“TO MY LOYAL LISTENERS.”

Peter’s left hand shook on the old sound mixer. He was unaccustomed to this – thinking about what he would say while managing the audio engineering that Molli always handled.

“Molli,” he interjected with a moan, finding it hard to grasp he was back on air. “Forgive the sound quality. She’s not here, and perhaps not with us at all. I’m having to go it alone on this freezing Cambridge morning in late October 2037. This podcast is live and being stored or played out on a server somewhere, I hope. Storage is a thing for future uses and likely matters no longer to no human; well, possibly alien archivers, assuming they ever get here. To those of you with grid power who still retain an Internet connection, you can guess what I’m about to say – but please stick with me through this last show of our series.”

A lamp crashed behind him, and he spun around to be sure nobody was entering his garage studio. He apologized.

“Sorry about that. Shaky ground here with buildings coming down. You understand all too well.”

He stopped for a moment, noticing his hand smeared a streak of crimson across the mixer. “Crap, I’m bleeding somewhere, or it’s someone else’s blood. I can’t tell any longer.”

Reaching for Molli’s beloved red spiral binder, he opened it to her final entry.

“I appreciate those of you who sent in questions and comments from prior calls. Molli wrote them down, and I’ll try to get to them if I’m not rudely interrupted.”

He turned his leather swivel chair to the side and closed his eyes, then forced himself back to his microphone.

“You have been the greatest to me and to my friends come and gone, like Molli and Ears. Loved that guy. Lost another love yesterday to radicalized mechs, as if there’s any other kind. But we who still breathe have lost many.”

Tears streamed down his face and plopped onto the desk.

“I’ll do the best I can despite a world boiled like a Fenway Frank in utter death and disarray. This is my last podcast and likely one of the last podcasts of humankind. Yesterday, I streamed the other final interviews from our series – Brokers, Hats, and Stoicholic. They’re playing on any server I could find that was still working, or they’re lost in the ether that was humanity. Either way, it was a great four years before it unraveled, and I’d be nowhere without you. You were my sustenance and kept me going. But I’ll make it through. As my grandma used to say: ‘Buckle down, face the cold wind, pitch your last pitch and make it a fastball.’”

He clicked on his tablet to run the Uncovering Science Podcast ten-second lead-in jingle.

“That’s the last time we’ll be forced to suffer that stupid guitar riff Molli liked. Her old boyfriend made it, the idiot. Well, at least he’s likely gone, too. You don’t hit a woman, ever, but then, I suppose all the idiots are dead or soon will be.”

The jingle stopped, and there was a moment of silence.

“I’ll start from the top, as I used to do, as if nothing is different. So here we go.”

Grabbing his sweat-stained Red Sox cap, Peter placed it brim-backward on his balding head, then took a deep breath.

“Hello fans of all things science and tech. This is the Uncovering Science Podcast with your host Peter Scott, and today we will discuss the end of the world and how we got here.”

He emitted an accidental laugh that emerged from somewhere below his diaphragm.

“What was that old song from the late 1990s? Something about this being the end of the world as we know it? I can’t recall. Please bear with me. I need to take a swig.”

He reached for an uncapped, half-full plastic water bottle.

“Water in a plastic bottle. Freaking reminder of our throwaway mentality. Humanity is impermanent. The water survives in some form, and the plastic disperses and disintegrates over eons. I think it was episode twenty-something. What I’d give to return back to that time and those all-too-simple problems of mankind’s Earthly abuses and aberrations.”

Peter turned again to check the door from his garage to the house, ensuring that nobody was trying to enter, and his eyes scanned the chrome bolt lock to confirm it was in place. He loved this makeshift studio. It was his parent’s home where he had grown up. They were in Minnesota – perhaps alive, probably dead. So many were dead, and it wouldn’t stop.

Sections of the acoustic foam he had recently reapplied to the garage door were falling down, exposing the insulation underneath. He thought momentarily about repairing it.

He dropped his head and uttered, “I may die here, and it could be today. Worse yet, I may get no warning. Whatever it is, whatever of the myriad plagues released, I doubt I’ll survive them much longer. I’m not special. Ducked the blade one too many times. Being in this city I loved so long, I hate to admit that it is no longer my treasured place as it is.”

Unconcerned about sound quality, he pushed the pop filter aside.

“Unlike my other podcasts, there are no guests today. It’s not that they wouldn’t come if they could. They can’t participate when they’re dead or unable to travel without the imminent threat of death. The fact that the power is on in Cambridge is a miracle, or that I can ping the server network and find it’s still up. The resilience they built into these backbones, all the way to the network endpoints, is amazing. Kudos to those power and network engineers who imagined such a versatile system, whether wired or wireless. You’ve got to love them for creating a network that will outlast the humans that made it.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Peter stopped again and looked at the newspaper cutout on his wall that read, ‘Obelisk crash-lands on Saskatchewan farm – the Waening from an Alien Race?’ It was almost funny then. The editors were so flustered to report-out on this revelation, they forgot to use spellcheck on the heading. He shuddered at what had transpired since that day.

“I’ll do this podcast, but I can’t guarantee you it won’t abruptly end, as every end is unpleasant and unplanned these days. Without Molli to help me prepare, without my usual guests to interview, I’m lost on how to begin.”

