by Thomas Bradford

The cell was occupied by a single individual, an old man. His hair was long, once white but now dirty, perpetually brown at the roots and stiff like straw. He wore no clothing save for a brown loincloth — once also white, now soiled after decades of wear. His face was smooth and hairless.

How old was this man? Somewhere in his early seventies, judging from his appearance. His entire life he had been a prisoner in this cell, alone. Never once had he seen or heard the presence of another human being. He had no name, knew no language, no rational thought. There was no point of reference — no I think, therefore I am. There was only him.

He existed, unaware of his existence.

All that he knew of life was a quiet cell, a silent, impersonal cube of stone bricks marred with the degradation of time. For years, decades, he sat against the wall, his head tilted, his dreamy eyes gazing to the room’s only window: a vertical, rectangular hole, wide enough to fit his arm through if he could reach it . . . wide enough to see a blue sky.

That was all the window showed him: sky, and clouds. No ground, no structures, only the soft wisps of high-altitude clouds, drifting along a cerulean stratum. He stared at the blue world outside, his eyes distant, lost in an inarticulate longing to be part of that world.

Throughout the years he had eaten food that was left for him — slid through the bars by a strange, multi-limbed contraption, silently performing its duty with indifference. When the man slept, he used the slab of stone beneath the window; it was smooth and bare, devoid of comfort and fused to the wall. When the man defecated, he used the metal toilet — he did not remember in his old age, but there was a time when he didn’t know how to do this. He had to learn. Buried in his thoughts was the memory of a young boy covered in excrement; what happened to this boy as a result was the first instance of what his life in isolation had come to be defined by:

There were times, usually when he had done something wrong, when the man’s body would freeze, the command of his limbs lost as he rose into the air to float above the dust-covered floor. A painful feeling — a sound, almost — would pierce his consciousness, and his mouth would open in a soundless scream, his eyes clenched shut in the throes of silent torment.

Sometimes while this was happening, an image, or feeling — often a combination of the two — would flash in his mind. In the case of the young boy there was the image of the toilet, along with a certain knowing that he must use it.

There were also instances when the man hadn’t done anything to warrant punishment, yet it would happen regardless. No lessons were taught in these situations — only inexplicable torture seemingly for the sake of it.

Over time the old man’s mind had become skittish with the fear of punishment. His existence in captivity had caused his demeanor to change. Any desire of escape was snuffed out, slowly destroying the young man who was, leaving a lifeless figure with catatonic eyes in his place. But even if the fire in his heart had long been extinguished, the old man’s mind was always frantic, always afraid of unexplained reprisals.

Which is why, when he saw the barred entryway to his room standing wide open one morning, he did nothing for a long period of time.

His eyes had fluttered open from a thin sleep. At first he didn’t comprehend what he was seeing but, eventually, with caution he slid from the stone slab, creeping across the floor towards the open door — he had never learned to walk on two legs, and moved instead on all fours like an animal. Gazing through the opening, he saw the familiar metal railing across from his cell. He poked his head from the entryway, looking first left, then right to see a stone walkway, similar to the bricks of his room, extended in both directions.

It was deserted.

Inching forward, the man exited his jail cell for the first time in his life. He approached the railing and stuck his head through the bars. Looking down, he saw identical floors situated below him, their levels stretching to infinity; looking up, he saw more of the same, and straining his eyes he could see even more across the chasm, rows upon rows of similar cells spanning his vision.

The prison was large, empty. The other cells held no one.

Pulling back from the rail, he looked again to the right and began to move in that direction, his eyes darting around as he crawled, searching for any sign of movement but there was none.

After perhaps an hour of walking past empty cells, listening to the soft patters of his own footsteps echoing in the vast drop of the tower’s center, the old man finally came to a long corridor. Electric bulbs were placed along its walls, yet its distant end was lost to his sight. With nowhere else to go but forward, he began to walk down it.

At one point he was startled as a tiny compartment in the wall opened at floor level. A peculiar thing emerged — a small machine, sliding toward him on treads, the glass casing of its electric eyes clouded with grime and the dust of age as it rotated its head back and forth. The man flinched and backed away, ready to turn and flee before the metal object stopped and began spinning aimlessly in circles.

The machine was malfunctioning. Tiny sparks erupted from one of its metal joints as it spun and made helpless sounds. Realizing it didn’t mean to pursue him, the man slid along the opposite wall, his eyes locked on the thing in distrust as he crept slowly past. After a little distance was made, he broke into a scampering shuffle, throwing worried glances over his shoulder until the sparking machine was out of sight.

The corridor seemed to go on forever. The man wanted to stop and rest after a while but the animal fear in his brain wouldn’t let him; it was afraid another one of those strange machines would appear. His exhaustion disappeared when he finally saw the end of the tunnel in the distance: a large set of double doors — two massive slabs of dull metal, towering high over the man’s huddled form. He crouched in front of them, resting with his hands braced against the cold floor like an ape on the cusp of movement.

The doors were too heavy for him to move. It seemed to be a dead end. At a loss, the old man’s exhaustion returned; his eyelids began to close as he slumped forward, to sleep, perhaps, before returning the way he had come.

With a deep, grumbling sound, one of the doors began to slide outward.

The man’s eyes shot open. He backed away from the swinging slab, pausing just out of its reach as it finished opening, his gaze moving from the door to the area within.

Darkness. Inside, beyond the small area visible from the light of the corridor, there was nothing. The old man was afraid, but instinct urged him forward and he obeyed, passing over the threshold and beyond the edge of light within.

