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THE PAST IS NO LONGER RELEVANT. THE FUTURE IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE.

I don't know why I am dictating these words into my G-drive backpack. They serve no purpose whatsoever, no reason.

Only bleak, horrid reality faces me.

A tiny spider is hanging from a silvery-spider web, in front of the monitor, as if taunting me.

I try to look past the spider, but my eyes keep focusing on it. It spins its web, descending.

Why do you exist, spider? Why do you persist?

I've locked myself away in my last cage, my tomb.

I've made the world like this.

How many days, how many years or months has it been? I'm afraid to look at the calendar.

I've been in this bunker far too long, and I'm beginning to lose track of time, and of myself.

I am so alone, and so it should be, for I've committed the worst crime, the extermination of billions.

I try to convince myself that they were already brain-dead when I ordered the nuclear launch, and it helps just a little.

Only a little, because I know that I am the one who designed the Neural Interface system that was supposed to save humanity but instead brought about the end much faster.

Sigh.

I should never have tried to ask her how to save humanity.

I should never have programmed a self-aware AI search engine.

I should never have studied to be a computer engineer in college.

I should have been a painter.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The terminal beeped wildly.

Another pump failure.

This one can only be fixed outside.

Damn it.

Time for another trip out, into the cold, radioactive wasteland that was once my city, my past, my life.

I passed by a row of sealed-off rooms.

The Dead Zone has somehow found a way into them, infecting them with its wrongness.

A cafeteria, now covered in pink bio-luminescent mold that's slowly devouring all of the salt packages. Food really sucks without salt.

A janitor's closet with a bucket of rainbow-colored water, that seems to shift colors whenever I come near.

Now I can't even wash the floors because I am too afraid to approach the bucket.

A mess hall with cube-shaped cockroaches. How and why did they evolve to be cube-shaped? For improved stackability? Why do roaches need to be stacked?

I shuddered.

I reached the exit.

The enormous blast door rolled out with a rumble.

As I emerged I saw something that I never could have expected.

A towering, nightmarish monstrosity.

A spider thing more than 20 storeys tall.

This was far worse than any Dead Zone mutations I'd read about.

This THING, whatever it was, wasn't paying attention to me and was standing still. Red tentacles were extending from it in all directions, flailing slightly, creepily.

I slid quietly back into the bunker and took the eastern exit. I could still see the gigantic spider, thankfully much further away this time, and I was ready to run back inside if it was to take just one step in my direction. I had to make it to the pump outhouse, fix whatever the issue was, and then go back inside, hopefully for a very, very long time.

I didn't want to deal with the monstrous spider.

I pushed it into the back of my mind as a ridiculous hallucination.

Reach the outhouse, fix the oxygen pump, go back.

Don't look at the spider thing.

Don't look at the spider thing.

Oh God, I looked.