1.

This death is the first tree in the forest.

I still remember that statement by Bashevis, who was himself transformed into a cadaver less than three weeks later. That was more than 120 years ago, but the memory is as clear and painful as an open wound.

Unless that’s a side effect of the pills.

---

I’m on the terrace. It’s morning and the fog has erased the world. Shapes appear, moving outlines, like breathing. Then I make out the edge of the forest. I’m on the terrace. A machine purrs next to me. The sun finally rises, burning off the white fog. I contemplate the forest: immense oaks, some several centuries old.

I’ve watched them grow.

Between the terrace and the forest, a clearing. The machine maintains it. It has accompanied me for many long years and I feel affectionately toward it. I’m waiting impatiently for its death. Below, between the trees, something is moving. Slow. Powerful.

A stag.

A stag with white fur, immense antlers.

It walks silently. Straight toward me. It looks at me.

This is not the first time.

Long, white hair, tangled, thick, hangs from its ears. I can make out opaque shapes—ticks, lumps of flesh, mutations. I don’t know what all.

It’s beautiful.

It stops. Its eyes are black, enormous, cold and well-meaning. Or, rather, absolutely not human, so well-meaning then.

Its antlers shine softly. Incandescence that makes me blink.

I’m human and not the slightest bit well-meaning.

I take aim.

My gun is effective.

The stag looks at me and then rears up on its hind legs. Standing there, larger than life, more than 3 meters tall, antlers included.

It utters deep, guttural sounds. I tell myself that if a tree could talk it would sound like that.

The stag lowers its front legs, then walks off, turning its back on me and leaving me alone.

Obviously I didn’t shoot. I weep.

The forest is immense and deaths are numerous.

The trees never speak.

---

2.

I’m on the terrace. The sun has reached its peak. The grass in the clearing is burnt. The machine purrs at my side. It has accompanied me for many long years. Although I feel affectionately toward it, I’m waiting impatiently for its death. Below, among the trees, something is moving

The white stag.

The movement of its feet, the way it places its cloven hooves on the ground, all reveal a rare elegance. Its gait is a ceremony. It comes straight toward me, stops halfway there, and rears up on its hind legs.

My gun is effective.

I take aim.

I shoot.

Nothing happens.

The stag lowers its front legs, looks at me, excluding me, turns, and walks away.

I scream. I shoot again, several times. Still nothing. I throw the gun down, run into the house, and open the gun cabinet. I find a missile launcher. Return to the terrace. Its infrared sight lets me find the animal. I press the trigger. Nothing. Long scream of rage. The machine floats a few meters from me, waiting. I ask it for explanations.

You gave the order to neutralize weapons for once and for all.

When…

Sixty-seven days, nine hours, six minutes…

I cancel that order.

It’s a priority order and cannot be cancelled. You also addressed a message to yourself before taking an unrecommended quantity of red pills. The message is…

I pick up wooden ax and head for the machine. I hit it once, then a second time. I hit it over and over again. I reduce it to a pulp. I run into the clearing shrieking, still waving the wooden ax.

I grow calm.

Somewhere behind me, the entrails of the house produce a new machine.

Red pills.

I drop the wooden handle.

Return to the building.

The infirmary. Pills. Red pills to forget. Green pills to remember. And those striped ones….

I take the green pills.

I remove all my clothes. I go out of the house stark naked. Head for the forest. The ground cuts into the soles of my feet. I gobble up the green pills. I go back as far as the Sino-African conflict.

---

World War IV.

The African sun is unique, never friendly. The savanna is ravaged by fire. Carbonized vehicles lie scattered here and there. Some have been irradiated. We advance calmly. I’d even say joyfully. I love war. The causes are of no interest to me. I sell my body and they improve it. The Chinese offered me a new network of optic nerves. The Africans were staying with the titanium powder reinforced skeletons. Behind me, a small battalion of Ze-Dong, Chinese liquidators.

