The Last to Die

I am the last human to survive the Apocalypse. An accomplishment I am most proud of.  Now I know you have many questions, so I'll try to answer most of them as best I can. 

The First and Most Obvious Question:

How could you be the last human to survive the Apocalypse? 

Answer:

Well, I have to explain a few things first. 

Okay. What I say next, you must promise me you won't laugh or sneer. Okay? 

I'm a time traveler, the only one as far as I can tell. I haven't really bumped into anyone like me during my travels. No, I don't travel in an-old timey police box or in some contraption made of pinwheels, phonographs, and umbrellas. I travel in the most logical and scientific way possible.

I don't want to give too much away. So let me just say that it helps to be related to the inventor of the first successful Portable Particle Transportation Device (PP-TD for short). Not only did he unlock the mysteries of particle transportation, but he also was able to fit it all into a device small enough to wrap around your arm like a wristwatch. Several generations later, I inherited the company and began secretly experimenting on the long list of prototypes to one day accomplish time travel! 

 The problem of moving particles through space was already solved, the next problem was figuring out how to move particles through time. The writing was in the sky. People were thinking, theorizing and even debating about it, but no one took the time to actually do it. I didn't want to be known as the inventor's great-great-grandson, but as the inventor of time travel. With a whole list of complicated modifications, my PP-TD could accomplish exactly that!

Second Question:

What does time travel feel like? 

Answer: 

Well, it's kind of hard, since I have no idea if you've ever transported your own particles before, but I'll try to explain it as best I can. First, you feel a tingling sensation as your cells begin to disintegrate one by one. Next, your whole body starts to feel numb as half of it has already faded away, not like half your body looks normal and the other half looks like a model in a science class. Think more like in a movie when one scene dissolves into the next. After that, you black out and lose all conscience for only a millisecond or two. You wake up to a blinding light, and suddenly, you feel numb and soon the tingling returns. Just  like waking up a sleeping foot, the numbness and tingling fades away and you feel just as you did before you. I know that all sounds scary, but the process only takes 4 seconds, and once you get used to it, it's more of an annoyance than anything else. So, time travel feels a whole like that, except the whiplash is terrible! I almost threw up the first time I did it, and I only traveled 5 days into the past! 

Third Question: 

What did you do once you realized you could travel through time?

Answer: 

Oh, boy! Where do I begin? 

After the tests were completed, I came up with a whole list of famous people I wanted to meet. A part of me wanted to walk up to them and shake their hand, but I knew I couldn't risk f altering the timeline in any way. I'm not usually don’t follow the rule, but I wasn't too keen on being the first person to screw up the time and space. 

Back to the subject, seeing historical figures alive right in front of you is fantastic! I can only describe it as seeing your favorite celebrity, except you can't risk catching their attention. I became such an expert on hiding in plain sight, I bet I could give that Waldo guy a run for his money. 

Once I saw everyone and everything on my list, there wasn't much left for me to do. I could go back in time and see everything all over again, but that didn't feel like any fun. I was even considering traveling back to my own time and putting the device away. Before I placed the coordinates in, something caught my attention. I remembered an incredible story that sounded so off the wall it didn't seem to actually have happened, but there was no harm in a quick check. I placed the coordinates in and took off. 

New Lisbon, Ohio. 1871.  

Defense lawyer Clement Valladigham steps up. 

"Your Honor," he began. "Today, I will prove that my client, Thomas McGehan, did not kill Thomas Myers. Instead, I would like to propose it was actually Mr. Myers who accidently killed himself!"

The crowd murmured. 

"That's absurd!" cried the prosecutor. 

"Order! Order!" the judge yelled, hitting his gavel, "Mr. Valladigham, please continue." 

With that, the proud lawyer drew out a revolver. The crowd gasped, and some even ducked under their seats in fright. 

"I have in my hand this Colt Revolver," he explained. "The same make and model of the one that I believe Thomas Myers accidentally shot himself with. Now according to the coroner's report, the wound was found right above Mr. Myers's abdomen. Which means the gun would have been pointed...right here! And then in the spur of the moment, he pulled the trigger like so…"

POW! 

Clement, Valladigham's body shook. His eyes went wide, his lips began to quiver. He took one last gasp of air. 

"Oh, no, it appears I shot my….myself!" 

He plummeted to the ground, dead before he even hit the floor. 

The crowd cried in hysterics. The judge tried to bring order back to the room but could not. 

At the age of 50, Clement Valladigham laid dead in a sea of his own blood and the screams of spectators. 

Now call me a sick monster all you want, but I found the whole thing quite hilarious. How stupid can one be? I realized I found a new use for my time-traveling device. From that moment on, I searched for the most ironic and comedic deaths in all of history. 

Before you get on your high-horse and tell me what a terrible person I am, may I argue that what I did was no different than watching an Epic Fail video on YouTube. The person already died, so there was absolutely nothing I could do but watch and chuckle at their misfortune. Furthermore, I didn't just watch random people stabbing other random people. I craved to see something more original than that. 

For example:

In 16th century France I watched a wealthy inventor practically tar and feather a peasant, strap a pair of wooden wings on his back, and send the man plummeting to his death. Could you believe the inventor genuinely thought the feathers and wooden wings would make the peasant achieve flight! Horrible, I know, but if you were there with me, you would swear it played out like an ancient Looney Tunes cartoon. All the scene needed was a whimsical score and exaggerated sound effects, and it would be comedy gold!

After watching Jamie Olsen, the first man to find himself accidentally transported halfway through a wall, I grew bored of people merely dying. So I moved on to full-blown disasters instead. 

