Prologue
Hope the conviction that things will improve Hope motivating change and advancement.
Hope the driving force behind getting out of bed each morning persevering through difficult times moving forward no matter how challenging life becomes
Hope empowers us to overcome any obstacle that life presents to us Hope, the impetus behind never giving up never quitting, continuously battling for a better today, a better tomorrow and a better world
Hope, the light that shines in the darkness Hope, that fills us with a sense of completeness and ties us to one another fostering our sense of purpose and fulfilment
The Last Human in the Milky Way
Chapter 1
Somewhere in the world, an old woman sits on a bench near the sea. She’s not sick, but she’s old. And she knows she’s going to die. She does not think much about it.
She lives in a small house with a garden. Around the garden are the remains of an old stone wall. When she sits at the table in the living room, she can see over the stone wall and across the plain towards the forest. The vast sea is hidden behind the dense treetops.
From time to time, she can recall some vague but still distinct memories. Once, many years ago, she had been taken out, far out at sea. The vast, endless sea. He took her out in his father’s boat, a small rowing boat with a mast and a sail. One day he had taken her on a sailing trip. She could still clearly see the features on his face.
At the time, she had not thought that it could be dangerous. She and he, alone in the tiny boat, were far, far out at sea. What if the wind carried them away? What if the wind blew in a direction away from land, as it occasionally did? Where would they go on days with offshore wind?
She had been safe. She had trusted him — the young boy with whom she had fallen in love, the one who would later become her husband, and the father of little Sara.
She is sitting at the table, allowing the memories of the past to lift and carry her.
She dozes off and twitches when she suddenly notices that she is about to fall asleep.
In the past, she didn’t sit still as much as she does now. At the start of the new year, in February and March, she used to sow seeds inside. In the cupboard out in the windbreak, she had a reasonably large collection of small seed bags with beautiful colour pictures of flowers that were to grow on the outside. When spring arrived with the first warm, sunny days, she sowed seeds in old cans and egg cartons so that the sprouts could grow large enough for her to plant out in the garden. She used to put them out in the first few weeks after Easter. Small, fragile sprouts grew into colorful flower mixtures in the bed outside under the living room window in May and June.
In the garden, many years ago, she had planted bushes that bloomed again every year, beautiful, intense, and gentle colours.
She could follow them as they arrived, one at a time: a red-pink lieutenant’s heart, soft-shaped bells (Lamprocapnos spectabilis), a warm scarlet knight’s spur (Delphinium), dahlias (Dahlia “Jomanda” and “Icarus”), wide branches with yellow broom (Cytisus scoparius ssp. scoparius), and ears of corn on snow, which faithfully brought white or pink flowers every May and June.
She’s often sitting at the table in the living room of the house. She mostly thinks about the old days now. There are so many things that have ended in life — so much that is no longer there.
The weather is fine — slightly cloudy, a little sunny, and not too much wind — so she gets up, puts on her outer clothes and her old, worn shoes, and goes out. She walks slowly down the overgrown tractor road from her house down to the sea, to this worn bench, to sit there for a while and think.
She likes this bench. And she likes to sit there and look out over the sea. She has thought more than once that this is where she wants to be when everything comes to an end one day. She’ll lean back against the backrest, her eyes open, a soft breeze caressing her face. In the meantime, the environment around her will continue to exist as usual. She will quietly close one eye and vanish into herself.
She’s thought about it a lot recently, but she doesn’t like the idea of the person or people coming to find her, where she’s slumped over on her side on the bench, lifeless.
What if the daughter is the one who comes there and finds her?
No, she doesn’t like thinking of that.
She thinks of her daughter, who lives a few hundred meters further up the street, in a bad apartment, in a dilapidated house. She would have liked her daughter to live in a better house. She has considered whether she and her daughter should change houses.
She is a little worried about her daughter, but she tries to push such thoughts away. As she sits there, she imagines her daughter, the tiny little creature who was supposed to grow up to be big. A sweet little girl who made her heart melt when she lifted her face and smiled at her with her beaming, genuine smile. She considers her daughter frequently. She had a sincere desire to see her daughter live in a better home. A little bit better spot to spend her remaining days.
But she knows that it is not relevant. The daughter must have the house she has, because there she has a bedroom for the boy. Before he visits from college, the room is prepared and the bed is made. The youngster is her grandson, and he is a student. She is happy. She is also aware of her daughter’s aspirations and ideas for his future. Boy, he’s going to be something. She wanted to give her grandson money. She had thought that it might come in handy, that he might get a few thousand. Perhaps as a contribution to enable him to buy himself a dormitory flat. But Sara had said no. She had advised her against it.
“You’d better save your money,” she had said, “save it for later, it can come in handy.”
She wanted to ask why Sara said this, but she saw something in her face that made her hold back her questions. There was something she saw that she did not understand.
She has not had it easy in her life, her daughter. She sees it, but she feels helpless because there is nothing she can do to help her. Her health is bad, and in winter, when the thermometer drops to or below zero, the cold creeps in through gaps and leaky window frames in the house where she lives. It is not acceptable.
She knows that the daughter has complained to the landlord. No one should be forced to live in such a bad house, but the landlord does nothing about it. He has no respect for her. She’s alone now. Has been for years. She doesn’t have her husband anymore, sadly.
She thinks about what it was like before he left. She has tried to talk to her daughter about it. What happened before he left. But she no longer dares. She sees that it is difficult, it hurts her daughter to talk about it, so she lets it be.
At times, she thinks of her husband, Fred, who died many years ago. She notices that she thinks of her husband more often now. And she thinks about what it is, what this life is.
She thinks a good deal about her life. And she thinks of her husband, and what the two had in common.
For so many years she has been alone. The years overlap as new ones arrive. It’s almost like she’s coming out of the count now. — How old has she become now? She would rather not think about it. Yes, approaching a hundred. So long since she was a little girl. She can still remember when she ran barefoot around the grass in her parents’ garden.
“Yes, yes,” she thinks, “life, that’s what it is.”
Chapter 2
A man stands on the terrace in front of his house. It is night, and he looks out over the landscape.
The full moon shines obliquely down on the terrace. The landscape is in darkness, because the electricity supply is shut down at night. It started two months ago, and since then, it has been dark at night.
