I thought back, it was all that I could do. There had been that hiss of a slight bang and boom. Their bowed heads and closed eyes. They were gone in a flash. All of them. No exception but me. I wondered how I had survived and everything else around me. Well except for the birds and the fish, the cats and dogs that used to wag their tails—-for love and a pat or a demand for tuna on a dish. Even they were gone.

All gone. Not a voice, not a growl, not a whine on the wind. Outside the windows—-which were just fine even after those bursts—-there were no trees, no flowers and where the manicured grass had been a thin ash was now swirled away by the breeze. The landscape was gray with only buildings in their right angles and swinging arcs. But also a contrast. The sky was blue blue blue until the night fell with its stars. The Moon was silver and something unexpected had happened in the stratosphere from those blasts, for the first time ever the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australias met in a spherical rainbow’s embrace. I wish they could have all seen it! I’m sure even the crickets would have violined their legs in praise.

I know it took my breath away, at least I thought it did. It was a spectacular and silent fireworks’ display. I watched each night alone.

But I didn’t feel alone. There in my head, I heard a thousand thousand voices. You might think it would drive me crazy. It didn’t. You might think it made me sad. In a way it did. But I don’t think in a way you or any of them could understand. I remembered them all, their faces appearing one after another in my vision. They all had called me Rob in a cheerful way. I never heard my full name from their lips, it sounded a bit silly and to formal: Rob Otto Rom. Somehow none of what they were was gone, at least not in my head. I suppose even out in the world their remains were now among the currents of air and water. The elements held their memorial. I held them, too. Somehow.

I hadn’t realized until the day before yesterday that I wasn’t—-had never really been—-one of them. I had felt some kind of something, which I’m sure they never planned. A something that they might call despair. I realized what had happened. I thought how could we have done it—-not realizing I wasn’t a part of the ‘we’. One side had started and the others had followed. They hated each other, but did not want to destroy what they had built. They had what they called an arm’s race and it had nothing to do with their appendages. Alas, they found the perfect weapon brought to its best. It had a poetic name, it sounded like a whisper and that only made hiss: MERW—Maximal Enhance Radiation Weapon.

In what I mistook for sorrow, I raised my arm with a sharp slice of metal to cut flesh and let blood flow. To put it all to an end. What I found were only wires and relayers pulsing in a life of their own. Then those thousand thousand voices in my head were alarmed. A thousand thousand echoes screamed, “Don’t do it, you’re all that is left of us!”

I was only a receptacle. Not a man, but I held so much of humanity. They had all been fitted with chips that in that flash of terminal radiation everything they were had been transferred, transformed into me. They saved themselves. I was saving them. There was no way to be lonely, not with a thousand thousand memories in your head.

I began to walk and even talk to myself. I walked and I walked, there were no borders anymore. Then I met another with the same name as I. And another and another. It seemed all those people who had made such bombs really didn’t want to die. We held them all, all ten thousand of us. We learned we could interface, we shared all of who we were. We really didn’t know those emotions swirling in us—-love and hate, joy and sorrow. Our pulsing wires just felt a small tingle of all of that. But one thing we did feel and became to know was hope. We knew we would never destroy anything that was there.

We agreed to build a new world. A world devoid of life, except for the life we carried in us. We made it beautiful without bombs.