Believe me, I was there for every great tragedy known to mankind, from the mountains of Pompeii erupting,to the  Hindenburg bursting into flames. I know it sounds terrible, but you have to take my word on this. They were all equally funny in their own entertaining way. 

So, yes, I bore witness to all the greatest tragedies  man would ever face, except one; the Apocalypse!  

Fourth Question and Final Question:

How does the world end?

Answer: 

Oh, boy! Strap yourself in. It's going to be a bumpy ride!

Before even attempting to reach the end of civilization, I had three big problems. When does the world end? How do I get there? How do I live long enough to come back?  

Figuring out the when was no problem. According to scientists, the world had another 7.5 billion years before the sun went red dwarf. In its red dwarf state, the sun would begin to consume every planet from Venus to Mars.. 

The hardest part was trying to figure out how to get there. See, like everything in this world, the PP-TD runs on a battery. As a safeguard, if the battery gets lower than 13%, it would refuse to function until the user charged it back up. If it wasn't always in use, the battery life would last a good 24 hours. Not only that, but I noticed every time I went forward or backward 5,000 years, the battery life would go down 10%. So I either needed one big battery with 1.5 million little batteries inside it,  or a charger with enough juice to keep it alive. Oh, and I remembered that since the sun would be going red dwarf, I would need something to withstand the heat. No sense in coming back in the form of a human puddle now is there? 

I was so thankful to be the inheritor of the million-dollar technology industry! I gave them the word to start working on batteries for the PP-TD that could last a whole 730 hours. I also got in touch with the Space Research and Exploration branch to work on a spacesuit tailor made to safely observe the sun from a close distance. I made it all sound like I was doing it for the customer or for the good of mankind. They never would have guessed it was just so that I could witness the end of the world! 

I didn't even have to wait that long either. All I had to do was jump forward in time from year to year and check on my company's progress. They barely noticed I was gone! For all they knew, I was living a life of ease in the Bahamas somewhere. They also didn't care that I still looked 35 without a speck of gray in my hair or one wrinkle on my face for five straight decades. 

6 or 7 minutes of time traveling later, both projects were finally in the beta stages of testing, which was good enough for me. I snatched the super battery and the suit that could protect observers from the heat and rays of the sun. I snapped the battery into my device, jumped into my suit, and took off. 

I appeared 7.5 billion years in the future with an overwhelming sense of wooziness come over me. I should have prepared for the side effects of traveling through billions of years. My head felt light-headed. I needed to sit down to keep the world from spinning. I glanced at my modified PP-TD. 42%. I shook my head and got up. If I wanted to see the end of the world in all its glory, I couldn't waste it on feeling sick.

My eyes adjusted to my surroundings like a camera pulling focus. The first thing I noticed was that everything was red except for the cloudless dark orange sky. The next thing that got my attention was when I looked up to see the large sun staring down on me. Despite the intensive heat outside, it felt nice and toasty in my suit, like standing next to a small space heater in a cold room. 

Suddenly, I felt my hand sinking through some thick liquid. I looked down to see the metal support beam I was resting against was starting to melt like a chocolate bar on a summer day. I wiped the metallic liquid on to my pant leg when I heard a loud rumbling sound that made the entire ground shake. The sound itself reminded me of the low cries of a dying humpback whale. The sound was followed by the cracking of dry concrete. I looked up to see the top half of one of the few remaining skyscrapers come tumbling down. My mouth hung open. It was so beautiful in its destruction, like watching a dying star in the cosmos. 

The instant the top half hit the ground, a thick cloud of dust consumed the streets.  I stood there, still in awestruck. It was hard to imagine that people used to work in buildings like that one. Each person working for different reasons; to support a family, keep the lights on in their apartment, or just make a name for themselves. So many people, so many hopes, dreams, and troubles, but yet none of it mattered in the end. 

I walked through the streets to see what was left of the carnage. The roads, that the city's taxpayers tried to keep clean, were covered with fossilized trash. It was so relieving to see the sidewalks, where annoying people pestered each other with religion and politics, were no more. Vehicles, commodities people were willing to shell out thousands of dollars for, laid in shambles. Money, the very thing people fought over the most, flew out of the destroyed banks and instantly caught on fire. 

The sheer amount of hopelessness that consumed the city and the rest of the world made me feel... happy! While any sane person would weep about the total destruction before them, I laughed with joy. I laughed the same way I did when I saw Valladigham shot himself. I laughed the same way I did when the people of Pompeii were consumed by lava. It felt so good! 

Suddenly I felt a sharp pain on my left arm. My sleeve wasn't on fire, but to my horror, my arm was! I wanted to rip the sleeve of my suit right off, but to expose to the heat outside would make it worse. I saw the flames through the see-through plastic, where I would look at my modified PP-TD. The battery! Sure it passed the regular vanilla model tests, but I forgot to test it on my personalized model!

No choice left, I ripped the sleeve out to get rid of the pain. My teeth clenched as my nerves singed strand by strand. It felt like a bunch of tiny teeth were chomping off my arm piece by piece! It was unbearable. I doused my arm in the sand, which felt even hotter, to my relief, it snuffed out the flames. With disgust, I raised what was left of my arm. It looked more like a piece of red BBQ chicken than human flesh. 

My eyes widened, and I wanted to cry.  I would die here with no food, no water, not even a place to rest from the sun. I laid on my back, looking up at the sun, and that's when I realized I didn't have to feel sorry for myself. 

I accomplished an incredible feat. I was the only human to outlive them all! Yeah, you read that correctly. I outlive every single of you! I have nothing to be ashamed of.  When I die, I'll go down in the history of the cosmos, and there's not a single thing you can do about it!