I knew I was the last man in the universe when the ship passed beyond Pluto's orbit. From there, the Sun appeared as a dim star. The computer had just completed a parallax measurement, and the numbers it returned made my hands tremble before they froze entirely.

The Sun had lost four point seven four percent of its mass. From this, I could calculate the conclusion that made my heart stop: it had happened. The event we had predicted twenty-five thousand years ago.

The thing had already occurred.

In 1963, when I was recruited from the CIA's Berlin station, no one told me the full scope of the Ark Project. They just said it was a mission of unprecedented importance. I was Jack Malone, former field operative, trained in interrogation, surveillance, and surviving situations that had no good outcomes. They told me I was selected for "psychological resilience." Whatever that meant.

The ship traveled for twenty-three years in ship time. But Earth time had passed twenty-five thousand years.

Seven other Pioneers had set out with me. Four died from radiation of a nova. Two died of disease. One—O'Brien—shot himself during the last deceleration communication, listening to the silence from Earth.

I was the last.

When I finally returned to the solar system, the ship had arrived twenty-five thousand years after Earth time departed. I passed through Pluto's orbit and flew toward the inner system. I looked once at Jupiter and found the Great Red Spot gone. I flew straight toward Earth.

My trembling hand pressed a button. The porthole's opaque curtain opened slowly. I saw a black-and-white planet.

The black was melted rock that had solidified—the black of tombstones. The white was evaporated ocean that had frozen again—the white of a burial shroud.

Then the signal came.

A video signal rose from the ground, and the computer displayed it on my screen. First I saw footage filmed two thousand years ago: the energy flash, the sky turning hellish red then nightmare purple, the buildings melting like wax. Molten rock flowed down mountains like great waterfalls. Where the sea had been, only mushroom clouds of steam rose.

When the steam cleared, years had passed. The earth had cooled. Black rippled rock covered everything. Human traces had completely disappeared.

Then came the city.

Tall, slender skyscrapers rose like a forest. The camera descended to a plaza filled with people. All of them looked up at the sky. At the center stood a beautiful girl, perhaps a teenager, waving at me through the screen. She called in a voice like honey: "Hey, we see you! You look like a star flying very fast! Are you Ark Number One?!"

I knew this was some kind of automatic device, buried before the Great Catastrophe.

"Then other arks have returned?" I asked.

"Of course! Twelve more were launched!" The girl's face was wonderfully crafted. Her large eyes seemed to sing.

"Then... are there still people alive?"

"Someone like you?" the girl asked innocently.

"Of course someone like me—a real person, not a virtual one."

"The previous Ark returned seven hundred and thirty years ago. You are the last returning Ark. May I ask—do you have women on your ship?"

"Only me."

"You mean no women?!" The girl's eyes widened in shock. "I'm so sad, so sad... you are the last of your kind." She covered her face and cried. The crowd on the plaza cried with her.

My heart sank. Humanity's extinction was confirmed.

"Follow our guidance and land, and you will know!"

I entered the landing craft and began my descent. When I stepped out onto the black wasteland, the air was thin but breathable. The temperature was around minus forty degrees Celsius. The sky was a deep blue, and the Sun shone overhead without warmth.

I saw the source of the information wave—a transparent hemispherical visor embedded in the ground rock. Several such hemispheres were scattered across the ground at a distance.

Then the "feather" craft appeared.

Thousands of them rose from the hemispherical domes, flying through the thin atmosphere. They landed on my outstretched finger, appearing like a scattering of fine white powder.

The Earth Leader—the girl—jumped off first and immediately fell on her back.

"Too slippery! You have oily skin!" she complained.

I estimated that over ten thousand people were on my finger.

We rose toward the Ark in the landing craft. The micro crowd cheered. Someone shouted: "Wow, look at that metal sky, that artificial sun!"

"Don't be such an idiot!" the Supreme Ruler scolded, but she herself looked around in wonder, then began singing with the crowd:

Magnificent Macro Epoch, Great Macro Epoch, Melancholy Macro Epoch, You are a dream vanished in fire...

In orbit around the Ark, the Earth Leader continued to tell me the history of the Micro Epoch.

"The Micro society and Macro society coexisted for a period. During this time, the Micro completely mastered Macro knowledge and inherited their culture. Meanwhile, the Micro developed a highly advanced civilization based on nanotechnology. The transition took about twenty generations."

"Then the Great Catastrophe approached. The Macros stopped traditional reproduction. Their numbers decreased daily. The Micro population grew rapidly, soon exceeding the Macros. The Micro began demanding control of world government. This caused uproar in Macro society. The顽固派 refused to hand over power. They said, how can a bunch of bacteria lead humanity?"

"That must have been unfortunate for you."

"Unfortunate for the Macros. They were quickly defeated."

