Terminish was the last ever language.
It had no future tense. There didn't seem to be a point. It was
spoken by one man. The last man left on Earth. He spoke it to
himself. He was the only member of the human race left after the
Antinatalist policies were implemented. The world's population had
been sterilised. The argument went that the
world would tick over fine without us and that it was only being
damaged by us.
The ecosystem suffers if a species of
animal or plant is removed. To make something extinct is to remove a
link in the chain. However, there was one link on the chain that had
no place on that chain. That link was us. The world would thrive
without us. Popular thought was that we must have been left here by
aliens and that we really belonged somewhere else. It was argued that
this might be the reason we're a discontented lot. It was decided
that we had to go. So go we went. Everyone knew that there would come
a time when only one would remain and that time had come and that one
was Martin.
Martin wasn't sure if he was the last
person left on the planet. How could he be sure? Who was keeping
count? Knowing the dreadful reality of his predicament would have
driven Martin over the edge, but there was hope in his ignorance.
'You never know, someone might come down the street one day', said
Martin's mind to Martin. So he carried on with his routine of
foraging and looking at stuff and watching films and listening to
music and reading things by people who were dead about people who
were dead.
Power generation was automated so
Martin did not have to go without the comforts he was used to when
the planet was populated. For such a self-hating species, the human
race could at least have credited itself with the quality of
consideration. They did not leave their last member wanting. The only
thing Martin wanted was company and even that desire was waning. He'd
forgotten what it was like to have company and was only reminded when
he watched a drama or read a book where people were together. These
manmade remnants of entertainment and so on were not the greatest of
Martin's consolations as he lived out his years and reached old
age. It was the ordinary little things that he'd never noticed when
others were around that brought him the most solace. The way sunlight
fell upon the Earth. The songs of birds. The sound of wind gliding
from one place to another. These things once meant nothing to Martin
but as he grew old, infirm and terminally ill, these things meant the
world to him because these things were his world. They were the
sights and sounds of his home. A place that had always provided. A
place that had never failed him.
As Martin passed away, crumpled and
alone, he whispered four final words to himself. These were not the
last words of a solitary man but the last words of an entire species.
Martin was speaking for the whole of the human race because Martin
was the whole of the human race. His last words were in Terminish.
'Felbus belbunt unf seft', he croaked, which meant 'we've changed our
minds'.
The birds, whose songs Martin had so
enjoyed, descended upon his cadaver and picked his bones clean. The
wind and the sun wore down the rest. The last ever human blew away as
dust, dispersed over sea and over earth.
So go we went.
