The Last One — A Short Story About the End of the World
How did you imagine the end of the world? Would it be an artificial intelligence gaining consciousness and turning against us? Or an alien race arriving to colonize our planet? In Hollywood films, the final days are always marked by some glorious battle. We fight the machines, we fight the aliens, or we fight a world-ending plague.
But the truth is, our end was anything but glorious.
We never stood a chance.
I should know —
I watched it all unfold from the front row.
My name is Joseph Stanford, and I am the sole inhabitant of the International Biosphere Base.
The base's goal is to develop a fully self-sustaining space station—one that could eventually serve as the prototype for the ship that will carry the first settlers to Mars. According to the plan, the first colonies will establish themselves on the Martian surface, using the planet’s raw materials to expand their foothold and gradually building larger habitats for those who come after.
Even the most optimistic projections say it will take a hundred years to fully colonize Mars this way.
It’s an extraordinary honor to be part of such a mission. This station represents the pinnacle of human technology. Practically every major tech giant is among the project’s backers. Over a hundred startups contributed innovations, and the initiative also received substantial government support.
No surprise there — the goal is more ambitious than anything humanity has ever attempted: the colonization of another world.
The base has been orbiting Earth for just over three years now. And for just as long, I’ve been living here — alone, in this sealed-off, self-sustaining world.
My only connection to the outside? The Internet.
20 days before “Judgment Day”…
A few days ago, I received a transmission from the Earth base — News of a new outbreak.
A disease more aggressive than anything we’ve seen before.
The reports suggest it might be a particularly dangerous mutation of a flesh-eating bacterium. It devours its victims from the inside out — and its hunger doesn’t stop with death. Even after the host’s heart stops beating, the infection continues its feast.
Within hours, there’s nothing left of the body. No recognizable form, no remains — just an amorphous, liquefied mass.
A horrifying way to die…
10 days before “Judgment Day”…
Chaos has taken hold of Earth.
They can’t stop the spread.
Roughly 10% of the planet’s population has already fallen to the disease.
A few scientists managed to isolate the bacterium — but it’s unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. It’s carbon-based, yet it isn’t a cell. No nucleus. No DNA.
Some believe it’s not even a living organism in the traditional sense, but rather a swarm of microscopic machines.
Too complex, too precise to be a biological weapon.
More and more voices are suggesting something else entirely: That it might be of extraterrestrial origin.
Were we attacked?
5 days before “Judgment Day”…
Earth’s infrastructure has collapsed.
I don’t know how many are dead — or if anyone is even still alive. I can no longer reach my family.
All I have now are fragments… whispers pulled from the static.
In one interview, a scientist claimed the “nanites” — as they’re calling them now — seem engineered specifically for the human body. According to his theory, they aren’t of human origin. But they didn’t attack us. They were here all along, dormant — trapped for millennia in the polar ice.
Waiting…
Waiting for us to melt their prison through the very climate change we caused.
A time bomb, buried in the ice.
Maybe not an act of war — But a final safeguard.
A last failsafe to stop us from destroying everything else.
The Judgment Day…
Earth has gone dark.
I’m afraid to even say it out loud, but… I may be the last human being alive.
Two final messages reached me from Earth. Both from Annie — my wife.
I don’t know why they arrived now. Maybe some automated system sent them on a delay.
Most likely, these are the last video messages she ever recorded.
The last words I’ll ever hear from her…
The firs message…
Oh, Josh…
I don’t know how to tell you this.
Our little boy, Dominik…
He wasn’t spared. The infection took him too.
I… I can’t go on like this.
Everyone we knew is gone. Everyone.
And I’ll be next.
They’re saying we’re all infected. Every last one of us.
Whatever this thing is — it was inside us for months, hiding, waiting… just long enough to spread to everyone.
This isn’t a disease.
It’s a coordinated strike.
They’re wiping us out, Josh.
All of us…
The second message…
Josh…
I hope this message somehow reaches you. Everything down here has collapsed.
But I’m not afraid anymore.
I spoke with Dominik.
I know how that sounds — I know it seems impossible. But it wasn’t a dream. I’m sure of it.
He said it was possible because the nanites have already woven themselves into my mind. That’s how he can talk to me now.
He told me not to be afraid.
He said he was scared too, at first, in the New World.
But then someone called Mister Omega comforted him — a kind old man who lives there, and speaks without words.
He told Dominik that our planet is dying. That the damage is irreversible.
They came to save us — not our bodies, but our consciousness.
They’re far beyond us, Josh. So advanced that they’ve abandoned physical form altogether. They live in a vast cloud that stretches across the galaxy… maybe even beyond it.
The nanites — they’re part of that cloud. Just as our bodies are made of cells, theirs are made of nanites.
And in that great body, millions live together as one.
Dominik is there now.
Soon, I will be too.
Josh… I saw it. Dominik showed me.
It’s paradise.
I only wish you could come with us.
I wish…
End of the message.
I can’t get Annie’s message out of my head. It’s all too coherent, too logical to be a hallucination.
Annie’s a great artist. A brilliant pianist, an insightful woman — but she couldn’t have just imagined something like this.
I used to read a lot about the Technological Singularity myself. About Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, about a future where we abandon our physical bodies and continue in digital form.
How naive it is to picture aliens as humanoids, as creatures shaped like us. If they’re thousands of years ahead of us, they’ve likely long surpassed the Singularity.
And how childish to imagine they’d arrive in giant spaceships to evacuate humanity. Even in the Star Trek films of the ’80s, they “beamed” people aboard.
If what Annie said is true, then the nanites did teleport us — just not in a way we ever expected. They mapped our structure, transmitted the data into the Cloud… and then used the now-useless pile of matter — our bodies — to replicate themselves.
They waited in silence, quietly spreading across the planet. And once everything was in place, they activated.
If they’d done it any other way, we would’ve tried to stop them — because we would’ve never been able to understand their intent.
It was a brilliant way to preserve human culture.
Maybe… maybe it wasn’t their first time. Maybe they’ve done this before.
How did you imagine the end of the world? Would it be an artificial intelligence gaining consciousness and turning against us? Or an alien race arriving to colonize our planet? In Hollywood films, the final days are always marked by some glorious battle. We fight the machines, we fight the aliens, or we fight a world-ending plague.
But the truth is, our end was anything but glorious…
We never stood a chance. The plague consumed everything in the blink of an eye.
But the truth is… we were the plague.
We humans consumed the Earth’s resources until there was nothing left.
We knew exactly what we were doing. We understood the consequences.
And still, we did nothing.
We poisoned our oceans.
We corrupted the skies.
We shattered the delicate balance of nature.
We sacrificed our children on the altar of comfort — dooming them for the sake of convenience.
We were like cancer: spreading unchecked, devouring the very body that gave us life.
A species like that does not deserve to survive.
And yet…
Our saviors gave us one final chance.
They sent the nanites.
They assimilated us.
For reasons we may never fully understand, they deemed our culture — our essence — worthy of preservation.
Just a few days ago, I thought maybe I was the last human — the final survivor of the end of the world.
But now it seems I’m something else entirely.
I’m the poor bastard who missed Noah’s Ark.
I’ll grow old up here on this station, utterly alone… a living relic of a species that’s already moved on.
This will be my grave. A floating tin can, drifting through the void — my own personal coffin, a monument to everything we were.
And this is where I’ll rot.
Alone.
In this goddamn metal box…
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