"How is that possible? One Macro could smash your city with a single hammer blow."

"But the Micro wouldn't fight them in cities. The Macros' weapons couldn't defeat invisible enemies. The only weapon they could use was disinfectant, and throughout their history, they had used this substance fighting bacteria without ever achieving victory. Bigger does not mean stronger."

"The war criminals received their due fate. Thousands of Micro special forces dropped lasers onto their retinas..." the Leader girl said viciously.

"After the war, the Micro took world government. The Macro Epoch ended. The Micro Epoch began!"

I was silent for a long time. Then I said: "Interesting."

The landing craft entered orbit around the Ark. The Micro rode "feather" craft around the ship, and its enormous size left them speechless. The Supreme Ruler told me her impression:

"Now we understand: even without the Sun's energy flash, the Macro Epoch would have died. Your resource consumption was hundreds of millions of times ours!"

"But this ship can fly at near light speed, reaching stars hundreds of light-years away. Only the great Macro Epoch could do such things."

"We cannot currently do this. Our fastest ships reach only one-tenth light speed."

"You can do space travel?!" I was shocked.

"Of course. Not as well as you. The Micro Epoch's fleet reached as far as Venus. We just received their message: Venus is now more habitable than Earth."

"How big is your ship?"

"The large ones are the size of a football in your units. They carry over a hundred thousand people. The small ones are the size of a Macro golf ball."

My last trace of superiority vanished.

"Predecessor, won't you feed us? We're hungry!"

"I never imagined feeding so many people." I smiled.

"We won't make you spend too much!" the girl said.

I took a can of luncheon meat from storage, opened it, and carefully scooped a small piece, placing it on the console. On the screen, people rushed toward a towering mountain of pink meat. The small piece barely decreased. The leader girl held a piece of bitten meat and shook her head.

"Not good." she said.

"Of course. This is synthesized in the ecological circulation machine."

"We want wine!" the Earth Leader demanded, causing cheers.

"Beer?"

"No. Scotch whisky or Moscow vodka!"

"Mao-tai is fine too!" someone shouted.

I had a bottle of Mao-tai, kept on the Ark since departure. I opened the white porcelain cap and poured the liquor into it, placing it at the edge of the crowd. On the screen, I saw people beginning to climb the cliff-like rim of the bottle cap. The Micro used their skyscale-climbing skills to quickly reach the top.

"Wow, what a beautiful lake!" the Micro cheered. The Supreme Ruler dipped one white small foot into the wine, and her foot was immediately encased in a transparent wine sphere. She lifted her foot, grabbed a small wine sphere from it, and put it in her mouth.

"Wow, Macro Epoch's wine is much better than Micro Epoch's." she nodded.

"I'm glad we still have things better than yours. But drinking with your foot is unhygienic."

"I don't understand." she looked up at me, puzzled.

"You walked barefoot such a long distance. Your feet would have germs."

"Oh, I remember!" the Earth Leader exclaimed, taking a box from an attendant. She opened it and took out a living creature—a football-sized round thing with countless small legs. "Look, this is our city's gift to you! Lactic acid chicken!"

I tried to recall my microbiology knowledge. "You mean... lactic acid bacteria?"

"That's the Macro name. This is a beneficial animal!"

"A beneficial bacterium." I corrected. "Now I see that bacteria indeed cannot harm you. Our hygiene concepts are not suitable for the Micro Epoch."

"That's not necessarily so. Some animals—er, bacteria—bite. Like the E. coli wolf. But most animals, like the yeast pig, are very cute." She said, taking another wine ball from her foot and putting it in her mouth. When she stood up, she was already swaying.

"I never thought humanity would even survive the disinfection!"

"I... we inherited all of humanity's beautiful things, but those Macros thought we had no right to... to represent human civilization..." she sat on the ground again, her tongue slurred.

"We inherited all of humanity's philosophy—Western, Eastern, Greek, Chinese!" a voice from the crowd said.

The Earth Leader raised her hands to the sky, reciting: "No man can step twice in the same river; the Dao produces One, One produces Two, Two produces Three, Three produces all things..."

"We appreciate Van Gogh's paintings, Beethoven's music, Shakespeare's plays!"

"To be or not to be—that is the... that is the question!" she staggered to her feet, playing Hamlet.

"But in our Epoch, a girl like you would never dream of becoming world leader." I said.

"The Macro Epoch was a melancholy Epoch with melancholy politics. The Micro Epoch is a carefree Epoch that needs a happy leader."

...

I had spent my life in the shadows. Berlin, Vienna, Prague—cities where men disappeared in the night and no one asked questions. Now I stood on the Ark's console, watching a sea of tiny people drink wine from a bottle cap, reciting Shakespeare and Chinese philosophy, singing songs about a Macro Epoch that had vanished in fire.

