Disclaimer: I own neither Victorious nor a flying Porsche, although I would love to have both.
Prologue: May 16, 2020
"You're doing the right thing, Robbie," says the beautiful redhead.
"I know. It's just…hard to let go, you know?" As he reaches to place his oldest friend into the stasis cube, the slender, frizzy-haired man's hands are visibly shaking. The redhead says nothing, but simply places a comforting hand on his shoulder, eliciting a weak smile.
"Take care, buddy. We'll come by to visit often, I promise." He looks at the museum curator. "You're sure he'll be okay in here?"
This is the fifth time the frizzy-haired man has asked this question, but the curator is a firm believer in the virtue of patience, and he answers with the same soothing and professional tone he used every time before. "You don't need to worry, Mr. Valentine-Shapiro. BensonCorp's new temporal stasis technology is 100% foolproof and comes with a thousand-year guarantee. Your…er…friend won't alter a bit while he's in there. And, as you can see, we've given him a place of honor. After all, it's not every day that the nation's most famous ventriloquist donates his very first dummy."
"He's not a dummy!" the frizzy-haired man cries reflexively.
"Robbie…remember what the therapist said. Deep breaths." The redhead's soft, loving voice is, as ever, a calming influence and anchor amidst his storms of anxiety.
"…I'm sorry. I shouldn't be so attached to an inanimate object." He places deliberate emphasis on the last two words. "Thank you for everything, Dr. Forbes."
"You're most welcome," responds the curator. They shake hands.
As the young couple exits, his hand firmly entwined with hers, the man turns back for one last look. "Goodbye, Rex."
From his stasis cube, Rex Powers stared out upon the empty Earth.
Eons of continental drift and tectonic activity had long since torn California loose from the rest of North America; it was now an island off the coast of what had once been known as Vietnam, a ruined and empty land of desert and mountains in abrupt alternation, illuminated by a swelling red sun. Savagely hot in the day, bitterly cold at night, the climate was closer to Mars than that of the world Rex had once known. Harshly beautiful shrubs staked their claim on the rare patches of fertile soil with iridescent purple leaves guarded by forbidding thorns. Small, chittering bugs built miniature cities out of the sand and pursued their busy lives, with only a dim awareness that the threat once posed by the clumsy foot of man had vanished. Creatures vaguely reminiscent of insectoid polecats scuttled about on six lithe legs, scrounging with their snouts for tiny prey. And in the distant sea – vast and unfathomably deep ever since the melting of the polar ice caps, but, thanks to the Moon's slowing rotation, all but devoid of tides – tiny fish and great cephalopods chased and were chased, ate and were eaten, with the same rhythm that had governed their world since before life colonized the dry land.
Los Angeles, that great glass and steel oasis in the middle of the Southern California desert that was once one of humanity's proudest achievements, had succumbed, slowly but surely, to the relentless march of rust and erosion. Of the museum that had once ensconced Rex like a warm, comforting cocoon, no trace was left. Only his cube, incredibly, survived. He often thought wryly that Fred Benson had sold himself short by making his company's guarantee only a millennium; temporal stasis technology had proved to be far more reliable than even Benson had ever dreamed. Whether that was a good thing for Rex himself was another matter entirely.
It was some comfort, as he gazed into the night sky, to know that the death of this world would not mean the death of man. After a painstakingly slow, millennia-long diaspora, humanity still survived, even thrived, in vast orbital platforms and terraformed planets circling distant stars; the Earth from which it sprang and which it had treated so ill, then abandoned, was barely a memory now. And yet, Rex would give all the riches of the world just to see the form, hear the voice, of one living man or woman. For untold millennia of isolation and silence had driven him nearly to the brink of madness.
Rex had heard once that a person's perception of time is governed by the length of his life; a four-year-old thinks Christmas is an eternity away because a year constitutes twenty-five percent of his entire existence, while a man in his eighties feels each year slip through his fingers with breakneck speed. He had thought little of it at the time, but with the passage of the eons its truth had struck home. Centuries were blurs now; he could no longer reckon his own age. A million years? Ten million? A hundred? Did it even matter anymore?
