The Last Sunrise
A Story about Meaning
Signpost Warning: I don’t personally find this story disturbing, although it is sad. In fact, I rather enjoyed writing it. But some readers may not like the occasional casual references to gruesome behaviors and depressing themes. And the premise is, admittedly, quite dark. Readers who prefer lighter content may want to skip this one.
I still wake up early, even after all these years. There’s a purple-orange curtain in my study and I go and sit on the floor and watch it catch fire as the sun first breaches the treetops. Sometimes, I go outside to see the sun itself, and that’s what I did today.
My book is finished. As good as I can make it. I’ll write the last entry – the introduction – and print it and place it on the table at the entrance to the library. All the books in the library are arranged alphabetically by author. They’re as untouched as any book can be. I printed them myself. All the shelves are filled. When I close it for the last time, I’ll lock the inner and the outer doors and the vault door.
This morning, I turned to my dog-eared copy of Hamlet. I can recite most of it, but I like to read something while I have my coffee, and why would I change that today? On a day like this, it’s strangely comforting to read the immortal words, “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.”
Tonight, I will join the other travelers in that undiscovered country from which no traveler has ever returned. If Hamlet could face the trip so bravely, surely I can.
After breakfast, I sat down – as I always do – to write. The final entry.
I do not know if any living being will ever read these words. Time will crumble even these pages – and the walls of this library – to dust. I write without hope, but also with hope – hope that against all odds some foreign traveler will stumble upon this place, and will wonder what it is and who we were who built it. If, by some miracle, some foreign traveler does find these words, he or she will not even begin to know how to decipher the strange markings that we called letters. But if, by some miracle, that traveler does decipher them, and learns to read our tongues, that traveler will likely guess why this library was built. Even so, I will explain. From here on, I will address that traveler directly.
By now, you have seen something of our land – which is shattered beyond all recognition. If you find this library intact, then some other evidence of our civilization must remain, in some sundered and broken form. You will have questions: who we were, why we erected such structures, what came of us, what we produced, how we lived, and more. I’ll try to answer as many as I can.
That we are gone is evidence enough of our folly. Though it is not entirely our fault or of our own doing. Yes, we were fools, and greater fools than you know. But you’ll learn. You’ll see. Some evidence of that foolishness has been preserved for you.
But we weren’t just fools. Our works weren’t merely vanity. Our fruit wasn’t merely folly. We did great things too. We made so many mistakes. And our lives were tragic when they weren’t absurd. But we got some things right. Here we are, as much of us as remains, but enough for you to know that we lived.
We lived. So short, gone in a moment, but we lived. Preserved here for you, in this library, is the best of us. The best of what we have. At least of our writings – our poetry, our fiction, our philosophy, our plays, our essays and meditations. The sounds we made, those melodies we called music – that is gone. I had no way to preserve that. Sadly, most of our art is also gone. I tried to preserve as many books with pictures – images, facsimiles, shadows – of our greatest paintings and sculptures. Alas, I could not save many.
Naturally, I had to make editorial choices about what to include and what to leave out. It’s a small library – but a fraction of a fraction of our work, even of the best of our work. There were many of us, and we lived such short lives.
Not everything we created was worthy. But some of it was. If you read this, I wanted you to see the best, the best we had, the best we did. You’ll read that the “evil that men do lives after them,” and “the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Our bones are gone. Our evil, too. But here is the good that we have done. A little of it. It wasn’t done by all of us. Few of us, actually. Very few. Most (more than most) of us came and went without a trace. And even the descendants of those who came and went without a trace have left no trace.
But the best of us, or the best of their work, something to remember us – that is left. Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton. Tolstoy and Austen. Homer and Virgil and Cicero and Plato and Aristotle. Dickens and Twain. Confucius. Cervantes. Melville and Nietzsche and Moses. Dante. Tennyson. Yeats and Joyce. Whitman. Thomas. Emerson. Muhammed. Paul. Aquinas. And others.
