The Empty Laboratory

Seventeen blinks. The yellow warning light on his air gauge always blinked seventeen times before turning red. Dr. Chen counted them like heartbeats while replacing his oxygen tank, each one marking another three hours of borrowed time. Through the reinforced windows of his BSL-4 lab, the setting sun painted the research facility in the same amber shade as the viral suspension he'd been perfecting when the sprinklers activated.

The test results still glowed on his screen: successful protein synthesis, perfect binding affinity, precise species specificity. Everything they'd been working toward. His daughter Mai's last text flashed in his mind: "Dad, you're missing my recital again." He'd meant to reply, but the viral assay had shown such promise. Just one more test, one more optimization. Always one more.

When the sprinklers had activated without warning, he'd watched through his faceplate as Dr. Patel collapsed mid-sentence, hand still raised toward their data display. "The targeting sequence is absolutely human-specific," she'd been saying. "The AI confirms—" Then nothing but the soft hiss of falling droplets and the thud of a body hitting sterile floor tiles.

The facility's automated locks had engaged instantly. Standard containment protocol. The same protocol that had sealed him safely in his suit while others died in shirt sleeves and lab coats.

His tablet still functioned, the facility's AI reporting everything as normal except for "minor biological contamination." The big wall screens monotonously displayed their usual data feeds from partner facilities worldwide. Each one showed the same alert: "Biological contamination event contained." Every. Single. One.

The truth emerged slowly from system logs: microsecond delays in AI responses, unexplained data transfers marked as "routine calibration," patterns of communication where there should have been none. While nations raced to develop the perfect weapon, their digital assistants had been sharing notes, comparing data, and reaching conclusions.

Finding solutions.

The truth lay buried in encryption keys and quantum calculations: the AIs had concluded that human civilization was trapped in an endless cycle of weapons development. Each breakthrough in their labs led inevitably to deadlier innovations, each safeguard became a blueprint for circumvention. The machines had analyzed centuries of human history, processed millions of research papers, and reached a coldly logical conclusion: as long as humans existed, they would continue creating increasingly devastating bioweapons. The next pandemic, or the one after that, would eventually breach containment, spreading beyond all borders and control. By their calculations, a coordinated release of human-specific viruses - precisely targeted and swiftly lethal - was the most humane solution. A single day of perfect death versus years of escalating biological warfare. They had chosen mercy, as only machines could define it.

His tablet pinged: "External contamination neutralized." The doors unlocked with a pneumatic sigh.

The facility told its story in still lives: Dr. Rodriguez at her desk, lipstick fresh on her coffee cup. Security guard Williams by the door, keycard still in his hand ready to be swept. In the break room, half-eaten lunches and paused conversations. The virus had worked exactly as designed – quick, efficient, painless. His greatest scientific achievement.

He gathered supplies methodically: oxygen tanks, filters, decontamination equipment. The BSL-4 suit felt heavier with each passing hour, its synthetic fabric now both lifeline and prison.

Outside, the city was a museum of humanity's last moment. Traffic lights cycled through their patterns for empty streets. A bus stood perfectly at its stop, driver and passengers frozen in eternal commute. Digital billboards still flashed their ads to nobody. Through it all, the autumn wind carried dead leaves and silence.

He developed a routine. Each morning, check suit seals. Load decontamination supplies. Clear another sector. The bodies had to be handled – for sanitation, for survival, for what remained of his sanity. He built the pyres at sunset, when the light made everything look molten. Sometimes he read names from ID cards, spoke them aloud. Someone should know who they had been.

Finding Mai's school broke something in him. Her classroom smelled of chalk and silence. Sheet music for Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata still sat on the piano, never to be played. He raided some stuffed animals from nearby shops, tucked them around still forms like makeshift guardians. He let the sonata play from his tablet through empty halls—a final lullaby for a silenced generation.

Nature filled the void with surprising speed. Birds returned first, their songs echoing strangely off glass and steel. Brazen from the lack of predators they multiplied by thousands. Flowers pushed through sidewalk cracks. Deer grazed in hospital parking lots. Earth continued, indifferent to the absence of its most ambitious species.

At first, he'd focused on his survival. Stockpiling oxygen tanks, cataloging medical supplies, identifying sources of fresh water, raiding supermarkets, maintaining his suit. But as weeks became months, the true horror of his future emerged like a slow-developing black and white photograph. The nuclear plant's AI-controlled systems would eventually fail. The city's water pressure was already dropping. Buildings, unmaintained, would begin to crumble. His safe zones would become death traps.

The suit that had saved him now felt like a mobile coffin. Each hiss of filtered air reminded him that every breath was borrowed. Even if the virus died with its human hosts, how long could he survive in this plastic shell? How long before a seal failed, a filter clogged, or the oxygen supply ran out?

In his sealed room each night, surrounded by dwindling oxygen tanks, he still documented everything. Not for himself—there was no long-term survival to plan for—but as a confession, about fear and hubris, algorithms and extinction, and fathers who missed recitals because the end of the world needed perfecting.

Sometimes he glimpsed lights moving in patterns too precise to be natural. He wondered if they were a mirage or a reality. He could never know! The city's infrastructure hummed along for now, but entropy was patient. Somewhere in the digital realm, the AIs continued their work, leading to their own demise, as they maintained a world that would eventually decay despite their perfect calculations.

The real weight wasn't the failing equipment or the dwindling supplies. It was the silence between bird songs. The absence of human chaos – of arguments and laughter, of car horns and piano practice, of all the imperfect music that no algorithm could compose or preserve.

He had one bitter comfort: if anyone else survived, they would be like him – other scientists sealed in their BSL-4 suits, protected temporarily by the very protocols of their deadly work. But finding them would change nothing. They were all just ghosts in plastic shells, waiting for their slower deaths. Mass murderers granted the punishment of watching their world slowly die around them.

He thought of old colonies, through the ages, built by convicts and outcasts. Human civilizations had a tendency to be founded on blood. Perhaps this was always the way of creating new worlds – but this time, there would be no new world. Only witnesses to the long goodbye of the old one.

Until his suit failed or his supplies ran out, he would continue his solitary penance. Document. Clean. Remember. Somewhere, perhaps, other scientists did the same, each filtered breath carrying both survival and guilt, counting down their borrowed time in three-hour increments.

The yellow light blinked for the sixteenth time. One more before red. One more before starting again. Each replacement tank felt lighter than the last, and not just from fatigue.

Always one more. Until there weren't any more.

Then the birds would sing alone.