The Last Man: A Novel

THE LAST MAN

A NOVEL

W.C. TURCK AND THE 99%

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

The Last Man

A Novel

Copyright © 2009, 2012 by W.C. Turck and the 99%.

Cover Art: Brian Murray

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-7193-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-7194-6 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 02/24/2012

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

CHAPTER TWO

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINTEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER THREE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dedicated to the Occupy Movement worldwide, and to truth, conscience, justice and the blessed diversity of mankind

CHAPTER ONE

THE PERMANENT TWILIGHT

ONE

The pale light bleeding in thin lines through the shades has the quality of warm malaise, the usual burden of fevered Arctic nights. Drawing them aside, I can just make out glimpses of the polluted brown sea-coast against the line of coastal towers.

They are monstrosities, these towers, bordering on the ad hoc and haphazard. Almost organic in shape, the towers have long ago shed the pretense of beauty to become instead mere assemblages that hold the greatest quantity of humanity as close to their workstations as possible. They are unfinished thoughts of minds more concerned with utility than soul or passion or even basic functionality. Not that those aspects carry any weight anymore. Instead they are relics of a world gone by, just as I am.

Lest anyone fear that this is some sort of melancholic lament for the good old days. It is not. I won’t trouble these pages with self-serving laments over the ascension or the avalanche of history. Nor will I entertain those inclined to such thoughts to some secretive sense that fate or the world or the tides are aligned against them, or is subverting their truer place in the world. Instead this is my testimony, a feeble attempt at remembrance, like a footprint at the shore.

Some would say this is my confession, and that may well be true. There are those who are plainly aligned against me, for what amounts to the inexcusable crime of fate. By the combined consequence of history, birth, the minutes of the day and failings’ at simple survival I am cast alternately as criminal and victim. Both are shades of the other.

Strange, that I retreat daily to this stark and silent flat to ruminate endless over these thoughts. It is as much my prison cell as sanctuary, but the distinction is a subtle one. Escape means answering more questions than I am prepared to face. Leaving means abandoning what comfort and security I maintain for the uncertainty of the unknown. Freedom implies danger, where comfort becomes a warm blanket, even for the condemned.

This was once a frozen place, but that was in a world gone by, a place as distant and hazy as I feel at this moment. This is what becomes of the unheeded cries of a fevered world, whose sickness became culture until it was simpler to erase history than ascend to its warnings. And so history is erased, discarded as worthless, which may well prove true. And one day soon I will be gone as well, vaulted towards an inescapable fate by the bureaucrats of Section Twenty-one, the proxies of the Corporation.

An innocuous glance continues my subversion. I know it is a futile act against Sentinel. Sentinel is everywhere. It sees everything, and even reads my thoughts, these thoughts. But the subversion is not in the thoughts so much as in their character.

Certainly it is a risk to have any thoughts at all. Simply thinking is a violation of numerous Section Twenty-one statues, but then again I am a special case. Perhaps I am the most special case, but that remains to be seen.

My subversion is well worth the risk. It connects me more fully to them, to their humanness, which here, and in this place, and in this time is now considered a supreme act of terrorism. It is for them that I stand and live and defy. When my suffering is at its worst that is the time I feel closest to them.

A needle prick carries the well fever and epiphany of pain. Like me, it is a flaw in the perversion of modern genetics to manufacture and reconfigure humanity. Theirs is a revulsion of history and that which made men whole, despite their flaws. But history is betrayed in our bodies. It fled there long ago from the arrogance of purposeful evolution.

Oh, the world that resides within that first wonderfully awakening instant of pain! At once curious and electric, but so terribly fleeting as it trails away from its cold eruption into something warm and remorseful, like the first breath of a beautiful word fading towards its demise. The pain clears my mind and diverts unguarded thoughts before they can betray me. This is how I have stymied them for so long!

A crimson drop grows at the tip of my finger. It reflects the acrid gloom of the city. I study the blood for a moment, as though it is some ancient relic of myself, of what I am and what I am not—which seems to threaten the very existence of society, according to the Corporation. Even the reddish smear it leaves across the wall is an element of the battle. For now it is fresh among dozens of others.

Section twenty-one regulates and controls the society. I should say here that they are not cruel or calculating by any standard, which is not to say that I fear what is written here will be read by Section Twenty-one. Society regulates itself well enough through the consequence of blind momentum and the dumb weight of population. Section Twenty-one shepherds that momentum through the implication, through a culture of subverted fear as real as an extra helping of salt brings a certain bitterness to a stew.

That they are not overt in cultivating fear which they view as benevolence and judiciousness is also purposeful. Section Twenty-one allows me the paper and pen to organize my defense. It is curious how they bend over backwards to create the illusion of fairness, as if the ultimate outcome was ever really in question. Instead my hand strains to write these words, a melancholic refrain to ancestors distant and long dead. That refrain is as much a part of my defense as I am. It is their defense as well, for it is their memory that has been erased from the world. That is until I came along.

