The Last
Prompt: It is the end of days. God and Lucifer stand before the last human being. You are the first neutral soul who is neither good or evil enough to pass into an afterlife thus must be judged personally.
Three people stood on the sixth floor of the Synergistic Tech Solutions office. One, a woman of middle years in a professional business suit, was pacing her way through and argument with an older man. The mans t-shirt was tucked into his jeans, he appeared a fairly disheveled and more than a bit distressed. As they argued they continued to cast furtive glances into the cubicle where the third person sat, quietly staring.
“Nonsense, I’m not the omniscient one, I don’t have the time to tempt every mortal being in this joke of a creation.” she spat, spinning on her heel, her pacing becoming ever more violent.
An office chair rolled under him seemingly propelled by nothing as he sat down, exhaustion tinting his voice, “Lucy, the system doesn’t permit for this to happen. The original sin was meant to prevent this very problem.” He leaned back, covering his eyes with a hand.
“Well just pick one, just pick one and let’s get this over with. I have been waiting eons to get out of this hole.” her pacing paused, arms cocked on hips, body tense like a cat ready to pounce on whatever he said next.
He looked for a long moment, and then shrugged away from her gaze “Don’t be a child. You know it doesn’t work like that Lucy, there are rules that-”
“No one is left to give a damn about your rules! This is the last one, just pick a direction and get rid of it.”
“Umm… excuse me.” the third voice chimed in. Both faces turned in shock, as if they had forgotten the third person was there.
The woman walked up to the cubicle opening, leaning on it and somehow acquiring a mug of coffee from nowhere. “Interesting, I didn’t think of this, let’s just ask it.”
The man righted himself in his chair, rolled over into the cubicle smiling. “Hello there,” he said in a voice that he probably thought was soothing, ”you must be confused. I am sorry if we have frightened you.”
“Yeah, umm, it’s alright I guess.” the third sorted papers in a way that seemed borderline therapeutic. “I was pretty confused at first, but the last…” the person checked their watch, “forty five minutes of argument have basically clarified things.”
The woman’s snort of laughter caused her to pull her coffee away from her face quickly. “Well,” she said while wiping her face with a napkin, “This one seems fun, I might take it.”
The man looked to her slightly annoyed, “can we be serious for a second please? I know you think my entire creation is your playhouse, but we have an actual problem here.”
“Christ almighty, we’ve been serious for fourteen and a half billion years, is there any chance that you can pull your divine head out of your all powerful a-”
“Hey, okay guys, so I’m obviously in no hurry,” the third leaned forward as if to intervene, “but maybe we stay on topic and avoid any personal attacks?”
The woman looked irritated, but quietly relented, putting her hands up and going back to her coffee.
“Lucy, can I call you Lucy?”
“That’s fine,” she said quietly, shaking her head slightly
“Okay, Lucy have a seat.” the third person stood and rolled their chair over towards the woman, moving to sit on the edge of the desk. “May I ask what I should call you sir?” the person looked cautiously to the man.
He paused for a moment of thought and chuckled, “call me Aleph.”
Lucy gave a derisive snort, but held from any further comments after a disappointed glance from the third.
“So, let me be sure I understand,” the person said, “I am the last person on earth, right?”
“Yes.” Lucy affirmed.
“And for some reason you can’t decide where I am supposed to go.”
“It’s not even that,” Aleph interjected, “We shouldn’t have to decide. All people are judged, based on their life, automatically. There were a few puzzlers but they were dealt with in short order. You, you are perfectly balanced. It is beyond credulity, it should not be possible for you to be so dispassionate that you do not stray one way or the other.” he noticed Lucy preparing to speak, and quickly cut her off, “and the whole system is built on very solid rules. If we break them by just picking one at random and sending you away, then things start to break down. We are down to the last life form in my creation, and if we let the whole thing fall apart we are going to spend another few billion years cleaning up the mess.”
“And the fact that we spent the better part of an hour arguing it shows just how far gone we are.” Lucy sighed, jerking her thumb at Aleph, “If that omniscient, pontificating, windbag takes longer than fifteen seconds to parse all the information and make a decision, then there is no decision he can make.”
“So I have a question,” the third person said, turning to Lucy, “I don’t mean to overstep, but why do you need to do that?”
“What?” She asked with a suspicious squint.
“Well, you are really taking jabs to Aleph,” the person gestured to the man, “you must know it doesn’t help at all.”
She gestured incredulously, “do you know who we are?”
“Presumably Lucifer and God?”
She paused a beat, caught off guard by the matter of fact response, “We hate each other, it’s just the way things go.”
