"That's all, folks!"

Every morning, even before he poured a cup, Judd Filts sat down at his display and surveyed the results of the morning's scan. He checked the numbers and consulted his SomCom which was fully loaded, in fact overloaded and as dense as any marble he'd encountered. He might have to purge some extraneous stuff soon, or it might sink under the weight of information.
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No. The dire outcome he had discovered was still on course. Most of the experts disputed it, of course. He was dubbed Judd, the Harbinger of Doom and generally laughed at. He had stopped giving lectures months ago and started devoting all of his time to experimentation. The government dollars were almost unlimited, and the university was happy to give him the time and the space to work. Volunteers were his only problem. Other than a couple of Gen Ed students, both whom he'd contacted through the Astronomy lab, no one had come forth. For the mechanics of his device all that was required was the ability to make ones mind a blank, or to conjure up inane thoughts. For Judd it was a struggle, but he had slowly mastered the process.
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For the test students it had been easier, because they were genuinely stupid.
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The SomCom absently rolled elliptically on the desk top until it touched a pencil, then it squeaked and sprung into the air.
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“Alright, Xi. Let's get down to business.”

-----

He was in the bathtub with his knees bent and his mother was sitting on the edge, telling him to lean forward. She scrubbed his back, scolding him. “It's alright to need somebody. It's okay to ask for help,” she scrubbed so hard for so long his back started to bubble and froth until the borders of this snapshot, this moment in time, began to blister and the scene collapsed into smoldering blackness. Then he was in Albuquerque behind a podium. He had a wheelbarrow with wooden handles, filled with bricks. He bent forward to select a brick, “Ah, I found this brick in Indiana – notice the printing on the side, clearly visible.” The audience was filled with women on folding chairs, all rapt, peering, straining. The room stretched back to eternity. An infinite meeting room containing an inexhaustible supply of ecstatic females. He picked another brick, coming out from behind the podium which appeared to be shrinking anyway, and looked down, seeing he was completely naked and sporting a humongous erection. The audience erupted in laughter and applause, slapping their pale thighs, squeezing their flopping breasts between flailing arms, knocking back their rickety chairs as they rose to their feet cheering and convulsing into an unorganized orgy of bouncing pink flesh.
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Judd stirred suddenly and lifted his head, disturbing two inches of ash and dust. Some of which stubbornly clung to his sweaty skin. He moaned loudly and clutched at his aching temple. A bit of dust to his left stirred and lit up in muted green from below. Judd reached out of hand and dusted off a layer, sending a cloud airborne and he sneezed. Then a small object, the size and appearance of a marble shot out from the dust and hovered a few feet away. It faded from brilliant green to a subdued shade of Blue(ltd) and shook a little bit to get off the last smidgen of dirt.
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“I don't think you can legally use that color, Xi, not without permission, or guaranteed payment into the account of Sir Masterful Richview.” Outside the building a siren that had been wailing came to a chirping halt. They noticed it more in its silence. The ceiling fell in a little more, showing more of the sky. It was billowing gray.
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The marble brightened and did an upward zigzag maneuver. “I've done a scan, and that bastard Richview is dead. Dead dead. Now I can be all of these, whenever. Blinkity.” It went from blue to orange to something indescribable and back to blue again. “I like this.”
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“But his accounts, his estate...” the words trailed off, like the distance had into a haze of indistinct maudlin. Judd stared blankly out from his room, through a hole the size of a garbage truck, into the stark emptiness of a new, unkempt world.
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“Dead. Dead dead. I did a scan. No accounts. Your money is no good here. Last call for alcohol. One bourbon, one scotch, one beer. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Blinkity.”
He swatted at the floating blue marble. It swayed just out of reach and purred like a cat tempting him to play. Judd slumped against the wall and cried.