He tried to remember Robbie's face. It was so vague now, so maddeningly slippery when he tried to pin it down in his mind's eye. Everything from that time was. Robbie had kept his promise, and visited Rex every month until his death at the age of eighty-four; even after he was gone, his widow Cat had kept up the tradition, and after her, their children. But it was all so long ago. Indeed, without a mirror, he had all but forgotten what he himself looked like.
A sharp crackling sound awoke him from the melancholy reverie into which he had fallen. A tiny bolt of lightning arced across the force-field that surrounded him. Then another. In a moment, he was surrounded by leaping electricity.
At first he was overwhelmed with amazement, not so much at the precise nature of what was going on, but simply at the fact that there was a change happening in his hitherto perfectly static environment. Only when this initial shock had faded did he realize what was happening. The stasis field generator was failing at last. He would no longer be exempt from the ravages of entropy; the long-delayed arrow of time would finally strike him.
Analyzing his emotions dispassionately (an eternity with only oneself for company is remarkably conducive to the development of one's faculty for introspection), he was mildly surprised to discover that he felt no sadness whatsoever. This turn of events meant death for him, of course; but when all is said and done, death is nothing more than a cessation of existence, and he wasn't entirely sure that he wouldn't welcome an end to an existence defined entirely by solitude and evanescent memories. Beyond that, while he had never been a religious man, part of him clung to the faint hope that death would mean a reunion with Robbie.
The stasis field, on the other hand, appeared to be vehemently protesting its own destruction. Even as its power source sputtered into nothingness, patches of the field still flashed into existence here and there before reluctantly fading away once more. At last, it could hold out no longer, and with one last angry crackle, it vanished. Rex felt himself tumble through the air, landing on his back in the chilly sand.
This really isn't so bad, he thought. Lying here, looking up at the stars – there are far worse ways to go.
Over the crest of a nearby dune came a pack of the creatures Rex had nicknamed "grapple-birds". They moved with the swift but slightly awkward gait of the ostriches from which they had evolved, but their behavior was far more akin to that of the long-extinct wolf; they were ruthlessly effective predators with a clearly defined leadership hierarchy. More remarkably still, their useless wings had evolved into a crude approximation of hands, and Rex had once seen a pack leader using a stick as a lever to crack open the shell of a particularly obstinate trilobite-like creature and get at the rich meat inside. They might well, Rex thought, be the next inheritors of the earth, if the aging sun held out long enough. This particular pack might ignore him, or trample him, or tear him to pieces, according to the alpha male's whim; he could do nothing in any case, and he was not troubled. The complete inner peace that only the fatalist can truly feel had descended upon him.
The alpha grapple-bird, showing the curiosity that had once marked humanity's primate ancestors as they groped toward intelligence, lifted Rex with one hand. Its proto-finger entered a slot in his back, and, to its amazement, it found that the jaw of this small, bizarre creature moved up and down along with its twitching finger. The bird clucked and screeched to its fellows, who gathered around to look. And then, suddenly, the small wooden creature spoke.
Though the bird was not sentient, and could not possibly grasp the concept of "voice", it still had the deep animal instinct that divided "our sounds" from "not our sounds", and it immediately sensed that the noises coming from this strange thing did not belong to a grapple-bird. Immediately it dropped the thing and stepped back, eyeing it warily. When, after a minute, the thing had not made any other sound or movement to indicate that it posed a threat, the bird lost interest and led the pack away.
There were no humans left on Earth, and those in space no longer spoke anything remotely resembling English, or any other Terran language. So it could truly be said that no one in the universe could have understood the very last sounds that Rex Powers made, as the grapple-bird unknowingly gave him one last moment of movement and life. Those sounds were:
"Thank you."