The Last Child
Chronicles of Expansion: Humanity’s (Accidental) Journey to the Edge of Space
Prologue – The Last Child
“E-22, is your genpo[1] ready for this next one? Come on y’all! Sing it with me like you were the last motherfucking child!”
Like most people in his age bracket, Phillip had heard those words before, first spoken hundreds of years earlier at a vintage concert on Earth 22. He knew what followed would be the night’s closing act. The band’s greatest hit. Their one and only track too, as far as humanity was concerned. He had not been there, of course, nor any of his contemporaries, but the song’s lone surviving live performance became what you’d consider an instant classic once the lead singer died tragically later that same night.
Phillip was around five or six when it happened, and had only known two earths back then, one of which he couldn’t remember. Number 22 was light years away from either one of them. Still, he knew the fucking song, and how it would not have been possible without him. He remembered hearing it on his seventh birthday, and on every April 7th thereafter. It was hate at first sound, and now that it had been playing on loop over the ship’s nanospeakers for years, he despised it even more.
There was nowhere to hide from The Last Child, especially for him. No place to run away to. Who in their right mind would set the volume to max before sabotaging the voice control center? Then again, who could be in their right mind after everything that had happened? Unlike most other systems, the millions of nanospeakers hiding behind walls and dropdown ceilings made of unbreakable alloys had never stopped working. That’s why anyone onboard could tell you the song started exactly two seconds and a heartbeat after the intro, and it went like this:
“He was the last child of a dying world!
Dum badum babadum badum,
Fed by hope, he had always known,
He would live to see the end unfold!”
Time was an impossibility anywhere near the Exodus 7, but by Phillip’s own calculations, that world the song referenced had died over one thousand years earlier. Everyone knew its story, from beginning to end. The barren rock that took its place, off limits to the genpo from all other earths, had long ago been declared uninhabitable by the Congs. It was through pure chance that he was born there. The last motherfucking child of Earth Zero. How long had it been since then? It didn’t matter. Nobody would recognize him anymore, even if his story had somehow managed to remain a trivial curiosity in some of the colonies. He could always thank the song for that much…
“How could his mama ever had known?
Dum badum babadum badum,
There were still children left to be born,
In that Old World We Once Called Home!”
His pregnant mother had been aboard the Feynman 5, a class 2 Galaxy Orbiter that accidentally became the last ship to land on our ancestral home planet. Not a good start for Phillip, but it could have been worse. The ship’s antimatter cortex was damaged midflight during a reconnaissance mission, compromising the hull and resulting in significant loss of life. Not a good ending for over half of the crew, being sucked into space, insta-frozen, and absorbed by an open cortex. There was, however, a silver lining. The Feynman had just entered Earth Zero’s quadrant, and its captain was given coordinates to a small post-colonial base a few clicks North of the Texas Wastelands. That’s where he was born. Inside of a broken ship still marooned on our forgotten world centuries later. His birth holocard read “Phillip Pax. 7.9 pounds. April 7th, 689 SA. Earth Zero.”
Radiation exposure had decimated the remaining crew by the time a rescue ship found them. A mother, her baby, and a handful of officers managed to survive. The deaths, which were kept mostly under wraps, contrasted with the ISRM[2] network announcement of his birth the next morning. All twenty-four earths received the same orders.
“Transmit to genpo. One last child born on Earth Zero. Mother is Conglomerate Captain. Announce following all positivity protocols.”
Two months later, an obscure synthetic band called Family launched The Last Child, becoming popcan[3] on several Earths and spreading the news of his birth across a loose network of human colonies. They were the first fully synthetic band to reach over ten billion hits. If only he had a credit for at least a million of those, or for the thousands of trivia questions about himself…
- Life. Death. Mother -
Adding to Phillip’s rather unique fortune, his mother had been a Conglomerate Captain during the war[4], a rank that brought along lots of new friends and benefits for her child. Thanks to these insufferable sycophants and their favors, he never lacked anything. Even his education, unavailable to most Congs and unimaginable to the genpo, was already paid for by the time the Feynman’s survivors returned to Earth Prime.
He was trained in the sciences from an early age, which to his mother’s disappointment led to a career in weapons development within the Conglomerate. She had always wanted a soldier. Still, he did well, as was expected of him. Too bad she couldn’t be there to witness him at the end. His rise through the ranks had concluded with a brief, sudden, and most unexpected stint as transitional captain of the ongoing mission, not long after everything went to shit. Didn’t matter; made captain!