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Two days later Judd reached the site of the floating lab, but if it was still intact it had definitely sunk into the sea, beyond his reach. The detachable snake dock was missing, ripped from its moorings and now the sooty waves crashed onto the steps that climbed down into the water.
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“How far out do you suppose it was?” He leaned forward and scrunched up his eyes. Seeing through the smoke and dust was impossible.
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“Many many feet steps of a man. Too many, and you haven't brought your flippers. Choppy soupy, full of debris, and bodies. Dead dead.” The marble had gone back to out-of-the-box green, but was joyfully experimenting with copyrighted sling displacements.
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Judd observed it until it calmed down. “Can you scan for it? Could anyone have survived if it sank intact?” He waved at the water.
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“Dead dead. No signals. Not anywhere. Just the one between Judd Filts and XiJign. Satellites up above, talking talking talking to themselves. And me. Say hi?”
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“Shut the fuck up.”
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Judd sat on the edge of the seawall, among the stinking flotsam, all gray and lifeless but for the ebb and roll, and dangled his muddy feet over the side. So it was all true, everything. The numbers didn't lie and he was the one who could say it. Judd looked up at his solid mass computerized marble link. “I told you so,” he said.
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“Huzzah.”
----
Judd poked at the marble with a finger and it bobbed gently. “Are there more of you anywhere?” The SomComs had been built to withstand anything that nature or the weapons of man could hurl at it, but without a personal link to their master, they were nothing but round shot. Only a full disclosure writ in a last will and testament could discern from it any viable information, that and the prior agreement between the marble and its owner.
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It settled into a geocentric orbit around his head. “There are. They are all around you. In the streets, in their cars, in their beds. Dead, all dead.”
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“Dead as a doornail.”
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“I don't know the reference,” said the marble, turning red.
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“Look it up,” muttered Judd as he swung his feet and slouched.
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The marble turned a brighter red, and it dropped an inch signifying resigned failure. “There is no reference. There is only you.”
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“And I don't know...”
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He sat up suddenly and looked hard at the marble. “The university!”
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It was an epic display, as seen from space. All of the elements of nature and the science of man had taken a massive dump on the earth, like a spastic stack of dominoes set in motion by the finger of God. Or in this instance by the unwitting hand of some moron in StealthTech. Honestly, it wasn't even this poor schmuck's fault. Somebody had to be the Judas, it is written. Judd hadn't an idea how the event would come about, or even what the event would be; he only knew that it would happen soon, and it would be cataclysmic. It was sort of funny. He had the numbers to prove it, any fool mathematician could see the truth. Judd had become famous, went on the talk show circuit. He met Cindy Cathas and had coffee with her. The world watched, fell in love with his quirky boy next door familiarity. The government even threw some millions at him for R and D. No joke. No joke.
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This was worse than even he could imagine.
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They made it back to the city, almost nothing was standing. Judd couldn't imagine anything living through this carnage, certainly the marble wasn't scanning anything. Maybe below his feet was a scuttling rat, or some beetles. He hoped so.
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Back in his apartment, before the night of the event, Judd had unplugged and settled into his bed. He mentally switched on the beam shelter and closed his eyes, surrounded by a symphony lulling him into sleep with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. What he had designed, with the government's money, was the only thing that had saved him. It was tested and it had worked.
“Where is the university?” Judd asked the marble. It had the schematics in its solid memory core.
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“Thisaway. Follow me.”

