The Last One

Every morning, I wake in the same bed, under the same sterile light, in the same suffocating room. The walls are stark and bare, closing in on me with every passing day—or so it feels. The air smells of antiseptic and decay, thick and cloying, as though this place is slowly rotting from the inside out. The hum of the ventilation system drones on, an endless mechanical whine that burrows into my skull.

There’s nothing else. No voices. No footsteps. No signs of life beyond these walls. The world is empty. The world is gone.

I am the last man alive.

The memory of before is faint, like trying to recall a half-forgotten dream. There was light, laughter, the buzz of a world teeming with life. Now, there’s only this. This room. This silence. The bed, the chair, the cold floor beneath my feet—these are my only companions.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m dead. Perhaps this is some purgatory, a punishment for sins I can’t even remember. Or maybe the apocalypse came and left me behind, a cruel twist of fate that condemned me to an eternity of solitude.

The doctors come and go, their faces a blur of cold detachment. I don’t speak to them. Why would I? They aren’t real. They’re fragments of my mind, illusions conjured to mock me, to remind me of what I’ve lost. They move with a clinical precision, their voices distant and flat, echoing like a faint breeze in an abandoned building.

They leave trays of food on the metal table in the corner, but I never see them enter or leave. The food just appears, as if by magic. I eat it without thinking, more out of habit than hunger. Even hunger feels hollow now, like a distant memory of something that used to matter.

I haven’t left this room in… how long? Days? Weeks? Years? Time has no meaning here. The clock on the wall ticks, but the hands never seem to move. The light overhead flickers, sometimes plunging the room into moments of darkness that feel like they stretch on forever.

I tried the door once. Long ago, maybe. It didn’t budge. Locked, as though the world outside had been sealed away. Or perhaps there is no outside. Perhaps this is all there is.

Sometimes, I sit by the window, staring out at the grey, endless void beyond. No sun. No sky. Just a thick, impenetrable mist that swirls like a living thing, shifting but never clearing. I imagine cities swallowed by silence, streets overtaken by dust and vines. The world is dead, and I am its lone witness.

At night, I dream. Strange, vivid dreams of people whose faces I can’t recall. They call out to me, their voices muffled, distorted, as though I’m underwater. Sometimes, I think I hear laughter, faint and far away. When I wake, the silence is even louder, the absence of life a weight pressing down on my chest.

I tried to resist it at first. I fought the loneliness, the crushing solitude, but there’s nothing to fight. The walls don’t answer. The doctors don’t care. The void doesn’t notice. 

And then, one day, something happens.

The door opens.

The creak of the hinges shatters the monotony, and for a moment, I’m frozen, unable to comprehend what I’m seeing. Light spills into the room—not the cold, artificial glow of the overhead fixture, but soft, warm light, tinged with gold. It seems… impossible. Unreal.

A figure steps inside. Dr. Lawson. She’s been here before—I think—but now she feels different.  Her face is pale, her eyes wide, brimming with something I can’t place. Fear? Sadness?

“Isaac,” she says softly, her voice trembling. “You need to listen to me.”

I don’t respond. My throat is dry, my tongue heavy. I’ve forgotten how to speak, how to form words.

She steps closer, her movements careful, deliberate. “You’ve been here a long time,” she continues. “But this place… it’s not what you think it is.”

I shake my head. “It’s nothing,” I croak. My voice feels alien, rusty from disuse. “There’s nothing left. Just me.”

Her eyes glisten with tears, but she doesn’t look away. “That’s not true. The world hasn’t ended, Isaac. It’s still out there.”

I laugh—harsh, bitter. “No. I’ve seen it. The silence. The void. There’s nothing outside this room. You’re not even real. Nobody is real. That’s why I’m here. You’re all just in my head. You aren’t real! I’m alone.”

I grab my hair pulling at its roots trying to make this illusion disappear. They aren’t real. They never have been. I know that. 

“I am real,” she says firmly, and her words pierce through the fog in my mind. “The people who care about you are real. This place—it’s in your head. You’ve been here, trapped in your mind, for years. But it’s time to come back.”

I shake my head violently, the truth too unbearable. “No! You’re lying! This is all there is!”

She kneels before me, her hands trembling as she places them over mine. Her touch is warm—real—but it feels like fire against my skin. “Isaac, please. You’ve built this prison to protect yourself, but it’s not safe anymore. You have to wake up.”

Her words crack something deep within me. The walls around me seem to shimmer, shifting like heat waves in the desert. The grey void outside the window flickers, dissolving into something brighter, more vivid. I close my eyes, clutching at the last remnants of my constructed world, but it’s slipping away, crumbling like sand between my fingers.

When I open my eyes again, the room is still there, but it feels different. Smaller. The air is lighter, the walls less oppressive. Dr. Lawson’s voice is soft but insistent. “You’re not alone, Isaac. You’ve never been alone. You just forgot how to see it.”

Tears stream down my face as the truth sinks in. I’m not the last man on Earth. I was never alone. The silence, the emptiness, the void—they were all of my own making.

I take a deep breath, the first real breath in what feels like forever. It hurts, but it’s real.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s enough to start again.