Last Laugh

I awoke. I was so tired. I didn't think I would feel so exhausted. But i suppose I ought to be grateful I awoke at all! I wondered where I was. And what was happening. Did what I had planned work? Am I when I am supposed to be?

Breathing. I am breathing. Breathe in. Breathe out. The breath of the gods graced my lungs once more. I felt it. Cherished it. Experienced it. This was the first sensation after being awoken.

I was tired. So tired. Given the hoped for time span, I should not be surprised. Even so, I am so tired.

The probes that sustained me withdraw from my pores and pull away. I feel a slight tickling like someone had a slightly sticky tape that would tickle more than yank as it was pulled off. Sensation. Prickly tickle.

I opened my eyes in time to see the probes withdraw into the sleep chamber housing. In another time, in another era, in another world, it would have been the thing of nightmares. Squiggly tentacles writhing as they melted back into the housing.

The light must be very low for my eyes have not been used in eons and yet I am not blinded. Or the medical technology I selected worked even better than I thought. I am unsure. It doesn't really matter. Especially if everything worked as well I had planned.

The housing split and I felt the cold metallic air wash over me. Labs and storage facilities and ancient places all share a certain smell, one that cannot be faked or replicated. One that one those who love them can only detect. My nose was obviously in order. And it smelled an ancient and clean and work of science all at once.

I stepped forward and out. The clean was cold, but not unwelcoming. The gravity was light, as I would expect given where I had stayed. Obviously, I was safe. My sleep had been undisturbed. I walked, even bouncy waddled if that was possible in the low gravity. I knew I had little time. If everything was according to plan.

I turned the window clear. The machines had cleared the regolith from the window, as instructed. I would have a clear view of the event. The last thing I wanted to see in my life. The event I had planned decades for. And executed.

I saw the Earth. Not the Earth I knew. This was aged and baked and cracked with the heat of a red giant baring down on it. Burning it, singing it, crisping it. This was an Earth at the end of its life. Moments away from the final spasms of our sun.

I breathed deeply. I was happy. I was satisfied in ways I cannot put into words. In ways only a soul at peace could know. A soul with delight in the world could know.

I looked out at the dead Earth and was delighted.

I started to laugh, and did get a short crow out before the sun washed over the world and in its explosion, at the death of the sun, smashed earth, scoured the moon, shattering it, destroying it, and me.

However, in that moment, in that second of delight, I relished the fact all the people I had hated, I had been belittled by, had been mocked by were long dead.

I enjoyed and delighted with the knowledge as I ceased to exist that I had had the last laugh.