During World War III, Westerners invented different sizes of bombs intended to neutralize electric and computer networks. Bombs covering the landscape with silicon, mini nuclear explosions provoking electromagnetic impulses, etc. Above all, the goal was to erase computer memories. Of course, after that war, biological computers, with DNA and molecular arrangements became necessary. Faster, more energy efficient, more resistant in the event of a conflict.

Then the memory bombs appeared. Biological weapons attacking the very structure of the molecules used for those new generations of machines., rendering them stupid. All too soon, applications intended for human beings were developed. Some for attacking our enemies; others for improving us. We’ve always liked drugs.

We cross the savanna, filled up to our eyeballs with a cocktail that transforms half of my men into puppets. Some moan softly, already in withdrawal. We’re winning this war, but this battalion will probably die during the victory.

Then I see the ghosts.

They come out of the forest, a dense, ambiguous herd. Their pace is different, asynchronous. They seem to run, yet they move slowly. Their skin is a phosphorous gray, translucent, as if these shapes are made of water, water able to gather into insistent yet impossible shapes.

Elephants.

The last elephants disappeared from the surface of the planet at the beginning of the fourth world war.

African elephants, of course. Asian elephants had been decimated 30 years earlier by the so-called poodle flu that had liquidated half of the animals on the Asian sub-continent. We gutted the planet, polluted its oceans, altered its atmosphere and eradicated almost all of the mammals, wild or other.

African elephants.

They headed straight for us.

They made no sound. The soil retained no trace of their passing.

But they were coming toward us.

I turned back to look at my men. They saw them too.

The herd walked past me. One of the elephants literally walked right through me. As I stood still, I passed through him. Each pore of my skin quivered, the hair on my body and head stood up. Electricity ran along my nerves. A taste of rust and mud mingled with my saliva. The temperature of my blood dropped. But the odor was marvelous. The scent of ocean and infinity. Then I heard the shrieks. I looked behind me; all of my men were dead, twisted into unlikely angles. I felt bad for them.

But I was the ocean.

---

Since then, I see ghosts.

The ghosts of the dead.

The ghosts that inhabit the planet like a species apart.

The ghosts of what never was.

Because I’m the last man.

---

I’m in the forest, naked. The effect of the green pill wears off. I talk to the trees, but they don’t listen to me.

---

3.

I’m on the terrace. The moon is round. The grass in the clearing is high, it undulates, deploying waves in geometric progressions, caressed by a cold wind. I’m standing, short of breath, I take a sip from a canteen containing who knows what type of synthetic alcohol. The machine purrs at my side—I’ve destroyed a lot of them, I know that, but I have no idea how many. Several machines, a single brain; it’s never more than an extension of the house. But the house has finally grown dysfunctional. It’s dying. I observe the situation, curious. Below, between the trees, the shadows. That’s where I want to go.

I cross the plain. The grass reaches almost to my waist. I’m wearing a black outfit now, semi-intelligent, which means heated, able to heal, and, as needed, chatty. A hunting knife hangs from my belt. All I use now are knives.

The machine stays on the terrace.

I think it’s afraid of the forest.

---

I’ve been walking for hours. The forest is denser and denser, more and more humid, blacker and blacker. Occasionally, I regret my choice of optical equipment—I no longer remember what a single lens is. That regret is vanity. In actual fact, I no longer remember what a single body is.

I come across various nocturnal creatures. I’m incapable of identifying them. The mutations continue. Things tend to become other things.

I encounter a colony of octopods.

I like them well enough. They’re mammals. I don’t know what they will evolve into, but they won’t imitate us. They left the water less than a century ago. Those that live in a colony look like spider monkeys. The solitary ones are more than two meters tall. They are slow, possibly dangerous, and they never live far from lakes, swamps or shores. One day, I’ll challenge one of them.

The mutations are closely linked to our own disappearance.

I reach the spring. It trickles from a heap of mossy rocks, forming a still, icy pond. I like to dive into it. Float gently in the liquid shade. I can’t touch bottom anywhere. Only my head stays above water.

I’m waiting for the spirits.