He peered again at the blood on his hand, reminding him to check if he was injured by his latest run-in. Peter pulled up his red plaid shirt, one of his favorites, and felt around for the cold, thick wetness of blood and signs of a wound. Bunching-up his t-shirt, he felt around his left and right sides for bullet holes.

“I see nothing here. Blood is on me, but I can’t find a wound anywhere unless it’s draining from that perennial hole in my head. Sorry, sorry. My terrible sense of humor is not appropriate, not in these times, these last days. To the show’s old timers, those who were with us before we attracted the larger crowds, you’ll recall our original charter. Our goal was to report with clarity on science topics. I mean, hell, here we are in Cambridge, Mass. If science wasn’t happening in this town, it wasn’t happening at all, or so we believed. Democracy is a good thing, but democratized gene editing and other virulent tech? Well, crap, we’ve learned hard lessons.”

Peter paused and took another drink of water. He was unusually thirsty, and anything out of the ordinary, any odd behavior, was a bad sign.

“In the last two months, we manufactured our destiny and energized creation, both good and bad, but mostly bad. It was evident every day in the media with each discovery – a new use, a new way to capitalize and profit on tech, a potential defense of any impending threat. That’s what it was for, right? We were protecting ourselves from the threat, the onerous threat, the presumed and pending invasion. And in these last dozen weeks of interviewing our guests, we got to see firsthand what some were doing. And to think, those few guests were a fraction of such characters in the global mix. We only interviewed people who lived in the Boston area or were stopping by our city for another purpose. A proverbial drop in the freaking bucket of existential experimenters. Democratizing this tech killed us. Hey, give me a second as I need to ensure we’re still on air.”

Three vidscreens were arrayed in front of him, one with a map of the server network. Peter ran a few pings.

“Can some of you try to email me? Good old trusty email. Mine still shows it’s alive. Cell system is out in Boston, and I assume that is a global deal by now. Please, somebody just ping me.”

He returned to his microphone. “I’ll get philosophical on you, so bear with me. This was an everyman podcast, or every person. Whatever. I wanted to help people understand and appreciate the technology. We didn’t mean to cause a ruckus or contribute to the fray, and I’m uncertain how the hell that happened. Molli and I were simply interviewing people. Surely the podcast was a bellwether, a sign of what was going on everywhere, or it was because we ran it from Cambridge, home to great minds and great institutions. I was fulfilling the charter, the original, innocent charter, and it unintentionally corrupted along the way. Not just here, not just Cambridge, or Boston, or the States for that matter. Things got corrupted everywhere, and they were corruptible long before this podcast started. Other podcasters were doing the same thing, just none that got so amped-up and electrified as us.”

A dog barked in the distance, the same hound the neighbors left out to whine incessantly for all to enjoy. It, too, would meet its end soon.

“I’m not arguing that I was not part of the problem. Doubtless, our podcast was a town crier of sorts. What the hell? A podcast can’t change the freaking world. We’re people talking. Just conversation.”

He paused, wondering how much of that was his own rationalization of innocence.

“Odd if you ponder it, that Boston was the center of global democracy. It’s where the idea got legs on this continent. I can’t distort the greatness that was democracy, so I hate to use that word ‘democratizing’ to describe what just happened to us. But the bar kept getting lower and lower for meddling in volatile tech. Too low. I suppose that’s democratizing for lack of a better term. We should have considered the implications of where we were headed. Hell, a fifth grader could buy a kit to modify the DNA of viruses and bacteria, and that was a decade ago. We should have considered it then – but by that time, it was too late.”

He looked around the dimly lit garage and remembered how it brightened when Molli and guests were there.

“We might have controlled things better, but it doesn’t mean the Chinese would have complied, or the Bulgarians, or my friends north of the border, or name your trillionaire or autocrat. We had a caustic mix of biology, chemistry, physics, genetics, time, and humanity – all focused on the one goal of limiting our threat exposure. But it appears that was far from our only goal, and many subgoals distorted the outcome. We spoke of chaos theory in podcast number thirty-three, I believe. Remember the double-rod pendulum, and how a small variation had a massive, eventual effect? Well, we had lots and lots of small things happening, whether that was our little garage experimenters, industry, or the hallowed halls of institutions and governments. Some of them impacted the big things like human decency, ecology, fear, politics – and I can’t forget genetics. If history could add this one last entry about humanity, it would say that chaos theory got to us. How little gene drives and scroll tech were allowed to go hog wild, ultimately screwing the proverbial pooch. But I digress.”

Peter peered back at the screen that displayed his email account.

“Ah, got an email! Somebody is indeed out there on the other end.”

He noticed the address was not from a familiar fan, and the subject line showed a single question mark.

“I’ll read the message out loud, assuming it’s not too gruesome.”

His jaw dropped, and the letters fell from his mouth. “HMN M.”

It was Molli. That was their simple abbreviation to get the other’s attention. They’d often use it when shifting notes during a podcast.

“Help me now,” he whispered.

At that moment, he detected a noise in the kitchen then jumped from his chair at an ominous pounding on the garage door to the house.

A raspy voice screamed from the other side, “Open and face your death! I smell you in there.”

He could fight no longer. “Jesus, a mech with olfactory geedee.”

Another fist-pounding and shove at the door caused the lock to split the door jamb.

The mech pushed his arm through.

Peter’s makeshift barrier was not working.

“I’m dead,” he sputtered into the mic.