He had forgotten. It was the last day on the Mayan calendar, the day the latest gaggle of honking doomsayers and fortune-tellers had proclaimed to be mankind’s last on Earth. For weeks, the media had made a circus of it, turning TV into a barrage of inane talk shows and special reports discussing the pseudo-science of Armageddon. Magazines, papers, the Internet, his students — there was no escaping it. Of course, the scientific community and every rational being on the planet dismissed the notion, but they, too, were having fun with it. It was Mardi Gras in December, but he had forgotten because it was ridiculous. There was not a day that went by that was not predicted by somebody to be the end of days. Eventually, one of them would be right. This? This was something else.
Loeb returned to the Freedom Hotel where he had booked a room for the three-day conference. That was where he stayed whenever he traveled to Philadelphia. The lobby was a mausoleum. He took the elevator to his floor and walked down an empty hall past numbered vacant tombs. A room service cart stood abandoned at the door beside his. The eggs were cold but the coffee in the insulated carafe still hot. He took the plate of toast, the coffee, and a half-filled snifter of brandy and locked the door behind him.
The city was beautiful at night. He had always liked the view from the hotel — a ribbon of lights in perpetual motion on the tree-lined Parkway, the illuminated and majestic Art Museum in the distance. The streetlights still converged to a distant vanishing point, but the cars were dark and motionless, and the ribbon gone. He placed the food and drink on top of a magazine on the writing desk by his window. A shot of brandy, then another — the world was falling apart, had fallen apart. He needed to think straight. He needed coffee, coffee and more brandy.
Below his hotel window, the fountain in Logan Circle was dark, its lights and water shut off for the winter. Streetlamps cast the snow-covered park in pale yellow. The traffic circle connecting the Parkway to all the major avenues in that part of the city had a park where people met and connected — networked, as people liked to say. It was all about making connections. Loeb saw what needed to be done as clearly as he saw the bottom of the brandy snifter.
Priority one was survival. That was a given. Every winter, too many neglected and homeless people froze to death on the streets of Philadelphia. He wasn’t going to end up like that. The Freedom Hotel had power and heat, a high-end men’s clothing store on the mezzanine, a five-star restaurant, chillers stocked with meat and vegetables, and a passable wine cellar. He would take inventory the next day and get whatever was lacking from the city’s finest markets and liquor stores nearby. He would live in luxury to the end.
Finding the other survivors was priority number two. Loeb would not accept that everyone but him had vanished. Millions, perhaps even billions, might have — that he could conceive in a world filled with weapons of mass destruction — but not everyone. Neither species extinction nor the laws of physics worked that way. Physical equations were never solved without some degree of uncertainty. Ask Heisenberg. There are no absolutes in life. And beyond the physical impossibility of such an instantaneous mass extinction, even the smartest man on the planet did not have that high an opinion of himself to believe that, of the 6.8 billion humans, he alone had been selected by nature to survive. There had to be others.
As predicted by the many who feared rather than embraced artificial intelligence, the world’s network of computers survived the demise of man. The Internet was closest thing to a living, thinking being Loeb had found thus far. It chose appropriate ads for him to see as he probed for others online. It knew he was at the Freedom Hotel, suggesting a wine to try with dinner that night. It somehow surmised that he would be interested in a vacation on some remote island near the equator, someplace warm, and it offered to book him an ocean cruise to get there. It even concluded that he needed a date that night.
He posted messages on bulletin boards, giving his email, cell, city, and identity. He posted on hundreds of news sites and purchased ads that automated servers pushed to every major online news outlet on the planet. Everything was connected. TV stations were still broadcasting, most looping endlessly through commercials targeted at a demographic no longer there. Some were transmitting blank screens, which Loeb found more appropriate, but one — Channel Three — was different and so became his inspiration. Its story was an eerie newsroom still life with vacant anchor’s chair. This story needed a face, his face.
Days passed before Loeb ventured outside. He chose a cold clear morning to make his way to the studios of Channel Three through desolate streets and around abandoned vehicles. Had humanity at least shown the courtesy of pulling over before the end, he could have driven there, but they must have had more pressing concerns at 12:21:12 p.m. on 12|21|12. He found a bicycle and pedaled the twenty blocks to Channel Three.
No one was there, yet the building seemed alive when Loeb came through its revolving doors. With the station’s unmistakable theme music as the backdrop, monitors throughout the lobby ran clips of news broadcasts from history — the first man on the moon, the fateful Dallas motorcade, the boxing match that stunned the world — stories so famous that sound was irrelevant. Motion sensors detected his presence, and an automated greeting welcomed Loeb and asked him to check in with the receptionist. Frozen in time, Friday’s closing prices rolled across a stock market ticker above the elevator. The directory beside it told Loeb what he needed to know. He found his way into the electronic heart of the station and set up the recording equipment, sat in the anchor’s chair and recorded his message.
“I am Dr. Philip Loeb. If you are seeing this, you are one of the few left. As far as I can tell, everyone else is gone. It’s like this all over the city and, in all likelihood, the world. I don’t know the cause. I don’t know how it happened. It just… did. The systems in place before this event are still functioning: we still have power, heat, and there is enough food to last the winter. The Internet is working, and the satellites are still transmitting. If you are watching this message, know that you are not alone. We must join together. We need to make plans. We need to survive. Contact me. My phone, email, and location are on the screen. Please, contact me. It is our only hope.”
He set the station to broadcast at full wattage and tied it into the national network. The tape would loop infinitely. Loeb streamed it over the station’s website and linked to it from every video hosting site he could find. He created his own login to the station’s billing and tracking software. He couldn’t track TV viewers, but if someone watched the video on the Web, he would know. The message was there for everyone to see. Now, all he could do was wait.
Loeb arrived back at the Freedom Hotel when the long afternoon shadows were washing the streets with bitter cold. The world hadn’t yet noticed the absence of man. It would be hundreds, maybe thousands of years before the effects of human folly were erased from the planet, but far less before everything shut down and the world came grinding to a halt. Time was “x,” the unknown variable in the next equation to be solved.
Fate had not left him a graduate assistant to do his grunt work, so after one stiff drink, and then another to take the chill off, Loeb settled into the chair at his desk by the window and began checking for replies to his posts, comments on his ads, or any sign to indicate someone else was out there.