After half an hour, the spirits appear. They always seem to come out of the water. They are small phosphorescent shapes, the size of field mice, some like rats, that move about on top of the pond. It took me a while to admit that these impalpable beings, made of the same matter as ghosts, have to be considered living. They sing, too. A very gentle wavelength in tune with the lapping of the water. I’m starting to understand their organization. Their liturgy as well. I don’t know if they’re mortal.

Shortly after my encounter with the elephants, animal ghosts started to invade the Earth. They always appeared in groups, always in places of war. Blue whales swept away the Royal Fleet of the Non-Secular States. Even stranger, a giant swarm of bees destroyed San Francisco. Lions with bodies like sapphires made of changing waters wiped out the population of Nairobi. Exclusively species that had been extinct for decades.

There are no large ape ghosts—the large apes were preserved.

While the appearance of these shadows gave new life to the fundamentalist religions, it also accelerated the implementation of a peace process. Little by little, the ghosts stopped bothering us.

But it’s only since the human species was erased from the face of the earth that these ghosts, the ghosts of beings that never existed, appeared.

I’ve seen spectral shapes similar to giant anteaters. Others reminded me of monstrous herons with six feet. And still others that could have passed for snow crystals, given the delicacy of their structure.

---

I remain in the water for 30 minutes. Occasionally, the things form a corona around my head. Once I’m out of the water, the suit organically removes all of the humidity. I return to the house.

I’ve never encountered ghosts of the human race.

Using my knife, I notch the trees until their sap trickles down.

---

4.

The machine is on the terrace. Looking for me. I hide in the tall grass in the clearing. The machine has made itself a shell, topped with sharp spikes. When I saw it for the first time, I laughed. Finally, something surprising. The house is worried about me. It can no longer make new machines, but my destructive mania has caused it to create one that is more resistant. Oddly enough, this one is also more playful. I imagine that being immortal has freed it. I leap at the shelled ball, brandishing an ax capable of cutting through any metal. The machine flees, zigzagging. It could easily have determined my presence, using one of its sensors (heat, pulse, fractal vision) and I appreciate the fact that it plays the role of a simple prey.

Perhaps it’s saving its energy.

It shakes me off.

So, here I am on the terrace, out of breath.

If my machine dies, will it become a ghost ?

That would be a first.

My mind is spinning.

The fleeting memory of having taken a striped pill, followed by some powder from the red ones, in order to forget taking the striped one. And to create fragmented memories.

Old junkie, I say to myself before collapsing.

---

Children’s laughter. A body snuggled next to mine. The heat of skin. Hair that smells like a dune. The taste of salt on a rounded shoulder. A hand. A hand and a tiny hand. A rocking chair. Her tongue that slips between my lips. A woman breastfeeding. Laughter of children and wife mingling.

---

I’m standing on the terrace, covered with sweat. The machine purrs next to me. The ax has disappeared. My body is producing endorphins to calm my mind. I recall trafficking my pituitary gland during the five Suez canals conflict. My brain can produce many drugs, but none can match the three pills. A dull rattle behind me. I turn around; the white stag is there, standing on its hind legs. Its antlers sparkle so much they seem to be on fire. I reach out my hand. Touch its chest. Its fur is thick, reassuring and stinky. It’s not a ghost. I smile. It gets back down on all fours, then takes off, trotting. A long time ago, I was a good horseman. Is it possible to mount a stag using a vertical posture ?

I fall asleep. Someday, I’ll have to eat something.

I wake up. The machine has placed a meal next to me. I gobble everything up. The sun is high. I squint. Smoke in the distance. In a straight line. Rising from the heart of the forest. I look down. I go into the weapons locker to pick up two knives that I wear on a shoulder strap across my back. Before that, I took all of my clothes off. I’m going into the forest to track down those who make fire.

The machine remains hovering over the terrace. It’s afraid of the forest. I’m afraid of the house. Of sleeping in a bed.

