I remember ending the world. Not on purpose, although you could argue that, being in the biological weapons business, in my case ending the world straddles the line between ‘industrial accident’ and ‘Freudian slip.’ But I don’t think I wanted to end the world. Not that time.

I was just better at my job than I thought I was, and the people who were supposed to balance me — the doctors, the World Health Organization, the heroes, and, God help the world, the governments — were worse at their jobs than they should had been. Even my boss, who was always pushing me to get more creative, should have paid more attention to what she was doing. So in a bonus-seeking flash of creativity, I had the idea of tacking a polymorphism engine and a P2P code library to an elegant, if generic, retrovirus. Just to see what’d happen, you understand.

It happened that Chicago ceased to be. Yes, I had a small lab in my apartment. So sue me; everybody else gets to work from home sometimes. It’s not my fault that... Well, that was my fault. I made a live virus vaccine against my baby, just in case it got out, and tested it on myself (there might have been alcohol involved, you understand). It worked well, as far as the ‘vaccine’ part of it goes. My vaccine virus was quite live, and hosted in my body it recovered very fast from the attenuation process that was supposed to turn it from deadly killer to training dummy for my immune system.

I suspected something when everybody started dying. I was quite sure when I didn’t.

But by then I had already run away from Chicago, perhaps contributing a bit to the speed with which the disease (diseases, meta-disease, whatever; the polymorphic engine was very good) spread all over the world. I’m not a very moral person, so I waited until I was sure it truly was the end of the world before I killed myself. Guilt, I could live with. Being the last person alive, not so much. Partly out of sentimental reasons, and partly because, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be a very comfortable life.

So the question is, what am I doing being alive?

And for that matter, why isn’t everybody else dead?

* * *

Subways are especially bad for you. Underground, few exits, visibility depending on electric lights that could flicker off at any moment. And the people.

God, the people. So many people that you can’t believe they are all alive, moving so uniformly that they must be running away from something. Jammed so tightly that it must be the most obvious trap in the world.

Subways couldn’t be better zombie-feeding slaughterhouses if they were specifically designed for it. Of all the things that terrify you, they scare you the most. So you ride them for hours every day, wanting to protect the survivors (survivors? there are millions of them!) and hoping to catch a Handler (but in a world without zombies, why would there be Handlers?), but mostly doing what has kept you alive ever since the world ended: killing whatever you fear the most.

(Except that there’s nothing to kill and the world hasn’t ended.)

Other things are troublesome, too. Walking around with so few weapons feels wrong, but it’s the kind of wrong you can live with. Twice someone has tried to mug or rape you while you were walking back to your apartment, and both times it was only their screams of pain that made you stop and realize that you were about to kill a person. Zombies never screamed in pain or begged for their lives, and Handlers cursed at you as you burned them. People scream and cry and call you names, and you apologized both times as you took a step back from the bloody mess that had tried to rob, rape, or kill you.

But the showers. The showers are good. Hot water. Soap. Washing your hair. At first you had showered as quickly as possible — it’d be embarrassing to be killed in such a cliche. But now your showers are long and fantastic, and not once have you had to cut one short and use the shotgun or the axe you always keep at hand while in your apartment.

So you still sleep with your back against a corner and furniture blocking all doors, and you still wake up with a weapon in every hand, but you are eating well and you smell great, and by all rights you should be happy.

You can’t be happy knowing that you’re insane. All the people alive and carefree, all the dead not walking anywhere... What is going on? Who undid the apocalypse?

You remember it clearly, and you remember the moment when it all began to make sense.

Now it doesn’t, again, and your skin itches every moment with the need to kill something undead.

* * *

It worked the first time. There shouldn’t have been any need for a second.

But the sun was in the sky again. Yellow, not red. And the stars no longer sang.

Once more, then. Once more the abductions, the killings, the endless rituals. An script of nightmarish complexity to write down a language so old that it predated Man and his provincial notions of logic. Blood as ink, symbols as gears, to build a machine in an ‘abstract’ space that so-called mathematicians thought unreal and uninhabited out of the naivete of a civilization a mere few thousands of years old.

A lighthouse to attract a conquering army. Pheromones to call the ultimate predators. A message from the traitor inside the citadel of life.

The second time there was no pleasure to be had from the victims’ screams, no thrill of novelty, no shivering doubt and no amateur’s pause. Just a careful rush to get it done quickly and right. To recover the exquisite tortures that had been the payment for betraying humankind.

Nothing happened the second time. Blood dried on walls. Corpses rotted. Candles burned down.

The ravings of lunatics were consulted to recalibrate maps of the planes beyond. Nightmares were culled for clues. Books were consulted, so secret that they had been hid as fiction and lore. Every step was checked thrice.

And still a yellow sun shone in the sky.

So he cries. He sits on the floor next to his latest victim and he weeps like a child because nothing he did seemed to work, nothing except that one time when he had called forth monsters from below the night. The monsters had eaten everything, and shared with him the pain of the world. But now he is again alone, throwing a bloodied knife against the floor in frustration.

He curls up against the cooling corpse. What had gone wrong? Was it somehow his fault?

Confused and broken, he closes his eyes and cries himself to sleep, cradled by slackening dead flesh and the familiar scent of blood. Above his basement and outside his house, people go by with their lives, but sleep somehow comes
to him despite that.

He dreams of the time when he had broken the glass floor of the universe.

In his dream he is again cut, eaten, burned, and loved. In his dream there is no distance and no end, and everybody shares everybody’s pain.

He wakes up smiling into a nightmare of a normal world.

* * *

It takes you a month to realize that you’re alive. Not just your body, but the you that matters. During that month you keep your routine just as if you were still controlled by the memetic scaffolding that made everyone a puppet for the Loop. It is only gradually that the moments of lucidity become more frequent and contiguous, until you can push small things off track: a bizarre email, an unexpected retort, an spontaneous act of rationality. One day you realize that you are technically in control of yourself, and that you have been for the whole time.

In your defense, you had been insane during most of that month. It was for your defense, too. Being an expression of the Loop is only bearable to those that were insane to begin with; the rest of humankind had quickly broken down. Not because of the things the Loop made you do, which were usually the things that you had always done, but because you had no choice but to do them. The difference was just a hair on this side of metaphysical, yet even the most axiomatically and unreflexively deterministic had felt the lack of freedom erode their minds until only their behavior remained.

You’re free now, and perhaps everybody else is free too. In fact, things seem as if the Loop has never struck. You cannot prove it, but some people still have a certain look in their eyes, a look you recognize from before the Loop. Not many, but enough.

The Loop couldn’t be broken. Not from inside, not by minds running it. That was what made it the Loop. You could believe that you had escaped it, even that you were mounting some sort of resistance movement against it, only to wake up one night just before dawn seeing the pattern of your actions cast a shadow against the ceiling, and the shadow had the form of the Loop.

So what had happened? What could have excised it so fully not only from minds but, it seemed, from the past? Even understanding the question, keeping it in your mind, is an effort, it seems so close to self-contradictory.

Only the reality around you makes it seem conceivable, and only because you keep probing that reality to make sure it stands.

You don’t know the answer to this question. You don’t need to know the answer. But not to seek the answer would be too close to falling back into the Loop, and you had sworn, back when sanity was a rare gift of happenstance, that death was better that belonging to it.

So you choose to know. That was always the hard part, the choosing. Now all that remains is to find out.

(The rest of the novella is available as a free CC-licensed pdf here)