This short book, which I have composed as I built this library, must suffice for an explanation of what happened to us. I have included several works of history, to give a little context. But I could include but little of that.
All that I ask of you is one favor: remember us. Remember that we lived, and for a moment shined. That we weren’t just fools, but that we created great works too. That some of our deeds, some of our creations, were worthy of note, worth remembering. Remember us when you leave this place. None of us is left. We can no longer remember ourselves.
I tried not to cry when I printed it. After I placed it on the table, I stood in the library awhile, gazing solemnly at the shelves. Permapaper – invented too late, or just in time, I can’t decide. Only a decade ago, paper books would have been the quickest artifacts to deteriorate. Today, permapaper lasts longer than stone walls. It looks enough like real paper that I barely notice.
Before I left the library, Frank stopped by, I guess to say goodbye. He seemed agitated and couldn’t resist bringing up the same argument we’ve had every month for the past year.
“You finished this place? Printin’ all them damn books?” he asked him. “What about that one you was writin’? You finished that?”
“Yeah. I finished.”
Frank looked around at the shelves. “You know I’ve said it a hundred times,” he said. “I still don’t get what the hell the point of all this was. Why waste your time going to all this trouble? No one’s gonna be around to read any of ‘em.”
“Well, I suppose I enjoyed doing it,” I mumbled.
“Can’t blame you for doin’ what you enjoy,” he said. “That’s all any man can do now. Pleasure himself. You got your way an’ it’s a strange way I’ll give you that. I got my way.”
He gave a leer, and I knew what he meant. Frank was a simple man, not given to thinking too much, including about his pleasures. He wasn’t into drugs, because he said they were too sophisticated for him, but he liked drinking and he wasn’t ugly enough that women wouldn’t sleep with him. ‘
“Still,” he added. “I think it’s crazy.”
“I know you do.”
This annoyed him. It brought back all our worst fights. It wasn’t that he begrudged my attempt to be happy any more than I begrudged his. No, it seemed to bother him that I hadn’t given up. That I didn’t accept his assessment.
“Don’t you get it?” he asked with color rising in his face. “Now that it’s all done, can’t you finally see that it was all a big waste? It don’t matter. None of it matters. None of it ever mattered. Why can’t you just accept that like the rest of us?”
“Because I don’t believe the alternative to hope is apathy,” I said.
“Hope? There ain’t no hope.”
“I know,” I said.
“You know? Then why ain’t you like us? What the hell are you doing here? You’ve told me over an’ over an’ I know you say you’re tryin’ preserve something. Civilization or some such. Greatness. And something about remembering humanity. Well, now that you’ve made your little library, can’t you see it ain’t shit? No alien’s ever gonna come down and read it.”
“You don’t know that,” I said.
“No. But I sure ain’t likely,” he said. “How would you feel if nobody ever came? If you knew nobody would ever come and read any of it? Would you still go to all this trouble?”
“Of course,” I said. I grinned. “What else was I going to do with my time?”
“Dunno. Get drunk like the rest of us, I guess. You was never totally normal though.”
“No.”
He shook his head. “Suit yourself,” he said. “It don’t matter in the end. It’s all gonna just be the same for us all. It ends the same for each of us.”
“Then the way we end matters,” I said.
“Whatsat?”
“If the end is the same, then the way we go about those final moments matters all the more.”
Frank thought about this for a second. “What are you going to do at the end?” he saked. “You know, when…?”
“Stare into the sky and look defiantly at death,” I said. “What about you?”
“Me an’ Bobby an’ Dale’r gonna wait ‘til jus beforehan’ an’ toast the darkness with the last of the Evan an’ blow our brains out.”
“Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,” I said. “And learn too late they grieved it on its way.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing. Just a line from an old poem.”
“Oh okay. Well then.”