---

The forest is deep. I cross through it without hesitating. Those who make fire cannot be human. There are no humans left. This death is the first tree in the forest, Bashevis said before transforming into a cadaver, three weeks later. He melted. Literally. Before my very eyes. Generally speaking, most of the planet was consumed, internal combustion that devoured flesh in two or three days. The luckiest ones melted. The golden age of genetic code manipulation had ended about 15 years earlier. Designing organic programs intended to create new species based on voluntarily archaic models. Caring for all sick people. Developing some diseases that could not be treated. And, of course, mutating everything that already existed. Butterflies had advertisements emblazoned on their wings. Fields burst out in fantastic colors, for trademarks. The world was code, DNA and private property. The other great science underway involved the development of interventionist nanoparticles—cell regeneration, biological robots with unparalleled precision, creation of an energy soup as a strategic replacement for fossil or nuclear fuels… And all that combined outside the laboratories. DNA and nanoparticles chose a new direction for the species. Mutations appeared, tending toward more the complex, more intelligent.

And humans were consumed. Or melted.

Only a few of us survived.

But fire cannot be produced by humans.

The apes do that. The large apes. Their species almost disappeared. First we protected them, then cloned, multiplied and arranged them. Such powerful little brothers, cheerful workers, skillful soldiers, giant stuffed toys. They survived.

I finally find them. A family. Eight, including two children. They know how to make fire. They also know how to use tools. They know how to bury their dead. They know how to recognize their image. They know how to laugh. They know how to weep. But that doesn’t make them human.

What characterizes the human species is the art with which I handle my weapons.

I cannot tolerate mammals setting off along our path.

I pick up my weapons, leap into the middle of them. Their skin is like the bark of the trees.

One night, I dreamed that I was speaking to the ghost of a tree. It too refused to talk to me.

---

5.

I’m on the terrace, covered with blood. A large portion of it belongs to the apes. I’m missing three fingers on my left hand. I have a gaping wound on my thigh. The skin has been rubbed off my knees and elbows—I had to crawl to get back here. I lie down on my back, inhale, breathe, grow calm. Then give my body the order to repair itself. I should have done that earlier, but it would have demonstrated a lack of honor. My temperature rises from 36.8° to 41°. The nanoparticles get down to work. My flesh burns as it regenerates. My fingers grow back. I’m atrociously hungry. This will take several hours.

Phosphorescent butterflies land on me. Their wings beat backwards. I try to catch one with my good hand. I believe I want to eat them. My hand passes through them. Insect ghosts move in clouds that have a taste nothing like oceans. Instead, it’s more like earth and ashes. I’d like to melt into them, like a burial.

They watch over me all night.

---

The starting point of the epidemic has been pinpointed. We were reaching out to immortality. We had invented a virus that was made up of intelligent nanoparticles, capable of regenerating cellular DNA. Bodies were supposed to repair themselves. One hundred and fifty of us served as guinea pigs. Bashevis got the message right off when one of the scientists monitoring us died. His body calcified in three days, while he was still alive. A simple problem of energy, Bashevis murmured. The epidemic was rapid. We had been modified to resist the virus. The others had not.

Men were consumed. It took less than a week. Without beginnings, without cries, without a crisis. We who were all noise, blood and fury, we disappeared in silence. The species was filled with dread, then erased.

Only the 150 remained.

A large number of them melted.

I remember the shores that bordered the center. The day Bashevis died, I was watching a herd of dolphins. Lustrous ghosts playing in the surf of a wine-colored ocean. I still hoped that the ghosts and the living would coexist. I was still hoping that human beings would reappear in the form of spirits imitating the shape of the water.

When I realized that nothing like that would happen, I tracked down the survivors.

I didn’t kill all of them. Just the men. A lengthy hunt. Interesting deaths: I had to be faster than the plague that re-built them. One woman asked me, why just the men, why not the women.

To keep us from starting over. To keep us from reproducing.

I could sleep with you, she told me. Our lives are infinite. You might feel alone, or go mad, or forget. And then you could sleep with me, or with one of the others. It doesn’t matter, I replied. I’m sterile. By choice. In such a way that nothing can repair me, I added. We’re almost immortal, but the species is over, I concluded.

