THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE MAN FROM THE PYRAMID

When it is the time of the last men, it looks like this; Black Pyramids crawl across empty, radioactive fields, chasing the dim sun across green skies. The people are trapped in the pyramids and cannot leave them, because the world is poison. Each person is cocooned in machines, pulling and adding slurry to a group sum, feeding others and feeding on others, as they all winnow down to ashes. 

What year? I ask him. What year is that?

But he doesn't know he says, just, "a long time from now."

In the future, he continues, all reason has left men. Still, the universe yawns, a hole which can never be filled. All borders of what might be learned by the human mind have been reached and there is nowhere left to go. There are no handholds left to pull ourselves up. The Earth is our tomb, and the dreams of previous men — the idea of escaping and populating the empty stars, the idea of turning inward, or escaping to a world rendered in a machine — each was more hopelessly naive than the last.

At the time of the last men, all want has left. People understand the nature of the world, and their true place in it, and have discarded the once-biological need to scrabble and hope. 

But you came from there? How?

He can't really tell me that, he says. I wouldn't want to know anyway. 

The Black Pyramids were a stop-gap, once. A place to store the future of man while calamities engulfed the Earth. Terrible things that had slept since before the Earth cooled that woke and warred in the coming epochs of time. Most of those outside the safety provided by the pyramids went mad and perished. The grid-like order that had wrapped the world in cement crumbled and fell to ruin. Within two generations, humans hunted and fed on other humans as prey. Finally, it great gouts of ecstatic violence, the last, wild, humans perished in rituals to abase themselves to the calamities. This was like praying to a hurricane, or worshipping cancer. While inside the Black Pyramids, the last men remained untouched by the madness, for such was the function of them. 

How long do we have? 

He looks at me, and his eyes, as they always do, appear to glow a faint green. Hardly noticeable really. And his teeth, perfect and without blemish show themselves. He holds up three fingers and waggles them.

Three what? Three hundred?

Centuries, he says. At least. But it doesn't matter. 

Is there any way to stop it?

But he just continues.

Inside the Black Pyramids, the last men ply the math using startling methods by today's standards which some might call "magic." But this is not done as some attempt at attainment, understanding, or escape, it is merely done to maintain a status quo. The calamities of the globe hunger for minds, and to use them in such a manner prevents them from being sensed and...consumed. Such math would be quite beyond modern humans to imagine, much less enact, so teaching it to humans of this time is quite useless, like giving the blueprints of a pistol to a chimpanzee.

Things go quiet until I ask the question I've been wanting to ask him. 

What's surprised you here?

Again he smiles. Much. He says. For a time purported to be so vile and self-serving, there is much kindness, and excess, and gift-giving. Giving gifts in his time is limited in communication to the status of something from a fable. A concept so alien yet on the periphery of reality that it may have once been real. The only gift he had ever received in the Black Pyramid was his enclosure, when he came of age. Since then, only silence, the sounds of moving fluids like the murmur of a giant heart, blue light and the thoughts of others plying their work. This world, now, is awash in gifts. People give freely in a way he has trouble understanding. 

How is it you have escaped the Black Pyramid. Why...

He looks at me and his face is filled with a deep and regretful sadness. The face of a man that has accidentally told a child something meant only for adults, something the child has misunderstood terribly. 

None may escape the Black Pyramid, nor have I. Even now, I am there. As I ply the strange maths needed to persist, my mind moves through the ages of this world, searching, sorting and seeing the previous worlds of man. My job brings me here and yet I am not here. I speak now to a ghost of an age long passed, and through the dance of math, the ghost speaks back. 

And with that, he was gone.