His house is on a small street in a small town far from the big cities. At the bottom of the street, where the street begins, there is a street sign that someone has made. The sign is attached to a pole, and the sign and the pole bear witness to the scarcity of tools and material resources, at the same time as they indicate amateurism and good craftsmanship. The letters are large and clear, but not industrially designed: Milky Way
He thought back to the time before he and Sara had moved here to the Milky Way.
He reflected on the period of time prior to when all of this began. He and Sara used to have a peaceful family life with Chris. Yes, a quiet and serene life would have been lived, but would it have been a good life? They might have been unhappy instead.
No, he couldn’t say whether it was one or the other. They had had a life like many others. He had a job to go to; it wasn’t all the work in the world. He was a warehouseman for a large mail-order company, and she worked in a clothing store.
Actually, he had dreams both for Chris, for Sara, and for himself. They had actually had a good time together, he thought, when he thought back on it.
Of course, he saw that he had sacrificed a lot, and he saw that Sara had done so too. He himself had wanted to get an education. He had wanted to study, but it didn’t work out. He did not get a study place, and when Sara became pregnant, he had to get a job and earn money. She was not yet 19, she was pregnant, and it was a complete crisis. So, he did what he had to do: he took responsibility, drove a van for a large company, later worked for a mail-order company, and then returned to work in the warehouse of one of the companies for which he drove goods.
When he thought back to that time, he sometimes felt a little wistful. It would have been a good time, actually. They were close together; they had really been close to each other at that time.
He felt himself smile when he thought of that time. He had always wanted to study literature. Educate himself to be a teacher, read books with young people and see how they matured, developed, and learned new things. He had hoped to see them and observe their development. But it didn’t turn out that way. He had to work to get money for his poor family.
When he looked back on it, he could think that yes, they had had a nice life together. It would have been good for him and Sara. However, somewhere along the way, things began to go awry, out of whack. They began to drift away from each other, he and Sara. And then there was Chris in the mix, a vulnerable young man. — Did they have eyes for him?
In retrospect, he could see that the two of them, Sara and he, had failed to take care of the boy. They had not, as parents and caregivers, looked after and supported him as they should have done. They had lost control of the boy at one point. He was in opposition to both of them, without their being able to understand why that was so. They had done everything they could for him, and they let him do what he wanted. He understood too late that Chris had come across substance abuse.
He was a little unsure if Sara had suspected it, but he didn’t think she had seen it before him. When Chris did not come home at night, they began to worry. They had several serious arguments as they walked around the rooms of the house and talked and shouted at each other while they waited for the boy to come home.
Gradually, it dawned on both Sara and him that there was something wrong with the boy. He was so distant and became, in a way, so alien. It was as if he was behind a glass wall when they spoke to him. He didn’t answer what they asked, and he said strange things.
That led to them arguing. They just wanted to try to understand what happened, so they tried to talk to each other so they could better stand together to support the boy. But it wasn’t easy. Very quickly, things fell apart between them, and there were mutual accusations from both that they had not done what they were supposed to, that they had failed, that the other did not care, and so on.
That led to them arguing. They just wanted to try to understand what happened, and stand together to support the boy. But it was easy for them to come up with mutual accusations — both, hurtful words and accusations that they hadn’t done what they were supposed to, that they had failed, that they didn’t care, and so on.
At the same time, they lived in a time when there was so much unrest. People in the country stood firmly against each other, many of them with strong ties to two separate camps. One part, the great majority, wanted society as it was, and to build on it, develop it, and make it a good society for everyone.
A large part of the population had suffered financially and materially over several decades, had poorer purchasing power, and had fewer rights in society. People began to rise in protest. Out of this protest movement came a force that developed into a threat to the democratic institutions in the country.
Sara and he did not quite agree on how they should look at this. She thought that they were very right, those who protested.
Everything was more or less corrupt, according to her, and there was a ton of power abuse and corruption among well-known politicians as well as in the media and on television networks.
Chapter 3
They had talked a great deal about this, and they gradually came to a kind of common understanding, a platform they both stood on that enabled them to continue living and working together with a common goal of building a future for Chris and themselves.
It was at this time that Chris applied for a place to study and got a place at a university further west, toward the sea. Sara and he had supported him with whatever funds they had, so that he could travel to the university. He also received a scholarship, which made it possible to start his studies.
When he looked at Chris, he thought of himself at that age— what dreams and hopes he didn’t have at that time! He had hoped that Chris would study literature and languages, as he himself had wanted to but had not been given the opportunity to do so. But Chris’s interests went in a completely different direction. He wanted to invest in data, he wanted to learn programming, and he wanted to become one of these new gurus, an entrepreneur who would create a new and ground-breaking company within IT.
Somewhere into Chris’s first year of study at the university in the west, Sara and he got a shock. Chris called Sara. He was small in his voice, but at the same time a bit dismissive in relation to giving them the information they asked for.
It turned out that Chris had a little girlfriend. She was only 17, and he was 20. He had made her pregnant, and now her parents, via Chris, came after Sara and him. First, the girl’s father called him, while Sara stood by and listened. Then the girl’s mother called Sara, and they were accused of failing as parents. They were responsible when their son made their daughter pregnant.
Chris wanted the girl to have an abortion, and he told her so. But her parents put their foot down and said it was not relevant.
“But you have to take responsibility for this,” said the father on the phone.
He further said that he would take his daughter into his home and that she would never have contact with the boy again.
Both Sara and he thought that what the man had said sounded like a threat.
They never met the girl’s parents physically, but they spoke on the phone, and they received messages through Chris. There were initial hints that they might be able to compensate the girl for the inconvenience and costs that Chris had caused the girl and her family. Sara and he agreed that there was no question of contributing financially on such terms.
They were given very strong messages that they should stay far away, otherwise, they would get the police on their backs. And if Chris approached the girl and their neighbourhood, they would make sure that he would have an encounter that he would never forget.
It went as it might have to go. Maybe it was for the best that it went that way, or maybe it was the worst that could happen? Sara and he had a granddaughter, a girl who came into the world when their son was 21 years old. He was a new father who was not allowed to see his new-born child, and Sara and he were two grandparents who would never be allowed to see anything other than a small picture of an infant, a little girl born in a town far away.
It probably went about as well as it could. Sara and he tried to talk seriously together through the case. Together they should try to find out what they can do, but there are still always accusations and counter-accusations that the other has not done the right thing. They had failed in their upbringing, they had not done what they were supposed to for their boy, and that is why things had gone the way they had.