He hadn’t gone far — the corridor was still visible behind him — when he noticed a new light ahead. A pale glow. His mind connected this new light with the one he had often stared at through the window of his prison cell — but this one was much larger. As he got closer, he realized the light was indeed coming through a window from far above. His surroundings slowly became visible, his eyes adjusting with the light’s help.

He saw a rise of steps nearby, their short flight leading to an empty dais whose purpose and architecture were a mystery, their intention perhaps being lost to time. The columns of pillars stood around him, their square dimensions rising towards a vaulted ceiling invisible in the darkness above; the rest of the chamber was similarly lost beyond the window’s limited light. In the dim glow the chamber appeared dark and gray, ancient in its stillness, and there was a quiet calm in the air. Motes of dust drifted lazily through the ray of light from the window, and the old man found himself feeling at peace. Alone, but in a good way. For there was no danger.

No punishments.

For the first time since leaving his cell, the old man felt safe.

He was about to sit against one of the columns, wanting nothing more than to doze for a while, when a large figure suddenly emerged from the shadows. The old man started, ready to take flight, but the figure turned to face him and he became paralyzed with fear.

It was the shape of a man, but large, brutish, dressed in a long white coat. Its greenish-brown skin was moist, slowly contracting and expanding at various points as it regarded him with its eyeless face. Several antennae protruded from its head; one stretched towards him.

The old man backed away, cowering as the figure approached, its thin coat brushing the floor as it drew near. It lowered its empty face, towering over him as he began to whimper.

Images began to flash through the old man’s mind: inexplicable visions which commanded his senses, silencing him. His eyes stared wide at nothing, his mouth hung slack as his mind was subjected to these telepathic projections.

He saw a small embryo – one which grew, becoming a human fetus, before it was born. A woman held the infant in her arms and smiled. Then came an image of a cradle swaying back and forth, the woman standing beside a man, their hands locked together as she slowly rocked their child. Both looked down at the newborn with loving eyes.

The picture vanished, replaced with an abruptness nearly as jarring as the images that followed.

Mobs in city streets, riots — people coughing, hacking, bleeding and dying as they tore at one another. Bodies lying still on sidewalks, in the roads, their flesh rotting in the baking sun. Blood poured, flesh and guts splattered and people screamed, their shouts those of killers and killed alike. The old man saw other places, as well, but the people were the same, their barbarous madness unchanged.

Words surfaced in the old man’s mind:

Sickness. Distrust. Death.

Somehow, he understood. Like a dreamer who knows certain truths in his dream, the knowledge was instilled in his brain, and a foreign voice whispered in his thoughts:

“A plague.”

He saw men standing before chanting crowds, their expressions angry as they shouted and pointed. People were dragged from buildings and houses and executed in the streets. Frenzied crowds wreaked havoc in cities across the land before thinning out, their numbers dwindling as they perished, their catastrophe compounded by the planet itself as it stormed and raged in a last attempt to shrug off the parasites that had swarmed its surface. A multitude of disasters coalesced into the final nail of a coffin long in the making, now prepped and ready for mankind’s departure.

His vision returned to the child, now crawling on all fours, oblivious to the two corpses lying in the next room. Its eyes were drawn to a bright light in the window — a blinding flash from outside.

A death cloud on the horizon, a final act of lunacy; the last inscription of humanity’s epitaph.

Time slowed to a crawl, stopped, and the child’s room grew dark. A creature appeared, its shape blurred but its long white coat visible. The old man watched as it scooped the baby into its monstrous arms before both disappeared.

The location changed. He saw a giant tower in the sky, its base hidden from sight far below the clouds. His perception drifted closer to the tower and he could make out small dots of windows in the tens of thousands. His mind’s eye focused on one as it drifted closer, and he passed through it.

He saw his cell. It was empty.

The bars of the door opened and a large machine appeared, shuffling into the room to deposit a crying baby in its center before exiting. As soon as the door shut the infant’s crying abruptly ceased; the child floated up from the floor, its mouth open in a silent scream.

Tears formed in the old man’s eyes as another message came to him:

“No one is left of your world . . . You are the last.”

The prison had been occupied once. Creatures and machines had crowded its walkways and passages, the cells had been populated with various species — subjects plucked from other worlds, last samples of dying races. Now the structure was old and forgotten, abandoned. No one else had been brought after this man, and no one else was left.

The old man was given one final truth: the punishments that each prisoner was subjected to had once been part of an experiment. Somewhere in the depths of the prison was a field of machines — silent banks of computers, rusted and cobwebbed with age. One was automated, possessing a specific program designed to probe the mind of each prisoner, collecting data for some long-forgotten purpose.

Over the eons, as the tower had fallen into disrepair with fewer beings left to maintain it, this computer had been overlooked, lost in a graveyard of defunct machinery. It had outlasted its brethren, its program left running, gathering information, the results never to be seen by anyone.

The visions ceased. The old man sat crouched in front of the creature, his arms wrapped around his knees. He was crying, his open mouth trailing saliva as he wept. He didn’t notice the alien summon a rundown machine, directing the robot to the sobbing figure on the floor before it left.

The man offered no resistance as the machine lifted him, carrying his frail body with ease back to his cell. It deposited him in the center of the floor, a weeping reflection of the child he had been upon arriving. Eventually, when the tears would come no more, the man shifted himself across the floor, coming to rest against the wall.

His head tilted, he looked out the window.

A single cloud was drifting past, lonely as it traveled, perhaps to join others in another time and place. Wishing to keep the image, the old man closed his eyes before the cloud could move from his sight. His breathing slowed, his exhaustion taking him at last, and he joined the cloud in his dreams.