The Last One

by Will Dean

“Humans can survive three weeks with no food, three days with no water, three hours with no shelter if it’s cold, three minutes with no hope.”

“It’ll trigger some king of hydrostatic pressure switch and unlock.”

Typo

There’s no way dog people would just abandon their pets.”

EXACTLY what I had thought!

Paperback novel. A little whisky before I fall asleep. Best way to clear my head. I use that time to think things through, work out what’s troubling me, keep the demons at bay.”

A mile or more of darkness underneath me. Bobtail squid and jellyfish with names like bloodybelly comb, black sea nettle, Atolla. An alien world covering two-thirds of the planet. Unimaginable depths and no chance of retrieval.

I step outside myself and look back and I see a troupe of tragic figures. Powerless bodies unable to escape whatever labyrinth they’ve found themselves contained within. A game inside a nightmare. Levels of isolation and manipulation I wouldn’t inflict upon a mortal enemy.

That's Deep asfff

We sit motionless awaiting the next challenge. Crash-test dummies driving toward a concrete block at breakneck speed, safety symbols painted on our blank faces.

Four people in evening dress scuttling around on Beelzebub’s yacht.

to me it already seems as if we’ve descended, in only a matter of days, from a luxury vessel to an abandoned post-flood ark: a decrepit boat with backed-up toilets and burnt air, overseen by some faceless group of outsiders.

Each minute feels more like an hour. The miles-deep ocean and the sparkling cosmos. Me trapped somewhere in between.