Sara suffered under the general psychological pressure. She said she felt sick. Not just from what happened to Chris, but from everything, this life they lived in this town, the difficulty of finding a new job after the shop job disappeared. She said she felt a terrible nausea invading her life because of all the failures — all that he had done or not done to her.
Beneath this list of accusations lay the awareness that they had both failed their son and their grandson.
On top of this, they were affected by the entire toxic climate in society and the dramatic events on the political level. The nation had split into two camps, where one wanted to abolish all the old, and reject the laws and rules that applied.
Political commentators in the press and on TV spoke of a deep, organic division of the nation. Some also spoke of what happened as a breakdown of all the norms and values that society had built on, and said that it was a fascist attack on democracy.
Chapter 4
It was a time of war in other parts of the world. And there were groups of people who traveled around the country with weapons, looting, and setting houses on fire. Just below the surface were private armies, built up over several years by local and regional warlords. They were just waiting for the starting signal to start the new civil war. There was anarchy, and there were strong forces trying to bring about a fascist takeover of power in the country.
Sara and he talked a lot about this, and it was in a way something that brought them together again after the crisis they had experienced with the son and grandson they were not allowed to meet.
As the rebellion grew in strength and this, which some had begun to refer to as the second civil war, approached, they began to seriously discuss what to do. Sara had lost her job because the shop had had to close due to the unrest that had occurred in the aftermath of the riot. He, on the other hand, had been unemployed for half a year, so they really had nothing to lose. Chris was placed in his study further west, and they knew that he was then not that far from where the boyfriend and the child lived with her parents. Perhaps there was hope that things would work out, that he could get in touch with her eventually.
They had also barely managed to talk a little about the drug problem. Sara had spoken to Chris on the phone for a long time and made him promise that he would stop taking drugs.
They had therefore reached a point where it was not too difficult to agree that, if necessary, they should travel to another city to escape the unrest and chaos, and start all over again. They agreed that they should invest in this and initially travel north-east. And then they would rather return to their old life if the situation allowed it.
They had traveled to this village in chaos, and they had traveled from chaos. The city where they lived was hit by battles between the private army of the billionaires and the government forces. Cars were set on fire, houses burned down, and people who got lost between the warring parties died.
When they started talking about having to leave, it had become a big argument. Sara was afraid of the house. He replied that it was better that the house was lost than that they lost their lives. Now it was starting to get serious, it had suddenly become a kind of war in the country they lived in the middle of.
Everything had happened so very fast. At first, there had been a period when it had been relatively peaceful where they lived. But after a while, pictures started to appear on television showing riots in the streets and the destruction of buildings and other infrastructure in several cities. A little further east, it was particularly frightening. All in all, it was horrible to witness how people from the same nation could stand so hard against each other, and even wage war against each other.
No one could actually give a good explanation as to why this happened. Everyone was afraid that the conflict would expand and get out of control. They both feared that many lives could be lost. Several of the neighbours said that they did not support the fact that the party they had voted for was so intransigent and went so hard. It was terrifying. When the unrest came to the neighbouring town, he and Sara finally agreed that they just had to leave. There was no way out.
In a way, he was very happy that they no longer had Chris in their house. He was all grown up now, over 20. They had had him when they were both 19 years old, and he had unplanned become the only child in their tiny family.
For the past year, he had had a place to study in a town further west, not too far from the sea. In addition, it wasn’t too far from the small town where my grandmother lived, so they were both happy that he got a place to study there.
They had visited him once during the first year, and now he had just started the new academic year
Sara was worried about him.
“He doesn’t talk,” she said.
“I’m getting so worried. He seems lonely, don’t you think?”
He did not agree. But he knew Sara well enough to know that he had to be careful with what he said. She could spin on and make it seem like something was seriously wrong, when the boy was actually just a little withdrawn and cautious.
“I get so insecure,” she said. “What do you think, he has no friends!”
He had replied that Chris had several good friends, but Sara had not given up.
“Who are they, then?” she asked sharply. “What are their names?”
No, he didn’t know that, and she told him that it was typical of him, not even being able to say the names of their son’s friends.
It had ended with them having an argument right after he had returned to the university. A couple of days later, the unrest began to rise, and they had to decide quickly what to do. He wanted to travel; she wanted them to try to sell the house first. He said it was too dangerous not to leave town now. They could rather consider it and try to sell the house later, when things had calmed down, if everything went well.
On a day with blue skies and bright sunshine, they had finished packing the car and trailer and had brought almost all the most important equipment in the car and trailer.
He had thought that the safest thing was to travel east and a little north. She did not agree.
“That’s the wrong direction!”
“It isn’t.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to go there!”
He was silent.
“I don’t understand,” she said, “why you’re pushing through this!”
He didn’t answer. Kept both hands on the steering wheel, looked through the windscreen towards a point far ahead.
Chapter 5
They had been driving for an hour when she repeated once more that he should stop at the next rest stop, so that they could talk properly about the matter.
While they were parked, two more cars arrived, one with a large trailer filled with furniture, packages, and equipment. They spoke to the two families, who were obviously driving together.
It turned out that they came from the same town as themselves, and were out on the same errand: to find a suitable small town and start over. They also had a plan, because they had become familiar with a small town in an area where there had been mining and extraction of coal. The operation had been shut down for over ten years, and almost all the houses in the town had been abandoned.
Sara asked why they were traveling in that direction. She thought that it would be much safer and more logical to travel west, away from the big confrontations and battles that one feared would take place here in the middle of the country.
“It’s that simple,” said the man who answered, “that there are several disused communities up here, with buildings that are in usable condition and just waiting for us and other families to come and live in them. Yes, actually there’s a whole street of houses that we can move right into.”
“But surely there are people who own those houses?” Sara tried. “That may be so,” said the man, “but there is no one there. Those houses have been empty for more than ten years, most of them.”
When they sat in the car afterwards, Sara looked at him and said:
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Oh?” he said. “I haven’t. Not at all.”
“We’re turning,” she said.
He turned off the engine, leaned back heavily and looked at her.
“Do you really believe we — ?”
She nodded, seriously.
“Don’t talk about it, it’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Yes, you think so. But I think the opposite.”
“No,” he said, “no question of us turning now.”
She looked at him, but said nothing.
“Yes,” he said. “Here we know that we will come to a place where there is a house we can live in. And then you’ll turn around and travel west, far as hell into the unknown!”
