After the Last Battle Has Been Fought (and Then Perhaps a Little Bit Before That)

Light from the dying sun slid over the low hills and poured into the valley, filling it to the brim with a red fluorescent glow. A tendril slipped through the window; it bounced around the kitchen, finally coming to rest in Sam’s eyes.

Sam sighed, leaning back in his chair and tossing the paper onto the table in a vaguely irritated manner. Samuel G Lee. A name of no significance to a reader, of course, he or she not having lived in the twenty-third century, but a name recognizable to virtually everyone in that era; Samuel G Lee, the man who invented the hologram. Of course, he didn’t really invent it; Sam had observed that no one invented, truly invented, anything. He had simply perfected the technology, bridging the gap his predecessors had failed to traverse. But he was the one who had become famous for it.

The paper lay on the table, temporarily abandoned as Sam got to his feet and walked to the window. If an observer had, perhaps, panned to the side a bit and zoomed in their view, they would have been able to make out the date displayed at the top in faded letters: June 8, 2003. It was a newspaper two centuries old, with the crossword partially filled.

As Sam stared out the window into the sunset, a harsh sound rippled through the house. A large piece of metal hit the force field and rebounded off the wall of the valley, bouncing along the ground until it finally came to rest in the grass. Cool night air poured into the kitchen as Sam unlatched the door and swung it open. Reaching into his pocket for his keys produced the afterthought that he had not, in fact, put them there. Where, then?

Walking slowly, the pain in his back reminding him of his forgotten medicine, Sam ambled into his room. On the dresser was a box of newspapers, which, to his knowledge, was quite unlike a set of keys. Looking under the bed yielded the same result. He checked the living room, and found them on the low table in there.

My mind is going was the thought that extended itself into the forefront of his mind as Sam stepped out into the night, locking the door behind him.

Upon inquiring about the nature of this action, you would have found that Sam’s response would be of altogether no use, unless you had a dime for every time someone didn’t answer your question, which would in fact be very strange. In truth, Sam himself did not know precisely why it was he locked the door every time he went in and out of the house. There was no one to protect himself against, nothing left alive on this wasteland that they had once called Earth. And yet he continued to lock the door, as if in the hope that he wasn’t alone on this ruined planet.

Wet ground squelched under Sam’s feet as he limped across the valley. Shivering against the cold (the radiators were malfunctioning again), he walked up to the boundary of the force field, detectable only by a faint shimmer, and slid his hand through the air, setting off invisible detectors; with a hum, a small portion of the field slid out, creating an opening through which Sam stepped.

The metal felt cold against his fingers as Sam kneeled beside it. The edges were sharp, as if it had been fractured against its will. He encountered these less frequently in recent years, scraps of metal from explosions that were dislodged by the wind and tossed across the empty streets until they came to rest in the valley. Sam thought better of lifting the metal and instead dragged it behind him as he walked back into the forcefield. The metal was deposited in the shed, and Sam stepped back into the house.

The numbers on the wall shocked Sam.

Falling on the calendar was something his eyes did out of chance as he stepped into his bedroom. The crisp, bold letters projected on the wall proclaimed the date to be the eighteenth of March. The fact that it was the eighteenth that day was not, in principle, important; what was significant was what it implied: that, as long as the fiery ball of plasma that was the sun and the spheres of rock that orbited around them were to be trusted (and in Sam’s experience, these things always came through for you), tomorrow was March 19.

The day he could travel.

Some part of him knew he had to go, the same part that had, out of sight, been recording all of the evidence of the decay of his body, his mind, and his machinery and deducing a suitable conclusion, and then proceeding to hide that conclusion in order to preserve Sam’s well being. But seeing the date dragged this conclusion out from the corners of his mind in which it had hidden, draped in the shadows of observation.

If he didn’t go tomorrow, the positions of the Earth as it spun through the cosmos wouldn’t line up again with the Anchor in the way it had on the day he wanted to go back to for another six years. And by then he might be dead, missing the opportunity he had spent two-thirds of his life preparing for.

The next morning Sam had renewed energy as he readied himself for the journey. There wasn’t much to do, but he busied himself anyway. After he ate breakfast and took medicine for his pain, he began tidying up the house and shutting off the machines.

At around noon Sam took a last look at the home he had lived in for sixty years. The small house stood alone, bordered by the grassy sides of the valley that eventually gave way to rock. The house itself was a low rectangular structure of dark wood set on a grey stone platform. As Sam stepped across the porch, feeling the aged wood bend under his weight, he noted the familiar musty smell that had come from little air circulation in the valley due to the lack of uncontaminated air outside. The railing was rough under his hand as Sam stepped down from the porch and onto the long, light-colored grass that scratched his legs through the thin cloth, bringing back locked-away memories of a park in his childhood.

Sam made his way across the valley and carefully scaled the low wall of red-orange rock. The ship came into view as he pulled himself over, a sleek white spear slicing upward through the smoky sky. On one of the curved sides was a panel lined with numbers, across which he slid his finger. A flat piece of the side collapsed inward, leaving a space through which he was able to step. Inside it was dark; his hand slid across the smooth wall of cold metal until it found the power switch.