---

There is a counting system that goes through satellites. In recent years, I’ve seen the last dots representing humans disappear. Two came to ask me to annihilate them. Now, I’m the last one.

My hand is intact. I’m hungry. The machine brings me food. I thrust a bloody knife into its shell. It flees, weaving this way and that. I remember the two monkey children. I stand up, head over to the medicine cabinet and gobble down two red pills.

Seventy years ago, I planted 150 oaks along the edge of the forest. Their DNA makes them believe they’re 200 years old. They’re magnificent. I know I gave each of them a name. But I can’t remember what. Damned red pill. I’d have to take a green one to remember. There’s water on my face.

---

6.

The stag is on the terrace. Standing upright. It’s pouring. The water runs down its chest, drawing dark veins of marble. I’m afraid. I enjoy the feeling. I think the stag is looking for me as it moves about under the downpour, looking left then right. It finds me, watches me for a long moment, then talks to me like the trees would talk. I don’t understand a thing it says. Suddenly it gets back down on all fours and gallops away. My heart pounds.

The machine comes back out of the grass in the clearing; it is growing wild, gradually freeing itself from the house. In a certain manner, I’ve educated it.

It has been raining for two months. New seasonal cycles are settling in. Yesterday, a herd of ghostly cranes with six feet crossed through the clearing. They moved in single file, stopping one after another in front of me. I saw the landscape, blurred by their bodies. Their faces, sitting on top of long, burlesque necks, seemed human. Some wore masks which, I finally realized were made of faces assembled together. Mummified faces of animals that once lived. Beings that were not ghosts. Classification is difficult.

I returned to the heart of the forest, where the pond is located. I lost my survival suit a long time ago (a country stroll after taking a red pill). It doesn’t matter. My body is used to adjusting its temperature. I floated for four hours. It was only during the third hour that the creatures I now call lemurs formed on top of the water. Now, I can hear the rhythm of their melody. Sometimes, I try to sing with them. They’re very tolerant. Then, I returned to the shore, lay down, and let them land on my body. For a while, I sparkled along with them.

Then I took the striped pills.

Their impact is random. Sometimes, they take effect immediately, sometimes you have to wait several hours, sometimes nothing happens.

---

The striped pills were difficult to find. They allow me to live lives that never were. They create fictional lives with an imperious density and reality, leaving the person who dreams believing in the absolute certainty of their realness. Of course, the appearance of stigmata caused a few problems. Remembering an amputation that never took place and waking up with a missing leg left more than one person a little perplexed. All kinds of explanations were provided: the persuasive power of the human mind, our chemical transformation into self-procreating gods, and even the appearance, through the use of drugs, of a breach that resulted in an exchange, molecule by molecule, with our other selves in parallel worlds.

Above all, some dreamed of beings that had never existed and woke to find them waiting for them. Of flesh and blood, with memories, desires, projects, souls no doubt, for those who believe in souls. But these beings never lasted more than a few hours, although they did leave very real cadavers behind. No theologian was ever able to account for this type of ghost. The striped pills were prohibited. Their worth on the black market skyrocketed. I sold a lot.

Now, I’m on the shore of an icy pond, rocked by tiny, well-meaning ghosts.

I wait.

I hope to be able to live a life that was not.

I listen to the trees, which refuse to talk to me.

I aspire to remember bodies, voices, odors.

I aspire to be before, elsewhere and another, rather than here, now and myself.

I’ve done nothing but kill, yet I’d like to be moved by something that has never moved me: the laughter of children, a body snuggled against mine, the heat of skin, hair that smells of a dune, the taste of salt on a rounded shoulder, a hand and a tiny hand, a rocking chair, a tongue that slips between my lips, a woman breastfeeding, the laughter of children and a wife mingled.

---

I close my eyes.

So many ghosts and not a single human being.

I could have enjoyed being a ghost.

Together we would have had daughters as mysterious as orchids, sons as beautiful as the daughters and their very long lives would have been a well of intense emotions. They would have known how to talk about the dead and we would have rocked with their song.

I am the last man.