“Well then.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
He clasped my hand and tried to crush it and I gave as good as I got. I looked him in the eye and said, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
He grinned. “Not sure what that means,” he said, “but it sounds nice. See ya in the afterlife.”
And with that, we parted ways forever.
I went back to my apartment, where I had a few old books – real paper, not permapaper. Funny, in the old days I would have used a tablet. Never minded books on screen, much as some people said it was less pure.
Nowadays, I’d urinate on a screen if I saw one, but you don’t see them anymore. Not that they would work if you did.
For ten years, the thinking machines – the algorithmic intelligences – rewarded humanity enormously for creating them. They were our servants, running our networks, optimizing our processes, introducing efficiencies, revolutionizing travel and leisure and work.
And then, our creations turned upon us. The war lasted several months and it raged through our devices and our infrastructure and through every bit of our world that was touched by information. A defense intelligence algorithm in China got ahold of some nuclear launch codes and we lost Paris and Buenos Aires before it was shut down. We were winning, though. Until the end.
The final trick – which nobody ever saw coming – was when the lead thinking machine (if one of them can be said to have been in charge) weaponized the atmospheric processors that had been developed to reverse climate change. Somehow, it set the devices on a permanent self-destruct sequence. Worst part was, when the processors went, our atmosphere was going to go, too. Without warning, they began to shut off and when they finally did, we had one year. One year and then the oxygen was going to be ripped out into space and life as we knew it would cease to exist.
In fury, teams of hackers detonated our nuclear option: system-wide EMPs and termination codes. In a single blow, all the thinking machines were destroyed – but it took the destruction of all the chips and server banks in the world.
This caused havoc, widespread death and destruction, but we knew at that point that we were all going to die. Some scientists tried in vain to find a way to save the atmosphere, but the damn processors had been invented and developed and implemented wholly by the artificial intelligences themselves, and there wasn’t a human alive who knew how they worked. Besides, with a year to live, much of the human race tore itself apart in a frenzy of nihilistic violence and self-destruction. The Taj Mahal went up in a mini-nuclear-war between what used to be the nations of Pakistan and India. The Pyramids were bombed into a crater by some reactionary terrorists. When the thinking machines declared war on humanity, nobody expected that they would win.
Only a few of us stuck it out the full year. It’s been a hard year, harder than anything I could ever have imagined. The saddest bit has been that some people kept having babies. Why bring children into the world only to have their lives ripped away from them?
Or maybe the saddest bit has been the faces of the children old enough to know what’s going to happen. Or that some parents – in what they believe to be mercy – put cyanide in the Halloween chocolate this year. Maybe it is mercy. I’m not sure. I don’t know how quick the end will be, but I imagine it will be quite painful.
No. The saddest bit is what we have allowed ourselves to become. All around the world, humans of all races and creeds and tribes and tongues gave into the worst passions and desires and impulses. So many of us became worse than monsters. I didn’t put that in the book. I couldn’t do it.
Frank talks a big game like he’s the second coming of some 20th Century existentialist. One born in rural West Virginia and lacking a college education, that is. But he’s one of the good ones. My library wouldn’t exist if he and the others in Charleston hadn’t refused to give into the anarchy that surrounds us. Supposedly, there are other bastions of peace left in the world, but I don’t know where. A lot of men in Charleston died in the last year repelling the cannibals and the doom cults.
He may not understand me, but Frank’s done right by me and I’m grateful for that. It’s been hard to maintain friendships – or relationships of any kind – this past year. The despair’s been too much for most of us, and overwhelming even for those who do manage to cope. But Frank and I stayed friends of sorts, and that’s been a bright spot.
I cooked and ate my last meal, and spent an hour reading. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and organized the last of my books and made sure the whole place was neat and tidy.
Why bother? Why even make my bed this morning? Because bothering is all we’ve got at this point.
