This is something I wrote for @mydivathings' #365daysofwriting challenge (https://steemit.com/fiction/@mydivathings/day-355-365-days-of-writing-challenge), based on a Photo by Simone Hutsch on Unsplash
The house where the last remaining human in the universe lived was located in a special place in the museum, away from the other exhibits, so as to minimise the risk of infection. Raaaf liked to go and look at it sometimes in his lunch break, slithering down the long corridor and past the three warning signs. He had never seen the Last Human, but he was assured by Grrrrr that she still lived in the house.
But Grrrrr was a lying little slurpbeetle and Raaaf didn't trust a word of what she said.
Raaaf had seen a shadow move, once, at the upstairs window. He wondered if the Last Human knew she was being kept artificially alive in The Museum of Things That Should Really Be Forgotten. Grrrrr said that the Last Human was kept occupied with something they called Social Media. She thought, Grrrr said, that she thought she was interacting with real people - other humans - and that people read her posts and "upvoted" them.
“She doesn’t realise that anyone who might give a shit about what a human being thinks died a couple of millennia ago,” the slurpbeetle said, licking the sticky slime that oozed from her anal gland.
“Isn’t it cruel?” Raaaf asked, wondering what the slime tasted like. He knew he shouldn’t think about it. Physical interactions between slurpbeetles and glovelboxes were not encouraged, to say the least. “Keeping her alive, like that. Tricking her into thinking there are others out there?”
“Not after what they did!” Grrrr said. “If it was up to me, I’d tell her that she’s on her own. No one cares what drivel she sends into the ether. That her whole existance is just meaningless.”
Raaaf thought that was a bit mean. And anyway, surely it was a bit rich coming from a slurpbeetle who finds meaning slurping slime from her own arse. But he said nothing.
Raaaf wriggled his way up to the house. It was suspended in a Nothing Field. Grrrr said that from inside the Nothing Field it appeared as if there was Something.
“She sees what she wants to see,” Grrrr said.
“What do you think that is?”
“Fuck knows,” the slurpbeetle said, sucking slime into her mouth. “Disgusting creatures, humans. Probably something horrible.”
Raaaf didn’t know why Human Beings fascinated him so. As a baby glovelbox he had always enjoyed listening to the Human Stories, his mother told him as he suckled from her. They had had so much potential, he thought. But they didn’t even know it.
The house was funny. Peculiar, rather than ha ha. Glovelboxes didn’t have houses, of course, their glovel encrusted shell was their home. And it wasn’t made of gloop like the slurpbeetles used. Grrrr said Human raped their planet for materials to build their houses, and raped it again to heat it. “Very destructive,” she said.
“But creative too,” Raaaf said.
But Grrrr disagreed and burped. A small bubble of anal slime popped out of her mouth and Raaaf watched it float higher and higher above them until it exploded and showered them both with droplets of goo. Raaaf waited until Grrrr wasn’t looking before he licked his shell clean. It did taste as good as it looked.
He looked up at the window, where he had seen the shadow move, but there was nothing. Not today, anyway. Perhaps she had died, Raaaf thought, as he slithered back down the corridor. Perhaps that wouldnt be a bad thing.
Perhaps it would be for the best.
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