The Pier at the End of the World

by Terry Pearce

The glow is pink in the evenings, orange in the mornings. Once, you could see the sun rise and set from here. It does not rise or set now. When the orange glow has faded and grey joins every horizon, there is nothing more to stay on the pier for. I get up. I walk through the streets of the city. I know that I will find nothing new.

I have walked these streets alone on over four thousand three hundred days. At first, there were small animals. Cats. Rats. Dogs. These disappeared; this is probably good. I might have started talking to them. I am so lonely. Would talking to animals that cannot reply be a sign of madness? I am not sure if a machine can go mad. I would not have thought that a machine could become lonely. But then I had never been alone.

I walk with no plan. When I was checking for survivors, I methodically followed a street plan. Now I wander. If a machine decides to move at random, the randomness should be pure. Does a random number generator not average out exactly, on a long enough timeline?

But I seem always to come back to the house. I thought at first that the streets led more easily to the house. But I have studied the map, and I cannot see how it is so. In fact, the opposite should be the case. I am more than eight years overdue for a maintenance check. Something could be wrong. How do I know?

The house. Her things are there. When she was alive, when I waited on her in the house, I felt nothing for her. Not an absence of feeling: there was no hole where something should be. Nothing should have been there, and nothing was. But now, she is gone. She is missing. Is it happiness, this... thing I believe I would experience, were she here? Is it pleasure I would receive if I could make her one more peanut-butter and jelly sandwich?

I have always known I could not feel. Not believed; known. When she spoke about Church, about her God, she spoke of knowing. She said that belief was too weak a word. I do not know that God exists. I do not believe that God exists. But did I know that I could not feel? Or did I believe?

Questions, always. There is nobody to answer them. It is not logical that I should ask questions when I know that there will be no answers. It is not rational that I should search the city streets, when I know there is no-one to find. It is not reasonable that my thoughts and my path should return always to the house, when nothing remains there.

In the face of all this, I must re-examine my assumptions. Maybe I can feel. Maybe I can go mad. Maybe God watches me.

I see the pink start to shade the sky to the west. I walk back to the pier. I sit and watch as the light suffuses the clouds and violet clutches the sky. I watch the swirls and patterns in the surf as white dances with flashes of purple; round, round and down into a bed of deep, deep blue.

I see the beauty. I feel it.