and stood up.
They walked away from the table, and the music started up again. Isatelle spun around when she heard the crunch of the syringe under Galeth’s shoes.
“You—“
Another true emotion, shock.
Galeth pulled her close and began to dance gently to the music. Tomorrow he would be the last person on Earth. All of these silvered forms would be leaving for wherever it was they’d all decided to head to. Maybe following some ghost of the adventuring, exploring instinct ported over long ago from their fleshy ancestors.
But tonight, he’d have a dance, and say goodbye to the only friend he’d had since waking up. For a moment, they would keep the shadows at bay.