And what do I expect from these selfish thoughts? Perhaps they will be a cornerstone to a revolution that reasserts the autonomous stature of each soul. I might hope that the spirit in every human being, all but extinguished by the Corporation, will re-ignite and run like wildfire around the planet and beyond. And if cities are razed and millions lost for the retrieval of our plundered liberties then so be it. What could prove a nobler cause?

Ha! It is a laughable thought. What absurdity to believe that the pallid assertions of pallid assertions of words swept into the dustbin of history, when my eyes no longer see and when my hands no longer write, and when the years have ground me to dust, that these words will do them any justice. But still I continue, playing the game, lifting my head each morning, while fantasizing about nothing short of revolution. It is as if there was some intransigent quality to the breath in my lungs, or the blood in my veins that compels me despite a tattered heart.

There is a world outside my window. It is a dull urban landscape: monstrous conglomerations of metal and glass and concrete. The city appears more as some odd crystalline growth, inhabited by mindless crustaceans or single-celled organisms than by people. It is too much for the land, almost too much for the clouds drifting among them through jaundiced industrial haze. On twisted and overlapping expressways, far below, traffic appear as sluggish rivers of molten lava.

The sun lays low on the far horizon, hardly more than a pale disk through dust and sulfur smog. I pause from these words for a moment to ponder the darkening city, I wonder about the people who go more quietly about their lives than I do. I would prefer to change places if only I did not hope that I serve a greater purpose, or that I wasn’t locked in a battle for my very survival.

Would I relish their ignorance, or feel the fool in some errant awakening? In the umber shadow of sleep the faces of my ancestors visit me, and I know that I must see this through to the end.

Across the city, millions rush blind in their tasks, sending up choruses of breathless greetings and simple offenses forgotten almost before they are spoken. They are feverish, feverish in their work, feverish in their play and even in their sex.

This is a new world, wholly different from the one mankind understood before. There is no war. Birth and life and death are mandated by the Corporation, administered by Section Twenty-one and monitored by Sentinel. Gone are distinctions of race. The blend is complete. Homogeneity is the new order. The dream of the futurists too afraid or hypocritical to ponder the ramifications has at last been achieved.

It heralded a new golden age, the extinction of animosities, inequality and war. There is no want and no poverty to speak of, none that is acknowledged anyway. Mankind is identical in every way and at every point on the planet. They are identical in the color of their hair and eyes. And their bodies are uniform, at least as uniform as the schemes and science of modern genetics will allow. None of them ever envisioned me.

And I among these uniform hordes, by quirk or by fate, or by the mindless consequence of the Universe stand alone. I am a scar from an erased past, an anachronism, an aberration in a world in which the question of race is obsolete. I am a threat to man’s formulated illusions of himself. I am the unintentional heretic, an intrusion upon the unprepared modern conscience. Black as I am, I am a ghost. I am a tribe alone.

TWO

Almost funny, in a sad way, to think that futurists centuries ago could not see that mankind had rushed headlong to this world from the beginning of time. Almost funny, in a perverse way, that the differences of man were not a celebration, but were cause for hatred. Man learned somewhere to fear and despise and enslave himself based upon only the most cosmetic criteria. And so he devised another way. But by erasing our differences we committed the greatest injustice, because it masked our greatest weaknesses and blamed our truest blessings. In our blindness to suppress those who hated on the basis of skin color we achieved their ultimate goal.

Looking around, this seems hardly the place to begin a revolution. My room is as small and inviting as a tomb. That may sound melodramatic, but suppose a world without art, without culture and individual character. Suppose the final days of the species, and the reawakening of a new era, a changing consciousness that compels the hordes to act less as individuals and more as cells that combine to activate a free and autonomous body.

Except this is not a supposition. All of society has been redrawn to annihilate the individual. It is nothing short of a purposeful exorcism of the blessed tumult of the human heart. Only by chance, by my difference and solitude, and the prick of a finger has that tumult been reawakened.

The press of the pencil against my bloodied finger brings a sudden sting of sharp pain. Pushing aside the papers for a moment, I pause to study the image of my father. I scratched it into the table with a thumb tack and colored the face to a warm brown with drops of my own blood. It is not my real father, of course. It is a fiction. But the fiction I choose to believe becomes my truth and my lie. My real parents were like all the rest, and I can only imagine the horror on my mother’s expression when they pulled me from her belly. I can only imagine her shame, as if it was her fault and not the random lottery of DNA.

My boots stand beside the locked door. No worries, it is locked from the inside. I am free to go, just not free to be. On the wall above them a small blue light reminds me that Sentinel is watching. Sentinel is always watching, searching every thought,