He had been a distant seventh in command when the uncharted gravity shift crippled Exodus 7. A “wandering quasar,” if you were to believe the science team. The original captain, along with most of the crew didn’t survive to find out what hit them. Following the incident, Phillip’s six predecessors, all military Congs outranking him in both reputation and brutality, spent the better part of a year outmurdering each other. The last surviving two died in front of him when one of the outer hatches malfunctioned. He did the best he could considering the situation, and remained captain until Markus, his first officer, staged a rather anticlimactic mutiny.
It was difficult not to sympathize with young Markus, an exemplary career soldier with a claim to fame of his own. At 30, he was the youngest military officer in the conglomerate and a protégé of Phillip’s mother. She had personally intervened to get both men aboard the Exodus 7. Poor Markus. The command structure collapsed a couple of weeks after the coup, and parts of his body were left to hang from the ceiling at the mess hall. His bones were still there, suspended by a thread of skin and dry meat.
For years, Phillip thanked his mutinous first officer in silence, afraid of any hungry survivors remembering a former captain lived among them. He often wondered, had it not been for that unwilling, treacherous sacrifice, whose limbs would have turned into macabre decorations? Probably his own, unless another entrepreneurial officer felt differently, but there was no time for any of them. Life onboard was about to go from bad to worse. The ship would soon become hell. It was then that the curse of survival made him hate his mother, Markus, and anything else related to the Congs. They were bullies. All of them. Violent beasts and blind followers of wartime’s immutable tenets. Cannibals!
- Freedom. Exodus. Self -
He trusted some of the Conglomerate’s teachings to be true, otherwise why embark on an Exodus mission in the first place? It would have been impossible for him not to believe. The tenets had been hammered in from early childhood, first by his mother and then by the Congs, both of which were one and the same shit. Not forgetting where humanity came from, nor his symbolic role as the last child of Earth Zero, were two of them. Following orders to the tee was another big one, or looking away when your superiors sinned, but the Conglomerate had at its core the best interest of mankind. That much had to be true. Besides, he always thought membership would bring him plenty of benefits once his face grew older and the sponsorships and inherited friendships dried up. That much, of course, would never be.
At forty, Phillip completed basic training and enrolled in the Exodus Initiative, where he was immediately placed under Shroud Protocol along with other recruits. Unlike them, he very much enjoyed the perks of anonymity. For the first time in his life, he was free, except for two minutes and thirty-two seconds whenever his song started playing. He graduated four years later, shipped off, and realized the music didn’t bother him any longer. That’s when gravity shifted, minds started melting, and The Last Child got locked in an eternal loop of torture.
Good lad Phillip weighed a full eight pounds!
Dum badum babadum badum,
You and I know where he came from,
But can we guess where his end is found?
For those who survived the incident, and the brightness, and the hunger, The Last Child proved to be a final push into the abyss of insanity. To summarize, everybody killed everybody. If you prefer the longer version, survivors teamed up to fight Cong cannibals stalking the ship’s massive corridors, and were it not for depression and hopelessness, they could have won. One by one, they snapped, suspecting anyone but themselves of being a ravenous man-eater. Suddenly, the song spoke to each one of them. They were all the last children of a dying world, which is a hard pill to swallow unless you’ve been taking it your entire life. So yeah, everybody killed everybody.
“We’re family, and that’s a wrap for us, E-22! Hug the last child if you ever meet him… and remember, he could be any one of us! G’night genpo 22!”
Phillip thought he might be immune to the song’s corroding effects, but now he wasn’t sure anymore. Whenever he covered his ears, he thought of it. If he slept, he dreamt of it. Not even the ruins of his mind were deep enough to escape the noise, nor to hide from a fate repeating itself into perpetuity over the ship’s speakers. Was he destined to be the last child once again? There was no escape. No hope. No reason not to pull the trigger on a makeshift gun he had spent months working on. So, he did, pressing his creation against the temple and cursing humanity one last time.
To his surprise, the shot marked not the end, but a new beginning. How could he have missed?
[1] Genpo: General population.
[2] ISRM: Interstellar Relay Matrix.
[3] Popcan: Popular canon.
[4] Which war is this? / The Earth 23 Independence Revolt?