She was still silent.
“It’s not happening!” he said firmly.
He turned on the ignition, started the engine, and turned onto the road in the direction in which the two families had started driving.
Chapter 6
Like many of the other visitors to the city, they took the same action. They picked a house, called around, and tried to find someone who could let them know who they could buy the run-down house from. Given how awful and damaged it was, they reasoned that they could purchase it for a low price. Since the previous owners had left the properties so long ago, it turned out to be difficult to determine who owned them.
Nobody in the area knew from whom they could purchase one of the run-down homes. Many claimed that because the house was so damaged and dilapidated, they anticipated being able to purchase it for a low price. One of the families said they had seen signs along the road saying that settlers were welcome in the town and that they just had to settle in. Several interpreted this as a clear invitation from what was left of local authorities. Furthermore, it was almost impossible to find out who owned the properties since it had been so many years since they had left.
Like the others, they had also taken action. They had moved into one of the homes, and slowly but surely, they had started the labour-intensive process of organizing their new residence, which would take some time.
In the first half of the year, they had done relatively well. Sara had put up with the way it had turned out. She basically had no choice, he thought.
Some days were good, while others were challenging. Both were a bit frayed on the nerves, and when they heard about the unrest in the town they had left, things started to go a bit rough with their entire relationship.
It didn’t get any better when they learned from some people who had been back in town that several of the houses in their street had burned down, things started to rage between them.
Sara had a terrible nervous breakdown. She blamed him, and he blamed her. He thought that yes, they were probably equally good. They were both in shock that their old house had been lost in this way. It was impossible to find out if they would receive any form of compensation. They had insurance on the house, but it was uncertain whether this insurance would cover the loss of the house if it had happened as was reported in the media, with the uprising and the fighting that had taken place.
It ended with Sarah and him scowling at each other. They were both angry and scared. She wanted him to get materials and repair the facade of their “new” house, while he said the building was badly dilapidated. He repeated that they just had to hold on. He had no money to buy materials with, and he looked darkly at trying to get a bank loan, as the situation was in society now.
There came a day with a serious argument that stretched over several days and nights. She took her bedclothes and went to bed in the guest room, even though it was stuffy, dirty and unpleasant there. He sat up at night thinking about what they should do and what they could do.
It ended with Sara leaving. She had threatened to leave several times and said that she did not feel safe, that she wanted to travel west. She wanted to go where her mother lived. She wanted to be closer to the place where Chris studied.
He said as it calmly as he could, so they didn’t have to panic now. He said it was impossible to get a house over there because there was so much pressure; so many people moved there. But she didn’t give up.
He had not thought that she would carry it out. As he knew her, she wasn’t capable of that. He had thought that she was dependent on him, that she would never travel like this without further ado.
But that morning it dawned on him that it had happened. She had just left. It was at the time when it was still possible to send messages with the telephone. She had written, short and laconic: “I’m traveling west. You can follow if you feel like doing so. It’s your choice.”
It was three years ago now. He struggled to accept what had happened, but he would not give in and let her have it the way she wanted. Maybe she didn’t want it either, after all?
He gradually learned to focus on what was the most important thing, living his days, his new life. He somehow managed to repair and rebuild the slightly dilapidated house. It was a good help for him to continue with that work. There were only a couple of the neighbours who knew what had happened and knew that his partner had suddenly left because she could not stand up to the pressure.
He had felt confident that things would go well there in the Milky Way. They had been promised that good things would happen with the development of small industry and new job creation, and in that sense, there was no reason to worry at all.
But in the last few months, there had been a number of disturbing signals. Internationally, there was a major conflict going on and there was talk that it could turn into war.
Chapter 7*
It was like a dark dream. Everyone was gone. He was one of the last ones still back in the Milky Way. His house was at the top of the road so he had barely noticed the changes. It had happened gradually, with fewer and fewer people coming home to the neighbourhood from work, shopping or school in the afternoon.
Up from the veranda he had had a perfect view, and he had long believed that everything — or at least most of it — was as it had been before everything had begun to change.
He thought back to what it had been like when they came here. They had been one of several couples who had chosen to move here to this neighbourhood which was a bit remote, miles away from the big cities where people lived much closer to each other. As the neighbourhood was far from an area with large population concentrations, house prices had been relatively moderate, and for their own part, that was one of the main reasons why they had bought the house.
He had discovered that he and Sara had thought the same as several other couples who had come here; this was a good place to settle down and build a new future. It had looked promising, but then something terrible had happened; the ground had begun to crumble away from under their feet. Sara and he had suddenly lost what they had built their lives on — each other. It came like lightning out of the blue, he had thought. They had raged against each other, had said things that should have been unsaid, characteristics and accusations that had only widened the gap between them.
Why had it become like this? Was it because after the move, after so many years together, they were now alone, as Chris had grown up and moved out? Their son had his own life now. He had moved far away, to the west coast, and Sara and he had agreed that they should try this new thing, build a new life together out here on the plains, under this vast, boundless firmament.
He didn’t want to think about the details, what had happened. He was at a loss for words in his mind. It felt so devastating, so degrading. After she had left, he had built himself an inner wall, a fence to protect himself.
He sincerely hoped that the neighbours had not caught on to what had happened. He had mentally prepared himself, thought that if someone asked, he should just pretend nothing happened, and say as little as possible.
He had spoken to several of the neighbours while they had moved into the house with the few things they had brought with them in the moving load. In those days, Sara had been almost invisible. She had been busy and stayed in the house, and did not come out when she saw that he was talking to one of the neighbours.
The neighbours had exchanged information about where they were from, and some small talk about why they had chosen to move to this town. It seemed that almost everyone preferred to avoid talking about what they themselves had left. He was happy about that, because then he didn’t have to invent a story about himself and what he had gotten away with.
Chapter 8
The neighbourhood was a collection of old, painted houses along two parallel streets, a derelict, village-like area that had grown up in a short period a few decades ago when optimism and children’s laughter reigned, and the sounds of children playing could be heard from the gardens around the houses. There was even a school building and a small assembly hall, both of which testified that there had once been life and bustle in the neighbourhood.
He had become acquainted with some of the other newly moved people one evening with a brilliantly beautiful starry sky. It had been a hot day, almost without a breath of wind, and the heat still lingered in the air after the sun had set. They stood in small groups and talked together, and he had gotten to know Kevin, who told him that he had been a lorry driver for many years before most things started falling apart. The trucking company he drove for went bankrupt, along with thousands of other vital companies in the machinery of society.