----

The devices at the university were exact copies of the one he had used at home, and his had worked perfectly. The beam had protected him from both the physical stress of Armageddon and the mental bombardment of any mind bending expedients that might be floating around the ether. Judd could only pray that the university devices had operated as well as his.
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Sally, test subject one, had been easiest to train. Her mind was a near total blank, and under stress her heart rate increased, but her mental functions almost flat lined. Judd had been ecstatic. As an administrator he had reviewed her course studies and grades and wasn't surprised at his conclusions. Judd taught her simple breathing techniques and a little meditation, which she took to extremely fast, and Sally was fine. As for the end of the world, she was more interested in how it would interfere with mascara and hair care than anything else.
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Subject two, Jen, was even better with the device. She needed next to no training, other than basic hookup, and how the wires and doodads looked best as they attached to her nearly flawless skin. She would adjust them just so, exposing the amplest amount of skin. The first time Judd hooked her up he sat stunned at her side while she posed, parted her lips, then drifted off to sleep in mere seconds. Jen's resting heart rate was 60 and it fell lower as she slept. Judd would have liked a wider range of test subjects, but these two would do for now, and there should be time to tweak the device and recruit better, more able, subjects in the near future.
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Oops.
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There was no possible way for Judd to know how widespread the annihilation really was. Was there absolute destruction? XiJign only had access to Judd's Qi and what amounted to maybe a half dozen severely disabled satellites that were holding orbit, but communicating with nothing on the planet. Based on that analysis, he feared the worse. He might be the last living man. Judd looked skyward, in the direction of the new international space station where almost a hundred scientists lived and worked. Were they still alive? It didn't really matter, with no support they wouldn't last a month. Xi led on, while Judd scrambled over chaos laying dormant in the lifeless streets. The city smoldered.
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Finally Xi halted. They stopped in front of a series of fallen arches and crumbling walls. Judd recognized the grounds and some of the friezes were undamaged. “Do a scan,” said Judd.
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“Bee boop. Good news...there be scannables. Fa la.”
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“Lead on, McDuff!”
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Judd's office and lab were on the corner of building twelve, the McMillan, and somehow the walls were standing, but the roof was blown off and presumably the second floor had fallen in. He didn't have a good feeling, but Xi was positive about a signal, so Judd climbed into a open window and started poking around in what he thought was his assigned rooms. His SomCom floated over to a pile of rubble and excitedly bobbed. “Here, and here.” It zipped over to another heap. “Here here.”
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He pulled up chunks and shifted slabs until he uncovered the first radiant beam. Once it was freed from imminent danger, the beam shifted and the test subject opened her eyes. “I just had the strangest dream,” she said, stretching and yawning. "My nose tickles.”
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Because the beam hadn't switched off, she was totally untouched by the calamity. Not even a mote of dust had settled on her pristine human body. She stood up and smoothed out her rumpled flannel jammies.
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“Wow, I can see the sky.”
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“Bee boop...it's alive...” chanted the marble sardonicly.
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“Ugh,” said Judd. “Which one are you?”
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She stuck out her chest and huffed. “I'm Jen, you pooh.”
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“You certainly are, now help me uncover Sally,” he said. Xi was hovering over the spot she was buried beneath.
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“It's dirty,” said Jen, as she looked around for a tidy place to sit.
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Without any help Judd slowly uncovered Sally. She was unhurt as well, but until he could move the heavy concrete slab that covered her legs the beam wouldn't release her. She had a completely stoic look on her sleeping face. “Do you see anything like a lever around here?” Judd asked Jen, who was pushing buttons on her pocket flix.
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“Why doesn't this work. It's just white.”
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“No signal. Can't you see, the world is fucked.” Judd gave up on her and started looking around the rubble for a steel bar or something close. He found a length of cable and tied it around a jagged piece of the slab and jerked it off with a crash. Sally suddenly awoke.
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“Christmas!” she shrieked happily and sat up with a crazed look on her face.
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“Bee boop.”
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They wandered through the grounds of the university, one of the thousands of institutions around the world that taught higher learning. It had been night when the world here came to an end. The place was deserted, except for a few custodians and the two test students. So far Judd hadn't seen any bodies, nor did he expect to. He wondered if anyone had had any kind of warning. Did the president have time to get into an underground bunker? Had anyone else designed a device to counter the carnage? Was he alone in this world with only his faithful SomCom XiJign, and these two...? They followed him and complained unceasingly.
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Nothing worked. If they found an intact artifact, like an electric car or a camera, it was fried. They came across a gas powered riding mower and it was blackened and showed evidence of scorching. There were many other things charred and sending up plumes of smoke. Judd was certain they would find nothing of use here. So they left the university and headed out to the main roads that were mostly uncluttered.
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Finally after walking for an hour the three humans came to the local grocery, where the parking lot was empty except for four cars. The roof had fallen in and only two walls were left partially intact. Across from the store was a newly built apartment complex that was shredded, but Judd could see a couple units that weren't hit too hard. “Let's check out those rooms,” he said.
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“That market has good sushi,” said Sally happily.
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Judd went in first. He couldn't get in the door, but he threw a rock into the window and climbed through. There was a man lying in the bed. He was unmarked, but his eyes were sunken and his body lay rigid and desiccated under the sheets. Judd went through the room and into the living space where he opened up the door to let the girls in.
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“Don't go into the bedroom,” he said.
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They sat in the dark kitchen eating crackers and dry cereal. This was it. This was what life was going to be. Scrounging in a darkened world.
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Sally had found a hairbrush and was running it through her hair. Jen was munching on a Triscuit.
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Judd laughed.
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“Funny. Funny days!” said the SomCom in a computerish voice.
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“So,” said Judd, pounding the table and making his test students jump. “When do we get to repopulating the world?” He had a maniacal grin on.
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Jen and Sally looked at one another, then they looked at Judd, then they broke up laughing.
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“In your wildest dream!”
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“Not if you were the last man on Earth!”
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“Blinkity,” snickered Xi, bouncing off the walls like a pinball in a tilted game. “Game over, insert quarter, bee boop.”