title>Sci-Fi Final Project

Man's Final Throes

Wendy Kemp

Scientists tried for years to figure out just why
Operation ArmyClone failed so dramatically
with the man who called himself Cell.

Everything from brain damage to indigestion was discussed. One extraordinary scientist proposed that it was, in fact, a single grain of dust under the fingernail of Cell which set the whole chain in motion. There was much serious thought given to this; but in the end, all theories were dropped.

There were more interesting things to be researched: why people had five fingers instead of six; why nature had created apples and oranges, but no combination of the two. Cell was soon forgotten. After all, what was the point in exploring an impossibly complicated question?

This was a popular train of thought, and so the study of pattern fading was pushed aside as well. Too complicated an endeavor, not one which would provide fast, easy answers. Why enter a field if it won't eventually benefit you?

You might argue, Listener, that it would benefit them through their descendents. But you forget. Natural selection had gone haywire. The instinct to preserve one's genes was disappearing from the human race. Millennia passed; other instincts disappeared. Babies stopped developing the perception of visual depth; like lemmings, many fell from high heights soon after taking their first steps. Then the children and adults began to fall, too. The Grand Canyon was closed. The instinct for self-preservation vanished.

Not to mention that the Darwinists had been right. The effects of pattern-fading were becoming more and more evident. Everyone in the world was now a descendent of clones a thousand or more times over. Cells couldn't divide; the birth rate fell to almost nothing. Finally, only tens of hundreds of thousands of years after the birth and death of Dolly,the last man died.

If you want to be technical, it was a woman. And she was only "the last man" for a grand and celebrated total of:
three seconds.

She didn't know she was the last human left, either. She'd only met two or three in her lifetime, after all; but since the need to reproduce and socialize was no longer written in the human genes, she hadn't stayed with any of them.

NOW:
Think of the longest vocabulary word you know. Say it out loud. As fast or as slow as you'd like. It doesn't matter.

That is how long it took for the human race to fall from a count of two, to a count of one, and then to zero.

The second-to-last man had died just milliseconds before, half-way around the world.
He'd been killed when a furry white rabbit ran across his feet and caused him to trip over a rock.

Then the woman died. Her cells simply fell out of synchrony; it was a miracle they had held on for so long.

The world began with a man, and ended with a woman.
She'd been born late in the evening, twenty years before;
And to honor the time of her birth, her mother had called her:
Eve.

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Last Modified: 5/1/98
Wendy Elizabeth Kemp