“There was only one thing to do,” said Kevin, “it was to pack up everything we could get in the cars and on the trailer, and set off.
Kevin looked at him with an ironic smile.
“In the city we left there were empty shelves in the shops. Nothing left of many of the things we needed in the grocery stores,” Kevin said.
His wife Liz, added to what Kevin said: “Yeah, the shelves in the shops were empty, we couldn’t get hold of normal foodstuffs such as flour and sugar, or meat and vegetables.”
“Yes,” Kevin said, “and the water supply in the town failed. We didn’t know when we had clean water, or when we had to boil our drinking water.”
Kevin said that it had gotten really bad after the hundred-year storm hit the area. At the time, there were many who had seen no other option than to leave their homes. Preferably travel as far away as possible.
They had stood for a long time that evening in the playground by the decommissioned school and talked. Some people had made a small bonfire on the gravel in the middle of the schoolyard, and the children got roast sausages on sticks that the men forged for them.
Light from the flickering fire played with the faces of the men and women who stood talking. When the fire had burned down and there were only embers left, they could see the mighty starry sky with thousands, perhaps millions of small luminous points sparkling towards them.
A young girl raised her hand and pointed: “Look there, that’s the Milky Way, isn’t it?”
The adults who were standing with the girl raised their faces and looked up at the sky above the forest.
“Yes, that is the Milky Way,” a woman said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
They stood silent for a while and looked up at the starry sky. It was a magical blink of an eye. The night sky came so close. It was something warm, something familiar that spoke to them.
“The road here,” said the girl’s mother, a woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, “is the Milky Way. Our road up here can be called the Milky Way,” she said.
“Yes,” the girl said, “that’s what we will call it.”
“Yeah.”
“And think that — it’s just as if — yes, that we are the last people in the Milky Way.”
“Mom, what is a human being?”
“My dear, a human being, that’s someone on two legs who can feel and put words on something strange they feel inside — like love, longing, empathy.”
“Mom, are we the last humans in the Milky Way?”
Chapter 9
There was something wrong, something disturbing, something that would not let go of him. It was a kind of uneasiness, and he didn’t understand where it came from, he struggled to understand what it was.
He thought that this is perhaps one of the important moments in life when your life is teetering and you have to dare to make a choice in relation to two different paths that you can take. But the more he thought about exactly that, the surer he became that it was a wrong thought.
He had been in the middle of that election situation earlier and then it was Sara who was standing on the other side of the road and it was Sara who turned her back on him at the same time that he turned his back on her.
This was something different, he thought, this was something less tangible, something almost invisible and something that could hardly be captured with the senses and the normal sensory apparatus.
He thought that it must be an intuition, a secret insight that something big is going on out in the world like here, in this society. And he knew with himself:
— I am forced to stand in it, and I am forced to stand through it.
— I will stand straight in the storm; I will stand through it.
He felt this uneasiness inside him. He was not like usual. Something that would not let him go. He knew it. These events, this chaos, this haphazardness. He recognized this feeling again, this black space inside him, this numbing feeling of being caught in an invisible net. But he didn’t worry; he was not afraid. No, he wasn’t afraid at all.
No, he said to himself. Not afraid. Just a little uneasy. Mostly because he no longer had his closest neighbours with whom he could talk. Like the Larsen family two houses further down. One day he had discovered that they were gone. Had probably been gone for several days, maybe weeks already. Grass had begun to grow across the aisle from the street to the house. Not normal at Larsens’, who had always been so careful about mowing the grass keeping it orderly around the house.
But that was not what had made him uneasy. It was rather the way they had disappeared.
What bothered him was the way it had happened. Almost without him noticing, that something was going on, that something was about to change in society.
He went into the living room and turned on the TV, in a kind of desperate hope that what he knew deep down was not the case. But that was it. The TV screen was as dead, as damned unable to convey signs of life from the world outside as it had been for the past few months.
He looked at the remote control, shook it, even though he was fully aware that it was no use, that it was not actually the remote control for the television set that was faulty.
He had not the slightest doubt that the explanation for the failure was different, and that the answer lay far out there somewhere, in society, in parts of the world from which he could no longer see pictures and videos. The internet had failed them. Everything was futile, everything had to be accepted, because no power in the world — at least no power over which he had control could do anything about the error; it was out of the question, and he had no doubt about that.
But still he felt this insane, this childish impulse inside him. He would get up and raise his hands to the sky, he would scream as loud as he could, he would throw the poor TV remote between the walls — as if that would have helped. He knew very well that there was no point in playing out his anger and frustration in that way. It would only lead to him feeling that the grey-black, the pitch-dark despair overpowered him and pushed him even more down to the ground.
Little by little he managed to calm down. He thought about the Larsen family, and the last time he had seen them at home or on the street. But he couldn’t remember when it had been. He decided to go outside and take a closer look.
When he walked the last steps up on the porch at the front of the Larsen house, he became aware of the full extent of it. He peeked in through the window, and he felt himself freeze on his back. The furniture, everything was gone! They had simply evaporated, had packed their things, rented a moving car and then had left early in the morning. Without mentioning the relocation plans in one word. Without stopping by and saying goodbye!
This was what made him most uneasy, especially when he eventually noticed that several people in the neighbourhood had left, in the same way. It was disturbing. He didn’t like it. He thought about what that might mean.
Perhaps the worst part was that there were no longer people in the neighbourhood that he could talk to either. After all, they had been here before, all the others. They had used to meet in the street in the afternoon and they had talked together, discussed the latest rumours about riots in several cities further south. Some had talked about the possibility of civil war breaking out in the country. Others shook their heads and dismissed such wild speculation.
He felt a tingling sensation inside him, a kind of vague contraction and slight prickling inside his chest, a discomfort that hardly ever let go.
Chapter 10
A few days passed. He observed no changes in the nearest houses. Everything was quiet, no sign of life in and around the houses in the neighbourhood. He reassured himself with the fact that after a while, new owners or tenants would come to live in the empty houses.
He sat down and began to think about it. It was almost a month since the unthinkable happened. During the day, he no longer saw anyone out on the street, no boys on bicycles or girls with skipping ropes. And he felt that he was starting to get really restless. What was this? Where were the new tenants and the new landlords, if it was really the case that people had moved away, that the houses had new owners and tenants? The houses could not be left empty like this!