Something was wrong.

I had been trained to notice details. And the details didn't add up.

The girl called "Queenie" Vasquez—if that was her real name—had been too eager to welcome me. Too enthusiastic. In my experience, enthusiasm was a mask for something else.

I waited until the micro crowd had dispersed to their hemispherical domes for the night. Then I took the landing craft down to the surface alone.

The city below was called "The Undercity"—a name that should have told me everything. I landed in a plaza and stepped out into the thin, cold air. The transparent hemispherical domes glowed faintly in the darkness, like bubbles on a frozen lake.

I walked toward the largest dome and found an entrance. Inside, the corridors were dark and narrow. The walls were lined with what looked like pipes and conduits, but something about the arrangement was wrong. They weren't pipes. They were tubes. Hundreds of them, arranged in neat rows, stretching as far as I could see.

I picked one up. It was sealed at both ends. Inside, suspended in a clear fluid, was a small, pale object. I held it up to the dim light and saw what it was: an embryo. A Macro embryo.

My hands began to shake.

The Leader had told me the Macro embryos had been destroyed. Burned. Disinfected. But these were here, preserved in these tubes, arranged in rows that stretched into the darkness.

I walked further down the corridor, picking up tube after tube, each one containing a Macro embryo. There were hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

I found a door at the end of the corridor and pushed it open. Inside was a laboratory. Microscopes, centrifuges, incubators—all scaled down to micro size but clearly functional. On a desk in the center of the room was a file. I opened it and found records: cloning experiments, genetic analysis, developmental timelines.

They weren't just preserving the embryos. They were using them.

"Finding something interesting, Mr. Malone?"

I turned. Queenie stood in the doorway, her tiny figure silhouetted against the light from the corridor. She was not the innocent girl from the video画面 anymore. Her expression was cold, calculating.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "You're thinking the embryos were supposed to be destroyed. You're thinking I lied to you."

"I'm thinking you kept them. Why?"

She stepped into the laboratory, her small feet echoing on the metal floor. "Because we need them."

"Need them for what?"

"For labor, of course. The Micro Epoch has advanced technology, but we still need physical strength for certain tasks. Macro bodies are... useful. We're cloning new Macros to serve as workers. As tools."

I felt something cold settle in my stomach. "You're creating slaves."

"We're creating a symbiosis," she corrected. "The Macros provide physical strength. The Micro provide intelligence and technology. It's mutually beneficial."

"It's slavery."

"It's survival. The Micro Epoch couldn't have survived without the Macros' physical capabilities. We couldn't have built the underground cities. We couldn't have survived the Great Catastrophe. The Macros made the ultimate sacrifice by allowing us to use their genetic material."

"They didn't consent."

"They're dead, Mr. Malone. The Macro Epoch is over. You're the last one. And you have a choice to make."

"What choice?"

"You can expose us. Tell the Micro people what we're really doing. They'll panic. They'll revolt. The whole society will collapse, and billions will die. Or you can keep quiet, and we'll continue our work in peace."

"And if I refuse to choose?"

"Then I'll have to ask you to leave. The Ark is in orbit. You can return to it and spend the rest of your life alone, or you can stay and accept your place in the new order."

I looked at the tubes on the shelf. Hundreds of Macro embryos, suspended in fluid, waiting to be cloned into bodies that would serve the Micro Epoch as slaves.

I thought of Berlin. Of men who had disappeared in the night. Of men who had been used and discarded by governments and ideologies. I had spent my life serving systems that claimed to be noble while committing atrocities in their names.

And now here I was, facing the same choice again.

I picked up one of the tubes and walked to the incinerator. I held it over the flame and watched the glass melt. The embryo inside vaporized instantly.

Then I picked up another. And another.

I burned half of them. The rest I hid in the Ark's refrigeration compartment.

When I was done, Queenie was standing beside me, watching silently.

"Why did you burn half?" she asked.

"Because I'm not a monster," I said.

"Neither am I," she replied. "I'm a pragmatist. And so are you, Mr. Malone. You just haven't decided which side you're on yet."

I left the laboratory and returned to the landing craft. As I rose toward the Ark, I looked down at the Undercity glowing faintly in the darkness. Somewhere down there, thousands of Micro people were sleeping, unaware that their society was built on a foundation of lies.

And somewhere in the Ark's refrigeration compartment, half of the Macro embryos waited, their fate uncertain.

I didn't know if I had made the right choice. I didn't know if I had saved humanity or condemned it to a different kind of slavery.

All I knew was that I had to keep flying. The Ark continued its orbit around a planet that was no longer ours, carrying the same human contradictions at a smaller scale, doomed to repeat the same mistakes with new actors and new stages.

The Disinfectant had not erased the infection. It had only changed its form.