THE LAST MAN: Part Three

THE LAST MAN
PART THREE
Despite assertions this is hardly a perfect society. It is imbued with all the miserable faults and foibles of the human heart. This desire for perfection, this impossible destination will certainly be the downfall of civilization, for in striving for perfection we become separate from ourselves. All the great literature, inspired thought, Art and music are the product of blessed insecurities, unrestrained passions and exalted perversions. They are unhinged anger, psychosis and guilt. Indeed, the greatest irony is that we were perhaps more perfect when we were much less perfect.

Freedom is a malleable alloy. There is no standard but what a man will or will not endure. Beyond that limit his freedom begins and ends. Within that closed room there is no consideration for anyone else’s freedom. Their freedom is an extravagance, a courtesy, not the divine sanctity of another’s solemn sovereignty. It can be bargained away. Though, in truth, the bargaining of one man’s freedom makes all other’s negotiable.

Ours was bargained away long ago. Freedom became defined more by security than by liberty. Few questioned those who blathered that the dead cannot be free, and so they bartered with the state that sovereign right for the weight of a few more breaths, a few more hours against eternity. It wasn’t wild specters that imperiled freedom, but freedom that imperiled the state. It imperiled the Corporation while it was still a small thing, while it might have been crushed and set aside among the other failed and forgotten ideologies, like fascism, and communism, feudalism and theism.

There were those who resisted Sentinel at first. Isolated and shunned by weak willed neighbors, they were quickly dealt with. Their ashes filled the sky from those first terribly crude reclamation centers. They were the lucky ones. They were the last of the truly free, the ones who would not go quietly. They cursed and stood defiant even as the flames devoured their flesh. I wonder if there were men and women like me among them. I wonder if they were the last. Perhaps they were the strongest, those most defiant. I wonder. That thought gives me strength.

It made perfect sense, on a childish level, to eliminate race from humanity. Centuries and millennia of strife, classism, racism and social stratification would be swept away. A new era of mankind, a grand step in evolution would be taken. Race was not the issue, but merely the symptom. A fool will raze the world before facing his own ignorance. The question remains of whether I represent the world or the fool?

I grew tall and lean, much taller than the other children. It was as though being black in a grayish-white world was not enough! My hair grew long and straight and stiff until I wove it into braids. My beard grew thick but short. And there I was, at first ashamed of features echoing my African ancestors.

Not that I only acknowledge that lineage. It was known even in the Twentieth Century that no man could rightly claim a single undiluted ancestry. The blessed diversity of the species was once scribbled through all races and all parts of the world. A melting pot or soup? Certainly a stew in which ingredients maintained a unique character while adding to the taste. How I must have appeared as a monster among all the rest. Now I am as a rare jewel; so proud and beautiful.

You might ask how the world came to be this way. Was it a deliberate process, or the accidental ignorance of our blind collective fate? A nation of good intentions can easily be swayed by the violent acts of a madman or a revolutionary. Broad passions about the rights of man are smothered. All the words of all the holy books ever written, all the best intentions of the enlightenment, the sanctity of the Reformation, or passions of the French revolution were rendered meaningless through the obfuscation of truth, lawyer-ism, and the collective abandonment of individual sovereignty. Hardly a revolution, it all happened with a whisper and over generations.


The Corporation had nothing to lose by putting me on trial. What they had to gain is certainly in question, for it would have been simpler just to send me to reclamation. No one would have known. There will never be any headlines and no programming concerning the trial. No Associate anywhere in the world will ever know. There will never be a popular uprising, no outrage and no curiosity. Perhaps it is a distraction from the burdens of time, or an implicit indication that some unknown and unseen autocrat in the Corporation has a conscience.

And so I was told of a secret archive where the last remaining references to the old world are kept. I was free to use them as I pleased to prepare my defense, as long as I did not take anything away. It was an incredible privilege, I understood, for I would have at my fingertips all that had become forbidden for centuries. Certain that my fate was sealed even before the trial I decided the archives would bring me closer to others like me, though they were long dead and gone.

I dreamed of them for days, hardly sleeping from breathless excitement and fantasy. I would find these treasure and consume every word as a starving body consumes every morsel or drop of food-even the tasteless, colorless vita-wafers that suffices for sustenance for Associates. My mind filled with shelves filled with endless manuscripts, of breathing in the air and scent of them. What I discovered was something much different.

Sadly the archives were not in some ancient catacomb, or some neglected but still elegant old world ruin. There were no dusty windows leaking pale dim light upon towering shelves stacked with untold volumes. There were no sheets of cobwebs to swept aside in discovery of soulful treasure. The “archive,” was in the basement of a sub-basement of one of those massive towers along the coast. Indeed, it was nearly in the low city!

It was a long descent through long sparsely lit concrete passageways and down uneven, hastily crafted steps, as if this had all been an after-thought to the building above. The air grew heavy. The biting smell of cold sewage grew stronger with each step. There were sounds; the dripping of water, the rhythmic thumping of the waves upon the shore, the groan and settle of the building.

At last I came to a metal door. The hinges had rusted and it was with some effort that I finally managed to open it. There was no light inside. That paltry light from the hall fell on some strange shape, like a creature slumbering in its tomb which, now disturbed, would turn and devour me. I half believed, fear banging against the inside of my chest, that the Corporation had somehow tricked me into that bitter end.

There was a small lamp in my jacket. The light was pathetic, but just enough to reveal what was called an archive. In a single great heap, and a number of smaller ones, the wisdom and works of mankind rotted and moldered: Kish, Mandela, Plato, Ellison, Dostoevsky, Freud, Ovid, Sefi Atta, Castaneda, GuanZi, Twain and Dante.

Standing water made islands of each great mound. Obsidian black, the water appeared like some mirror to another world. Stagnate pools had rotted many of the volumes into formless mush. Many more had been devoured or ruined by insects and rats that swarmed in places. What remained was terribly fragile under anything but the most careful touch. How sad, as I sat upon this throne built from the rotting history, wisdom and confession of humanity, like some sad monarch of nothing.