He felt a cold hand in his chest, it was like a hand that held around the heart. It was a frozen fist, an ice lump that had gotten stuck inside him somewhere.
He got up, felt frosty waves chasing through his body.
One of the last things he had experienced before the TV broadcasts had stopped completely was that there was increasing unrest in the world. In lands far away, on the other side of the ocean, riots and local wars had broken out. There was nothing special about it per se. This has been the case for decades. It was something one was used to, and it should not affect people here at home.
The last time he watched the TV news, they had reported protests and revolt in several countries. He did not know how reliable this information was, because there was a large stream of unconfirmed messages. The news reports came after the short speech that the President gave just before the TV screen died. He had tried to go online and check the state of the world there, but it was not possible to get anything meaningful out of it.
He was annoyed. But deep down he felt something else. Shiny fear, a white fear that no longer let go. The Internet had progressively deteriorated over the past year, but then there was almost a complete collapse of what he could understand, that Sunday more than four weeks ago when he sat and tried to log in to go and read the most important social channels he used to follow.
As time went on, he had become accustomed to the new condition. He had good dry food in the cupboard, and almost full freezer. As long as the electricity supply did not disappear as well, he would probably manage. If necessary, he could head north to the nearest town where the supermarket was probably as it had always used to be, accessible, with a limited, but perfectly okay product range for his needs.
He stayed inside the house for a whole week and continued writing the script while it rained almost non-stop. It was abnormal with so many days in a row with rain, but he did not think much about it. The climate had changed in the last ten years, and he had become accustomed to the fact that nothing was abnormal anymore when it came to weather and wind in the part of the country where he was.
He tried to adapt. That was his focus in recent years, after the normal structures of society had begun to change. He had done like most others, only tried to get through it, to survive where he was. That the unfortunate events in society had taken place exactly in the period when he had ended up in a new life crisis, yes that was bad enough. But there was nothing unbearable about it.
After all, he had found together with several people in the neighbourhood — including Larsens — with whom he had shared his thoughts. They had the same information and they were as preoccupied as he was with talking about the secret network of extra-terrestrial beings who had allied themselves with key politicians and businessmen. They had revealed their plans. The extra-terrestrials planned in alliance with a group of politicians and community leaders to take over the earth, that, yes it was unbelievable, it was so crazy!
Now that it had started to happen, he was disappointed that Larsens had left, without informing him, without taking him with him. He had trusted Larsens. Kevin was a reliable truck driver, a strong-built, sane man who had never said anything but things he could vouch for. They had, in a sense, established a kind of blood bond among themselves. And his wife Eva was so bright and gentle, so open and sociable, a nice woman in her prime. When she looked at him, he felt warm sunshine on his face. He had become a little captivated by her gaze. Had thought through the case and promised himself that he would never let his friend down. Not even if she came to him and offered herself. They had a sacred blood bond, Kevin and he.
Chapter 11
He was restless. Around him, in his immediate environment, things had happened that he did not understand. Like everyone else in the Milky Way, he had struggled a lot to understand what had actually happened. And like everyone else in the neighbourhood, he had had difficulties to understand and grasp the scope of what had apparently happened. What consequences would this have for him, for the people in the Milky Way, and for their future?
The Incident, or the Event, as some news media, and independents called the series of unimaginably powerful explosions in the air over the country, was consistently referred to in the singular, as something enormously large, extensive, and destructive — almost an invisible force that had gone off over central parts of the country, close to where the political elite resided.
The internet had crashed at the same time as the first reports of the incident had arrived. The story about the various components, the various explosions in the Event was therefore mostly hanging in the air, supplemented by scraps and bits of individual stories from people who had been in the parts of the country where the attacks had taken place.
It eventually became a multifaceted picture, with varied theories about who the attackers were and what kind of weapon the attackers had used. The main feature of this picture was that it was vague, lacking in detail, and almost completely failing to consider fact-based explanations of what had happened.
The Incident was described by some as a series of violent explosions which, it was said by people who were supposed to know about it, had come like lightning from the blue. The force of what had happened was hundreds of times stronger than the annual, destructive tornadoes that had razed large areas and killed hundreds of people.
In the first hours after the first two explosions, which had come less than 45 minutes apart, it had been very quiet in the news media, while social media was boiling. At the start, the regional authorities and the government had denied that anything unusual had happened.
A day later, when private audio — and video recordings that in the hours when the internet still worked had been spread on social channels on the internet, there were different divergent explanations.
One of the most referenced explanations was that it was a massive nuclear attack. A foreign power had sent a swarm of intercontinental missiles carrying nuclear bombs against the nation. The Defense Forces and the National Emergency Management Board had managed to neutralize most of the rockets so that they had gone off so high above the ground that they could not do the damage they were intended to do.
Other theories that circulated were that this was staged by the government and the secret organization Under Cover, which many said had been responsible for blowing up the two WTC towers many years earlier. For a segment of the population, what happened during the Event was yet another proof that 9/11 had been staged by the authorities through their super-secret organization, UC.
For several hours he had walked restlessly from room to room in the house thinking about this horrible thing that was about to happen. It hurt to take all this in.
He walked over to the computer and touched the control pad with two fingers. Surprised and excited, he saw that the internet was apparently back. He began to enter the address of the most reliable news channel and unexpectedly came straight into a live news broadcast where the reporter was standing in an open space with buildings in the background and reported that both the Army and the Air Force were in place and that they had investigated a large area and in fact could not find traces of such destruction as a massive, nuclear attack would have caused.
The journalist in the studio began to ask about the radioactive measurements that should have been carried out, but just as he switched to the reporter, the screen turned gray again, as it had been the day before.
Chapter 12
Several more days went by. The internet was still down, and he walked around the rooms in the house, feeling slightly desperate. The situation was disturbing, not good to live with. And yet, he knew, it was exactly what he had to do. He had to live with the new situation, without having the opportunity to read news reports or watch news videos, and without getting to know what had actually happened out in the world.
Still, he was a little relieved now. For several days he had been thinking about these changes, these almost invisible changes that happened in the Milky Way.
He was relieved because, he was sure. Something unexpected had happened in the Milky Way. Fundamental changes had taken place here, there was no doubt about that. And those changes, they happened because of something that happened out in the world. After what he had found out in the last few days, he was now sure that it was something very big, and also very serious, not only for himself and the people in the Milky Way, but also for people all over the world.
