Not with a bang but with a...tea towel

Margaret likes the way the sink is set into the bench facing the window. As she's washing up - a ridiculous task long since relegated (by the new race) to dishwasher AI - she watches the three wallabies on the back lawn. They bounce around one another, liking their own personal space: they're not like the congregating kangaroo.

The grass is very green, the product of recent rains. The forests rise up behind it, a million eucalypts jostling for air and light. She looks at the analogue clock on the wall, a remnant of a bygone age. She has until three, if they keep their promise.

Her hands sink into the warm, soapy water. She takes out a plate, swabs it back and front until the white moon of its surface runs only with suds, places it carefully in the rack. Later she'll dry each piece carefully with a tea towel she had from her mother, printed blue and white with 'Home Sweet Home'. It's comforting to do these last homely things. She wants everything to be ship-shape, before they come.

She finishes the dishes, and sits down at her polished wooden table, with a cup of tea. People don't drink tea any more, it's not necessary, and so tea is almost impossible to get. Coffee, also, and alcohol of any kind, is mostly a thing of the past. The new breed of humans are content from birth, no need for stimulants or pacifiers. It's a good thing overall, she thinks. A good thing, but she does like her tea, in a neat china cup, with a saucer and pink blossoms painted delicately on the side. She's made shortbread biscuits to go with it. She won't be able to eat the whole batch before they come, so she'll leave them on the table, a gift for her executioners.

When she's finished the tea, she washes the cup and saucer, and puts them away in the cupboard. Poor old house, she thinks, you've served me well this last thirty years. I owe you this mark of respect, that I won't leave you to them shabby and under-dressed, like a beggar who hasn't washed for a month. They'll probably demolish you - they won't want to leave a sign that I was ever here. They want to forget us unmodified humans, roll on over us to their bright and orderly future. And they will. After all, there's only me now.

She sits back down at the table and gets out her pen, and the paper she's been hoarding for fifty years, knowing this time will come.

**********************

Officer Pirandello is bored.

"Can we do it any sooner?" he says to his colleague from the Department of Natural History. She's a good-looking, olive-skinned Spanish girl he's had his eye on for a while. They bump into each other regularly in South Sea Paradise, one of the virtual locations they both like to relax in.

"Nope. The WG gave her a week to get her things in order, it's been arranged for months," she says, running a finger idly over her lips. She's had them done recently, along with hair and nails, at the Government Salon. She doesn't look a day over one hundred and eighty. "What I don't get is why they left it so long. She could've infected someone!"

"She's too old," says Pirandello, wrinkling his nose at the images the word 'old' conjured up. Illness, decrepitude, decay. Thanks to the WG, age was an ugly condition nobody had to witness nowadays, let alone endure. "I suppose there's no real harm in it. She can't pass on her genes, and living out there in the wild, she never sees anybody."

"Yes but ideas are infectious too...I would've had her stuffed and set up behind glass years ago, if it was up to me," says Juanita Fernandez. "Those old humans...homo sapiens...they make my skin crawl. They're so disgusting, so...uncontrolled."

To pass the time, they flick through Dream World, the social media app wired into each of their cerebellums. At two pm, Pirandello speaks a word to the transporter. The machine lifts gently into flight, skimming the mountains, descending gently towards the hidden valley.

"That's her," Fernandez says, peering down through the transparent floor. A few hundred metres below them, they see a cottage, its tin roof glinting in the sun. Outside crouches a tiny figure, on her knees, smothered by shrubbery. "Is she trying to hide from us?"

Pirandello accesses the information stored in his Google Implant. "No, I don't think so. I think she's...gardening. It's a thing Homo Sapiens used to do, involving plants. Put them in the ground, pull them up. You know, pointless, like most of the stuff they used to do."

The machine lands silently in front of the cottage. They both watch her for a minute or two, with puzzlement but little curiosity. The WG (World Government, to use its full title) has little use for curiosity. 

She has gloves on her hands. She's methodically pulling grass out from a bed of azaleas, and placing the uprooted tufts in a neat pile on the path that border the bed. She doesn't look up.

"She knows this is all going to be..." Fernandez makes a gesture, her hands held together, flying rapidly apart.

Pirandello says nothing. There's a strange beauty in the woman's absorption, in the movements of her gloved hands reaching, digging, pulling, setting aside. It is like music, half-remembered: it has rhythm, and melody. The garden, too, is lovely. Pink and white blossoms brush the bleached white of her hair, and the leaves cast a pattern on faded skin, as if she were a painting, intricate and fragile.

Fernandez has donned her white hazmat suit. She marches to the woman and grips her carefully by one arm. "Get into the pod," she says, meaning the compartment at the back of the transporter, for storing goods that must be kept in isolation. "It's time."

Margaret stands, slowly. Her spine uncurls like rusty metal. Fernandez can't help a gasp of incredulous pity. It's awful - the woman actually feels pain! But of course they all did, long ago, before Homo Perfectus was born, created by the first great geneticists to end natural selection, and human suffering, forever.

The last Homo Sapien takes off her gardening gloves.

"How can you bear it?" Fernandez asks, impulsively. "Being...like that!"

"Oh," says the woman, hobbling towards the pod under her own steam, "It's not so bad as you think."

She smiles, remembering the daily rituals of washing dishes, pulling weeds, hanging clothes, mopping floors...all those tasks that were done for you now, because people - no, not people, exactly, what did they call themselves? Because 'Homo Perfectus' imagined that the perfect life was unblemished by 'work' and garlanded by endless happiness amid virtual fields of peace and plenty. And it is better - the World Government and its modified humans have ushered in a world of peace and security. Oh my God, thinks Margaret, I haven't forgotten how it used to be, all the wars, and the famines and the cruelty. It was terrible, of course, it couldn't last. But something's been lost. It's the small things that give life its flavour, its salt and spice...

"I think you'll find I've left you something," she says, her lips wreathed in wrinkles, as they shut the door upon her.

Fernandez and Pirandello exchange glances of relief. Soon the last Homo Sapien will be safely (and painlessly, of course) frozen behind the glass of the Natural History Museum, for the viewing pleasure of those who (for some reason) need to enquire into the dry and dreary past. Soon they can get back to South Sea Paradise, or one of the other virtual worlds constructed by the AI for their amusement.

************************

By the time the sun sets on the valley, the house and garden are gone. The wallabies venture out in the dusk to nibble at the carrots that Margaret scattered before she left. The birds settle in the trees to coo and chatter. In a distant place, a signal finds its receptor, and an alien race prepares to descend upon an unsuspecting blue planet. Margaret's gift is waiting for them, painstakingly compiled: a treasury of humanity in all its painful passion and self-searching complexity. Not everything, of course, but as much as she could collect and store, in a place where the apparatchiks of the WG won't think to look. Once, she used to be a librarian: she knows how these things are done.

And along with the great works, she's stored her own writings, page after crossed page. About the wallabies, and the wombats that come out of their burrows late at night to forage, and how to make tea properly, and the best remedy for a stain on a carpet, and stories of the children, when they were little. The minutiae of a long life, well-lived.

Standing at the window after dinner, elbow-deep in suds, she's been watching the night sky. She's been talking to the stars for years, and lately, they've been talking back. She's left them everything they'll need to know, if they're to make something of the place...