Last

Humanity was given little warning when the sun went out.

Scientists detected some fluctuations in the normal radiation pattern of our sun, then a few days later, blip! Gone. Literally, gone. Satellites saw the region where the sun once was as an empty space. Telescopes couldn’t see anything either. Hell, NASA even sent a manned mission to check. Took half a year for that ship to report what everyone already knew. There was nothing there.

At first, the governments of the world adapted quite well. After all, we still had electricity! Sure, solar was out of the picture now, but fossil fuels and nuclear energy could power our civilization for centuries. With our level of technology, humanity could survive forever, sun or no sun!

How asinine.

Looking back, I don’t think anyone understood the gravity of the situation we were in. We all took the sun’s existence for granted, and nobody really knew how hard it would hit us if it were to vanish.

I was one of the few who knew that this was not just a minor inconvenience. No, this was a doomsday scenario. So I left my previous apartment in the big city and built myself a small home on the countryside. I needed to escape the inevitable fallout. All it would take is a few people to figure out how badly we were screwed as a collective species, and then suddenly the city would be the last place you’d want to be. The apocalypse tends to bring out the worst in people, so I’d rather be alone with the worst of myself, than surrounded with the worst of everyone else.

The first effect of the now permanent darkness we were all shrouded in was noticeable immediately. It was a lot colder.

A lot colder.

Deserts became covered in snow overnight. Areas where the weather was once unbearably hot becoming frozen wastelands. The U.S. government had to evacuate almost every single southern state. There was no infrastructure in place to protect from the blizzards that ravaged the once warm land. In fact, if you were located on or near the equator, you had about 10 days to leave before the cold winds froze you to death, or you installed a few hundred space heaters and waited out the eternal storm.

I was one of the few that decided to hunker down. I had prepared for this in advance. My home had a powerful central heating unit installed, and I purposely had it constructed right on top of a geothermal hot-spot. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to construct a functional geothermal generator. With this, I could have near infinite power. Should have packed more lights though, it’s really dark in here, without any sunlight coming through the windows.

So, with my relative protection against the unforgiving cold, I waited, and I watched. I watched as society crumbled.

The beginning of the end was when people slowly started to truly understand that the sun wasn’t coming back. I think a lot of people thought that this was just a temporary thing, or that it was fixable. But when pretty much every scientific organization tried and failed to locate the sun, people started to panic.

After everyone had come to terms with the fact that the sun was gone, the next logical step was to adjust to this new normal, and prepare for the coming ice age, right? Well, not to the minds of the general public and the scientific community. To them, the obvious next step was to create a new sun.

I don’t know how they thought that would go. There were a few successful experiments that managed to create miniature stars, but they were temporary. These substitute-suns had short lifespans. The longest running one lasted only a week. But for all the successes, there were twice as many devastating failures.

Last I heard, China was renamed to “PRIMARY EXCLUSION ZONE”, mostly due to the lethal levels of radiation which now permeates the entire country, and several surrounding ones. Asia is essentially uninhabitable.

After the loss of most of Asia, pandemonium broke out. People finally knew that there was nothing we could do. The sun was gone, and the dark had overtaken the earth. And with the dark, so had madness.

Riots devastated most major cities, famine destroyed the less populated areas. The lack of a sun made it significantly harder to grow anything, and the global food supply plummeted. Billions starved to death, or near enough to death to convince them to kill their fellow man for whatever scraps of food they could find. I’ve heard some accounts of what desperate people would do for even the slightest hope at a meal. Its horrifying stuff.

Through all this, I sat, and I waited in my little secluded home. My last bastion against the chaos. Although I was far, far away from the anarchy which destroyed civilization, I was not immune to the problems that caused it. Even with my protections against the climate, and even with my endless energy, food was a major issue. As it stands now, I’ve got 4 days left of food before I either starve to death or venture out in search of more. With plant life being practically non-existent, and my isolation from the rest of society, the former option seems like the most likely scenario.

I haven’t given up hope… yet. Yesterday I tried to start my car, which has been sitting unused in my driveway for far too long. No dice, the gasoline had frozen, and I’m too afraid to try and melt it. I’d rather not cause an explosion.

So I’ve just been here, waiting. But I haven’t been waiting idly, I’ve been broadcasting my location across any and all radio signals that I can broadcast on. I used to get responses. Stuff like “don’t worry, we’ll come for you soon” and “help is on the way”, and occasionally someone would tell me stories about what’s happening outside, but that was at the beginning of this whole disaster. I received the last transmission from the outside world 3 years ago, and it was not hopeful. It was only 3 words: “there’s nothing left”. After that, complete radio silence.

Now, I’m not one to give up without a fight, but I believe that my fight is over. I am but one man, one man against the world, or lack thereof. For all I know, I’m the last of humanity. Or at least, the last human with a radio. It’s been 3 years since I heard from anybody. 3 years since I heard anything other than static on the radio, and the howling wind outside. Nowadays, I sit alone in darkness.

So here I am, writing this all down. It’s a bit rushed. The lights in my home have been going out, and the central heating is breaking down. The cold is freezing the machines that run them solid. I don’t have much strength left in me, there’s scarcely enough light to see the words on this paper, and I’ve been rationing my food to the point where my muscles have atrophied significantly. I’m incredibly weak, it’s a miracle I can generate the force to move my hand enough to write this. Speaking of, I should probably explain why I’ve bothered writing this.

Mostly for peace of mind. I know that there’s probably nobody left to read these pages, and I don’t care. I just need there to be something, anything to prove that I was once a person that lived. To prove that there was at least somebody who was able to try and survive through this disaster, instead of becoming a madman. But also, perhaps… perhaps some alien race will find Earth. Perhaps they’ll land here and wonder “What the hell happened?”.

And perhaps, they’ll find this, and perhaps, they will be able to understand what happened. Perhaps they will figure out where our sun went.

Or maybe not. Maybe this will just sit and rot away in silence.

Either way, this is my end. To any human reading this, congratulations on making your way out to my little house, but I regret to inform you there’s nothing significant for you here. Just this letter, and maybe a bit of canned goods. To any aliens reading this, welcome to what’s left of the world. I hope you find the ruins of our once grand civilization interesting. Do me a favor, if you find my body, bury it. Or don’t, I wouldn’t mind if you take it for study or whatever. I hope I’d make a fine specimen.

I think the last of my lights just went out. Can hardly see my own words.

I’m going outside now. I’d rather freeze than starve to death, seems like a better way to go.

And as I lay down outside in the snow, and the cold takes me, humanity will be gone, and it will have died in silence…

Actually… no. Humanity won’t be silent in death. That’s too cliché. When I die, I’ll go kicking and screaming. I’ll shout until my lungs break under the pressure, I’ll thrash until the wind forces me to stop, and I will rage against the cold until it silences me.

So that humanity won’t die without a fight.