The fact that he had come to this conclusion, this certainty, somehow eased the pressure inside him.
To know more or less certainly what the situation is, is always better than walking around and being unsure. Not knowing, being uncertain is the same as having to walk on tiptoe, waiting for something unknown to reveal itself. It is the same as being held down, in ignorance. Then it is better to know something and feel a little more certain about the situation, about what the condition is like.
He thought about what he had heard about climate change on a television show one evening. It was almost two years ago now, but he could still clearly see the face of the man being interviewed, a well-known conspiracy theorist who for years had built an online money machine by constructing and spreading conspiratorial theories to a growing audience about the secret, hidden game played by those in power, governments and politicians.
The followers of this man never seemed to get enough of the terrifying, “ultra-secret” and sometimes macabre stories that he told on his online “news” platform about social leaders, politicians and their allies keeping small children captive in the basement under a pizzeria at a specific address in a named city.
According to the most extreme details of this conspiracy theory, the prison guards killed children they captured and ate them.
Journalists who investigated the case soon discovered that there were no basements under the named pizzeria. The well-known conspiracy theorist gradually changed the address of the pizzeria premises, but the story had long since fulfilled its intended function and disappeared more and less from the news headlines.
The man who was invited to the studio had a slightly overweight, stocky body. When he spoke and wanted to emphasize a point, his voice was powerful and confident. Occasionally, when the presenter tried to stop him and get a question in, he would talk in and out, and there was a couple of times a cacophony of the voices of the two men fighting to have the floor.
When he got excited or wanted to emphasize a point, he raised his voice and almost shouted with a jarring emphasis. When he became eager, he spoke more quickly, but included occasional pauses where he let the words hang in the air between those in the TV studio.
“Climate change,” he said, “this so-called climate crisis, all this talk, it’s just a fabrication, a false flag operation carried out by the government.
Collusive politicians, governments and social leaders all over the world — they have invented this to deceive us. They manipulate us, quite simply! 9/11 — what was that? I’ve said it before!”
He spoke with large hand gestures, to emphasize his words. He raised his voice, slammed his hand on the table confidently and convincingly, to make it very clear that what he was saying was the truth.
“Yeah,” he said, slapping his hand on the table confidently, “that, it was a staged attack, a giant cover operation set up by this global, covert, conspiratorial alliance of top brass, governments and politicians, with the help of a bunch of actors and directors. — And climate crisis, you say? — Ha-ha! Haven’t there always been storms and floods, maybe! Haven’t there always been forest fires! Yes, it has!”
The other man who was invited to the studio, an expert in social economics, was a slightly older man who mostly stood quietly and listened to the counter-debater. He showed little facial expression, but experienced human connoisseurs among the TV viewers could probably detect certain emotions on his face as he listened to the explanations of the counter-debater.
While the first one spoke, he raised his hand a couple of times and signalled that he wanted to answer, and when the first one, after a long stream of coherent words, stopped to catch his breath, the talk show host signalled that the second one could speak.
“You don’t need to look around very much,” said the social economist, “to see how the state of the world is today.”
The man on the other side of the table shook his head and grimaced.
“The truth about our world, society today,” the economist continued, “the truth is that our politics are failing. And this is not something I just make up and think. It is an empirical fact.”
He stopped, looked into the camera and continued:
“From pandemics and climate change, heat waves, global warming and rising sea levels — right down to simple questions about managing the economy — it’s a big, global crisis!
This is really serious! Our politics are literally failing, both in relation to existential and everyday challenges.
Yes, you can only look more closely at the conditions here in our own country. And in almost all other so-called up-and-coming, democratic societies. It is a fact that today we have very few countries that we can point to and say that they are “well-functioning societies”.
If you try to make a list of names of such countries, the list will be very short. And you should be grateful if you are lucky enough to live in such a country. All over the world, on every continent, riverbeds are dry, crops are failing, fascism and extremism are on the rise, and governments seem to have little or no plans to meet the enormous challenges.”
Actually, he was a little insecure now, after all those neighbours had left. Maybe there was nothing to count on anyway, this friendship with Larsens. He had become acquainted with the Larsen family after the worst had happened. And he was glad that they had not been there and seen him and Sara and what happened in the time before she left. It was perhaps the blackest night of his life, and he knew he would never fully recover — never in his life!
At night he dreamed about Sara and the good times before everything started to fall apart. At night he also dreamed that everything was back to normal, only that she was no longer there. And when he woke up in the morning, he thought that everything was fine, almost completely as before. Everything would be fine, because then the world could not go so completely off the hinges!
But that was exactly what was about to happen. He got the scope of it a little clearer for himself one Saturday morning when he took a walk down the street. Normally there would be a bustling life outside in front of the houses this sunny day, but it was not. He was more and more shocked as he discovered that the street was completely empty. Empty, no people!
He had long since tried to deny it. It was a completely normal reaction, a defence mechanism, too difficult to grasp what was about to happen. No one in the street had said anything to him. No neighbours had announced that they would travel or move.
There were no external factors, no clear signs that would indicate that this was going to happen, that everyone was suddenly going to travel. — Maybe they had traveled further south to find a better place to settle down. This winter had been colder than usual, there had been several strong storms, and people were tired of the harsh climate.
Many of the neighbours in the Milky Way had a camper. When he went down the street and looked, he saw that all the twelve houses that had a camper were empty, and the camper vans were gone.
Chapter 13
Before he had found out about the Event, he had had a hard time seeing what could have led to these changes, so that all the neighbours had left without warning. The Milky Way was a good place to live, a good neighbourhood and a good environment. He had only good memories from the first couple of years. They had had barbecues with the neighbours, and street parties at least once a year, in the spring. And then they had games for the kids.
That was strange, he thought. But then he realized that it had been a long time since the kids were small, and when he thought about it, no one in the Milky Way had small children anymore. But for the Jensen family, it was a bit awkward. They lived on the other side of the Milky Way. They had a daughter who was almost grown up and he had seen her pass by not very many days ago, he thought. But then he was a little stunned. It might have been several weeks ago. After all, he was not at all sure when it had happened.
He walked further down the street. The Stormberg couple in the big house further down on the other side of the Milky Way had two dogs, and then they had an adult son who occasionally came home and went for a walk with the dogs. It was empty in the yard there too.