The familiar blinking lights of the control panel and hum of the machinery eased themselves into Sam’s perception. The soft rubber of the seat felt cold as he buckled himself in, the indicator lights and data transmitters filling his view. The faint smell of oiled machinery was evident as the ship began to start up. The ship took its time, as if it was as anxious as he about where he was going, which was not far at all in dimensional terms, but in his mind was the longest possible journey one could take, like a boat ride across the River Acheron, the length not stemming inherently from of the journey but from the destination.

Finally the ship finished its startup and, upon direction from Sam, began to rise into the air, its speed increasing exponentially as it did. The world began to fall away below him, and he saw the small patch of green that had been his home surrounded by the drab colors of the rubble of cities.

The ship only needed to get into orbit above the planet to prevent him from landing inside an object when going back in time, the Earth’s position being a rather unstable thing when relating it to exactly sixty years and thirteen days time, and soon it did, breaking through Earth’s atmosphere and allowing Sam to fully see the planet in all of its glory, or lack thereof. Polluted air swam across the mud-colored sphere. From this distance Sam could see the towering mounds of trash that leaned over the cities; he could make out the long steel walls rising up from the surface to pierce the Heavens, as if to show not even the most tranquil paradises could escape the destructive wrath of the walls’ creators; he could see the sleek satellites in their perpetual orbits, relaying signals that would never be heard. And thus the planet lay there, buried in its own hate and drowned in its own corruption, like a poorly written paper the gods had crumbled up and tossed away to work on something else.

As the ship settled Sam unlocked the restraints holding him to his seat and stepped into the back room from which he pushed the time machine itself, a smooth black cube half the size of a man or, if you like thinking in objects that accommodate baked goods composed of wheat, sixteen and a quarter breadboxes.

Lights flashed across the sides as he inputted the date to which he intended to travel. After a moment the room around him seemed to ripple, and the machine went dark.

Sam strapped himself back in and descended towards Earth.

He landed in a remote area far enough away from civilization that there would not be observers but close enough to his neighborhood that he wouldn’t have far to walk. Light from the full moon shone down as he walked through the familiar streets. Twelve twenty three, read the display on his watch, specially programmed to follow the actions of the time machine, which meant there were eighteen minutes until the world ended.

The house was exactly as Sam remembered. Dandelions bordering the porch filled his sense of smell with a pleasant odor. Familiar ivy snaked between the floorboards of the porch. The soft creaking sound of the porch swing being nudged by the wind brought back memories of his childhood he had tried hard to push away forever. Moonlight shone upon the house, highlighting the bright white of the peeling paint.

As said light shone upon Sam, he was going to reflect on the depth of the sorrow that held down his heart as he prepared to see once again the face he had tried so hard to forget, the extent of the anxiety that made his heart race at the thought of what lay behind the door, the strength of the honor that filled his soul as he prepared to let himself go with abandon to the realm of Death; he had prepared a poignant monologue regarding these subjects, but then looked at the time and decided just to knock.

The seconds were stretched in his mind as hours as he waited for the door to swing open. When it finally did, it revealed an aged face stretched with the collective grief of fifteen years’ time.

Sam’s father stared down at him from the doorway. “My god, what could someone possibly want from me at this time of night?”

Sam stood for a moment in the moonlight. “You mean...you don’t recognize me?”

“No,” his father replied slowly, a confused look on his face. “Am I supposed to?”

Sam waited another moment. “When you say you don’t recognize me...you actually mean it?”

“I mean, you look vaguely familiar, but...” His father trailed off, then shrugged.

“You don’t know who I am? Sixty years, sixty bloody years of my life, preparing for this moment, and you don’t even know who I am?”

“Sorry,” he said. “So...are you going to tell me why you disturbed me at this hour?”

“Of course,” Sam said. “It’s me, Dad. Sam. Your son?”

The man raised an eyebrow. “My son isn’t older than me.”

“See, I have to explain. So, right before we both died, I went forward in time, you see, surviving the blast. I then lived for sixty years, having decided to make the most of life before I would do what I had originally wanted to, which is what I’ve come to do now. See, I wanted to be with you, Dad, when the world ended. After fifteen years of never even seeing your face, I wanted to finally reconcile and spend our last moments together. It’s me, Dad. I’m finally here.”

Sam’s father stared at Sam for a moment, then said, “That’s the most absurd story I’ve ever heard.”  He shook his head. “Have a good night, Sir,” he said, swinging the door closed behind him.
Sam stood in shock for a few minutes, simply staring at the door, behind which he had just seen the man he had waited sixty years to see, to be with, at this moment.
And his father had simply closed the door and walked away.
He looked at his watch. It was only about thirty seconds until the explosion would hit. Well, he thought, at least I tried. And as the man-made fire burned through the neighborhood, before it would go on to eventually take the country and the later the world, Samuel G. Lee stood alone in the street of his childhood, boldly facing death and laughing in its face, or at least looking mildly amused.