“I don’t hate at all, and I certainly don’t hate you, you are my child. I just dislike your attitudes and ideas regarding the way you should behave in my creation.” He said, while absentmindedly fiddling with paperclip.
“Did you think for even a second of these interminable eons that it wasn’t your creation?” She asked, spinning to face him and crossing her legs.
He scoffed, turning to face her, arms crossed, “How do you possibly figure that it isn’t mine, who else made it?”
“Oh we all know that you made it. But do you think that perhaps, if you create self sustaining, self replicating, self determining life, that maybe it becomes their life?”
“Well it is their life to be sure, that’s the point of free will, bu-”
“No hold on, if it is their life, do they not have a right to a place to live?”
“Well yea-”
“And so would you say that you are just lending them the world they live on? Don’t you leave them with the responsibility of managing it?” she asked with an emphatic gesture.
“I mean, yes… It is theirs in that sense,” he said cautiously.
“Could it be,” she asked, almost rhetorically now, “that you should let people just do what they want with the gift that now belongs to them, and not judge them on how they use their free will?”
There was a heavy silence, and they just looked at each other.
His body relaxed with a heavy sigh, “you’re not wrong,” again he caught her starting to talk, and jumped to correct himself, “you are right.” he said, and the room went silent again. There was a power to those words, and Lucy was left with her mouth open, hand hanging in the air. After a few seconds she caught herself, lowered her hand, and quietly looked away.
He spoke again, quietly this time, without looking up from the floor, “but did you have to work so hard to make them destroy it?”
“I didn’t cause all that,” she said, gesturing out the window.
“I know, I know,” he leaned back in his chair again, there was a long wait before he looked back to her with eyes that glistened slightly with emotion. “It doesn’t matter what effect you had on them. It just hurts that you tried so hard, that it was so important to you to make the effort to ruin them.”
“Why are you saying all this?” she asked dismissively.
“I don’t know,” he said, wiping his face, “I guess that at the end of all this, it just seems pointless to keep any of it back.”
“I just hated your ownership,” she confessed with a shrug, “and your plans, and your self assurance. I wanted to see one of your plans fail, just once see you confused.”
“Well you have it” He gestured at the person “I have no clue what to do here.”
“Well I don’t want it now,” She laughed, “now I want it to go smoothly.”
He chuckled and the tension seemed to dissipate a bit. It seemed that there was some long awaited peace that settled between the two. The third person thought that given another fourteen billion years they wouldn’t solve all of the problems between them, but there seemed to be an understanding that was built in that moment. For the span of a breath there was a peace that seemed to fit perfectly in the utter silence of a world devoid of all life.
The third person loathed to disrupt the moment, but they became suddenly aware that now was the time, before there was a chance to undo this amnesty. The individual stood up and moved to place their hand on Aleph’s shoulder.
“What? What is this?” he says while turning to look at the person
“You two don’t need to worry about this any more.” the person said, in a voice that seemed to thicken the calm, and relax the mind, “you two go on, and I will stay after.”
“I’m sorry, that won’t work,” Aleph said, “there is only one entity that can outla…” his words cut short in a exhale of realization.
Lucy looked up from the window she had moved to, “What? Did you figure it out?” she said
“I think I have,” he said, almost to himself, never breaking eye contact with the third person.
“Well out with it, I don’t want to be here any longer than we have to.” she said, walking back over, but stopped short when she saw the uncharacteristically reverent look on Aleph’s face. Aleph seemed about to ask a question, but stop as if suddenly coming to the answer himself.
“Thank you for this moment old friend.”
“Of course” the third person said, and Aleph disappeared.
“What have you done!?” Lucy shouted, running over, she looked at the person in horror, “What are you?”
“I am the end of all things Lucifer.” the person said, “I am the death of creation.” she stared in disgust at this person, but a slow awareness of the entity she was looking at seemed to complete itself in her mind and on her face.
“you are aren’t you?” she sneered and shook her head, “why did you do any of this? You could have just ended it. Did you enjoy making us dance?”
“Your anger and his hubris were the symptoms of the first imbalance in the universe, the flaw from which all other imbalance originated. Once resolved, this creation will wrap up nicely. We should leave a clean slate for the next one.”
“Well jokes on you, because your little trick has me angry as hell, what can you do about that you sanctimonious bastard?” despite her anger she seemed to flinch imperceptibly as the person stepped up to her.
“You know that it’s different.” the person said as they set their hand on Lucy’s shoulder.
“Fuck you” Lucy said, choking back tears.
“Oh Lucy,” the person smiled softly, “this is the only way it could have been, defiant to the last.”
And she was gone.
