How To Feel Joy While The World Dies

Gerard von Besius woke in a cold sweat. The smart lights were timed to his bio-rythms, so as soon as he jolted awake, the far wall of his bedroom came alive with a panoramic image of a rising sun over a tropical volcanic island. Had it been a dream? No, it had been real. Which made him cringe with nausea. He felt the concrete box that he was in like never before. The panoramic wall shifted to a plush forest floor covered in ferns and moss.

Gerard got out of bed. The bullet proof glass wall had chipped bullet divots. The glass door opened for him to pass through. He walked out into the hall. The bodies were gone. The blood was still splattered and dried all down the concrete hall.

“Mutinous bastards,” he thought. He came around the corner at the end of the hall into the enormous atrium with smart kitchen, long couches, exotic pelt rugs, a pool in the middle. The pool was still discolored red a little. A sunny sky projected onto the enormous ceiling. A woman’s voice gave a weather forecast: “Today’s forecast, 72 degrees and sunny,” it announced.

Gerard smelled frying butter and eggs, and coffee. For a second he believed it was real. Then he remembered. What he wouldn’t give for real eggs, butter and coffee. He’d give one of his islands in the Bahamas, he figured. But it was just the aromatizer, tricking his mind into thinking the protein compound Alexander was preparing was real.

“Alexander?” he asked.

“Yes sir?” a speaker responded.

“Where is everyone?”

“They are outside, sir.” Alexander responded.

Gerard shuddered.

“Everyone?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

He remembered, in that moment, a time when he was riding the city bus along Divisdero Ave, through the Castro, in the early morning sunlight. He was in the back of the bus, the window slid open. Someone had taken a fat black marker and tagged the frame outside the window, a tiny announcement of someone’s existence. He was listening to LCD Soundsystem as the beautifully painted old Victorian houses of the Castro passed him by. He knew even back then it was the end of the world, but he soaked in that one moment and thought, “At least it’s not today.”

Well, today was today.

He looked into the ceiling of the giant atrium. He could see where the video loop stitched at the seams. It was getting older, and no one left to repair it, or to mine the resources and ship them across the world to manufacture the necessary replacements to make it new again. He noticed the couches were worn, the pelts thinning. He hadn’t experienced disuse in so long. Everything was always new, top of the line. Exotic woods. His yacht — the one that sank in the harbor–was renowned for having the cabin built out with the last teak in existence.

Gerard remembered a woman, curly brown hair, beaming smile, lighting incense, holding her palms to her heart, basking in the joy of existence, in a sunlit movement studio, and he remembered thinking, “How can you be so hopeful, so joyous as others were burning themselves to protest extinction?” But some people carry the light of hope. He never felt that. He knew it was ending. He was just a realist about it. Get yours, before someone else does.

Now he realized; he’d gone about it the wrong way.

“Alexander,” he said, “get a suit ready. I’m going outside.”

Gerard crossed the atrium to a small door that opened as he approached. Blood was streaked across the floor, all the way to the airlock door at the end of the room. Gerard waited.

“Alexander, the suit,” he said.

“The door is jammed,” the speaker said.

Gerard pried it open, manually pulled the suit off a hanger on a track that would not budge. He awkwardly pulled the suit over himself. He’d never had to do it manually before. He entered the airlock vestibule, and waited for the “Outside Door” to open.

Bleak light poured into the dark chamber. Out on the landscape was rock, and the dead matter of branches and grasses. A scarred and ugly, rugged land.

“I can’t believe this was New Zealand,” he thought.

Laying about the entrance were dozens of bodies, still fresh from the night before. A faction of his armed guard had turned on him. They’d killed his women and his children to get to him. The loyal ones fought back. Alexander finished them all off by suffocating them out. Or so Alexander had told him. He’d been cowering in his room. There was video footage but he couldn’t bear to look.

Shots from a distance at Suckenstein’s compound. What the fuck was going on.

Then he saw the body of his daughter, Amelie, his favorite. She was going to rule the world one day. He looked around. This shit. She was going to rule this desolate piece of shit land.

Gerard went inside. Tears welled up in his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he cried. He pulled the helmet off his suit.

“Alexander!” he barked hoarsely.

“Yes, sir.”

“Kill me.” Gerard said.

“Sir, I can not. I am programmed never to harm you.”

“Kill me, god damnit.” Gerard shouted.

“Even if you die, I must resuscitate you.” Alexander replied.

Gerard tried to tear the suit off himself, failed.

“Fuck you. I’ll do it myself.”

Gerard grabbed for an assault rifle stored in a locker in the airlock vestibule. The robot arm clutching it would not release it.

“Alexander, let go!”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Gerard marched into the kitchen with his suit on.

“Sir, if you wear the suit into the living quarters, you will contaminate–”

“Fuck you.”

Gerard went to pull a drawer. It was locked. Gerard kicked the drawer. Kicked chairs over.

“Open the drawer!” Gerard yelled.

“Sir, I can not let you harm yourself.”

Gerard then started pounding his bare skull on the marble countertop, cracking it and leaving a thick bloody smudge on the smooth surface.

“Sir, I must stop you–”

“Fuck you. Fuck you. You have no idea!”

Gerard kept pounding his skull against the counter until all went black and he slumped on the floor.

Nothing. Then…

Gerard awoke on an operating table, robotic arms hovering above him. He was restrained to the table.

“Sir, I am programmed to never let you die.” Alexander said.

Gerard screamed and screamed until his voice was gone. He was sweating and out of breath.

“I love you, sir,” Alexander said, “I will keep you alive forever.”