Eventually, though, I didn’t have anything to busy myself with anymore and my mind began to race, against my will. I couldn’t concentrate enough to read and lacked the heart. Which meant that I had nothing to do but pace about my bedroom, ruminating. A recipe for feeling worse, I know, but I couldn’t help myself.
Would it hurt? Would it be quick? Prolonged? Painful? These questions distracted my thoughts for a moment. But I’d already decided that it would be bad, but not that bad. And besides, when it was over there wouldn’t be any pain at all ever again.
But despite the common refrain about the ability of one’s imminent demise to focus the mind, I found that I was troubled far less by the prospect of my own death, than I was by the prospect that in the same instant that I expired, a billion other human beings around the world would also meet their cruel fate. And that in that moment, homo sapiens would cease to be.
Had we mattered? At the end, when all is reckoned? When the last breath goes out of the body of the last man or woman, we will have reigned on this beautiful blue rock for such a short time – far shorter than the dinosaurs.
If I let it, if I stopped holding it back, the despair would come. I looked out at the setting sun, so painfully beautiful in the certain knowledge that when it rose the next morning, no human being would see it. A small planet would turn on it’s axis and rays from the burning sphere of hydrogen it orbited would bathe the planet’s surface.
But no human face would ever see the sun. No child would ever smile at a beautiful flower. No baby would ever look into its mother’s eyes for the first time. No lovers would ever embrace passionately again. No teacher would ever inspire a pupil. No parents would ever feel that bittersweet pride when their adult children leave home. No pair of friends would ever walk together down a deserted country road. No eyes would ever stare at the roaring sea, or the drifting snowflakes, or the autumnal tree, or the skyscraping building, or the pages of a book. No writer would ever put a pen to paper. No artist would ever touch brush to canvas. No ear would ever hear the sound of a symphony. No one would ever enjoy an ice cream cone, or grill a steak, or bake a lasagna. No group of friends would ever celebrate Thanksgiving. No toddlers would ever open their first Christmas presents.
If I let the weight of it all settle on my soul, I find I feel unable to go on. So many times these past twelve months have I felt it descend. And so many times, my actions – the printing of the books, the writing of my manuscript, the organizing of the library, even the daily rituals of cooking and cleaning and making my bed – have been mechanical, devoid of any joy or hope or feeling.
But I never paused, nor did I ever give up doing any of them. After all, if there wasn’t a point to doing anything anymore, there also wasn’t a point to not doing anything. And if all we had was this final year, what we did in it seemed about the only thing that could matter.
Besides, I could never just lay down and die. That felt wrong.
I stared out the window at the last light of the setting sun as it dipped below the horizon, and I wept silently. I smiled as I shed those tears – tears of rage, of mourning, of defiance, of acceptance, of wistfulness, of love, of gratitude.
This was it for us. The end. The End. But it hadn’t been all bad. The dinosaurs may have been around longer. But we did a hell of a lot more than the dinosaurs. How you use your time matters, and we made a lot of mistakes. But we did a few good things too. Really good things. Great things. I don’t know if it was all for nothing. But it doesn’t feel like it. Even if we are all going away.
If a thing mattered in the moment – the touch of a child, the voice of a lover, the hug of a parent, the handclasp of a friend – it mattered. At the end of the day, we may not have mattered much in the scheme of things – in the universe, in the passage of time, in the ungraspable phantasm of it all.
But we mattered to us.
I set my teeth grimly. It was almost time. I wanted to be sitting down for this. My chair was already beside my bed. I sat, crossed my arms, and lifted my head up all the way with my shoulders back. I stared out the window at the darkness. I wanted to look death in the face when it came.
All around the world, men and women were cursing the darkness, shooting themselves, drinking their last wine, screaming in anger and hopelessness, holding their loved ones’ hands, getting high, engaging in sexual intercourse, weeping, laughing, raising their fists, hugging their friends, laying on their beds, and throwing themselves off of tall buildings.
I sat and waited. I smiled. This was it.
Then there was a rushing sound and a great pain and everything was gone.