It was like a shadow town. A dead town where the buildings and garden fences and the abandoned playgrounds bore witness to life that was no longer there.
He suddenly had an intrusive feeling of being surrounded by the inanimate. The things, the houses, the trees between the houses — everything pointed towards the lifeless, towards death.
He felt that while thinking of the Stormberg family, unrest began to rise to something resembling panic. — He had not seen them come back from shopping at the mall either, not for a long time. He had thought, “What’s going on in the neighbourhood here? What’s going on here? It is unbelievable. Has anything happened in the world? ”
And yes, indeed, now, he knew. Something had happened in the world. He frantically tried to find out if he was awake or if he was in a dream. It was not easy to say. He wished he could just wake up and discover that what he had experienced in the dream, it was not like that in real life, it just had to be like that. A bad dream, a nightmare.
He decided to go home but got nowhere. It was as if something — an invisible arm — was holding him back. It was something that held him tight.
He decided to make one last attempt and walked down to the end of the street where there was a small turning point just past the house of Moss. There was no one there either. He started to get really worried. This was completely wild. There were no people to see at all.
What was this? He saw it now, clearly. For a long time, he had not followed what was happening in the world at all. He had missed out on the important thing. He had not realized that the world had completely changed, that important things had happened out there.
He had not watched TV for many weeks, because after he had decided to write this novel and he had started that work, there was one thing that mattered, and that was to write, to write, write all the time. As long as new things came into the story that added value to the script, the most important thing was to keep going. Just keep on writing more of what came from within.
It had become like an obsession to be able to move this project forward, and as the volume — the page number — had increased he had become more and more monomaniacal, only focused on one thing — writing, writing, writing.
Chapter 14
He had been completely seized by the work. He just had to write, all morning, further into the afternoon and evening. And he could not stop. Late at night, when he usually used to go to bed, he sat with the computer. Always new things that came to mind, new episodes, new conflicts. Whenever new ideas came to his mind, he sat and sweated and concentrated all he could. It was about getting the words down on the screen so he could say to himself, “There it sat! Nailed it! That was it!”
He struggled now, some of the most important, this which he had to formulate as soon as possible, the first scene, the episode that would start the action. And he thought: How does it all start?
He sat down at the table, opened the laptop, started typing.
“She was white in the face. She turned away from me, took quick steps across the floor towards the door.
I got up, but I was too late. I heard the door slam shut.
I ran to the window and saw her walking angrily down the street. That was the last I saw of her.”
He leaned back, read through the five lines. Was this enough? And should he write in the first person — a narrator who is involved in the action? Would this capture the reader, or —?
He switched to a new page in the writing program and rewrote the lines:
“She was white in the face and her movements were angular and hard. She turned away from me, took five quick steps across the floor towards the door.
I got up but fumbled and realized I was too late. I heard the door slam shut.
I ran to the window and saw her walking down the street. Her body movements were harsh and angry. That was the last I saw of her.”
He stopped, looked at the paragraph with the newly written words.
— He sighed. For every time he thought that now it was done, something else appeared. New moments, always new points, new things that the characters in the fictional universe thought, new fragments of dialogues that he had to take care of before they evaporated and perhaps were forgotten forever.
Writing took up more and more of his time. He wrote a few lines, stopped, read through the sentences, put the cursor behind the last word and hit the back button. Delete. Restart. Always the same, until perhaps he finally had a few sentences, a paragraph that he felt was well put.
He many times wrote until late at night, into the night, until he fell asleep in the cold light from the screen and rolled over in bed.
Suddenly the thought of the terrible thing came back. These thoughts he wanted to chase away, not let them have a place in his mind. There was a sentence that he had read that had stuck with him. It was again linked to this danger, this overwhelming, threatening force that was always there. The threat of nuclear war.
A woman had asked, on a forum where people could ask questions and get answers from other readers.
“Is anywhere safe on this planet for us to go? Or other planets.”
One man had replied: “No not in the absolute sense. We can never reach absolute security”.
No, that was exactly what made this so pointless to think about.
We can never achieve absolute, total, or complete security in human existence.
We can never be sure that we live in a world where there are no threats to our security. We can never escape so far that we are safe.
Another had replied that this is a part of human existence today, of living in the infinitely large. And as our understanding of the hazards in life and the world has grown, so has our awareness that they can exist.
This is linked, among other things, to the flow of information between people. In the last seventy years — yes, even just the last 30–40 years — the flow of information has become much greater. It is almost more than we can comprehend.
We can never create some kind of absolute, total, or complete security for people.
We can never buy insurance that protects us against this.
We cannot buy ourselves security to prevent something dangerous from happening to us.
We can never obtain sure guarantees for our safety. As human beings, we are at the mercy of the people who are put in charge of society.
We have no choice. This is a natural part of the human condition. The TK existential risk is part of living today, in the infinite diversity, variations, all kinds of forces — yes, diverse — all kinds of forces …
He slipped into sleep, first a dreamless sleep, then he was suddenly in another world.
The dream was chaotic, and dark. There was unrest in the country. Society was divided. Many identified with the Righteous, the Followers of Truth, those who fought against injustice and for the Alternative Truth and who wanted to reverse all the injustices that politicians and the government had done to them for many decades.
Others stayed away and lived their quiet lives inside their houses and apartments. They closed their eyes and hoped that it would soon pass.
But it did not look like it would pass so soon. Large crowds demonstrated, and in some places different groups fought against each other.
The country was characterized by insecurity, and people shut themselves in. Groups of uniformed men and women roamed the streets, attacking shops, public buildings, police stations and monuments.
The police were powerless, and in some towns, there were soldiers in the streets.
He felt insecure longing for the dream. He had to get away, out of this nightmare where men fought against soldiers and everything was chaotic and dark.
Next: Part 2
Chapters 15–27
Editing Listen to: The Last Human in the Milky Way, a Draft, part 2 — Medium
Thank you for reading The Last Human in the Milky Way, a novel draft.
If you have feedback for the author about some of or all the first 30 chapters, please write in the comments or by e-mail to [email protected].
If you can recommend a literary agent or a publisher, please let me know.
Literary agent or publisher?
Please contact me on e-mail [email protected].
Enjoyed the read? Reward the writer.
Instead of giving a tip to Øivind H. Solheim, please forward to friends and share: Books in English by Øivind H. Solheim (Amazon).
