A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher

That means if there were 7,000,000,000 people before the Gelding, less than 7000 of them could have kids.

They estimated maybe 0.0001 per cent of the world population somehow escaped the Gelding. How can I tell you this and not be dead? I’m one of the exceptions that proves the rule. And now we few-we vanishingly few-are all alone, stuck here on the other side of it. And though it probably felt pretty hard for those it happened to, it did happen. The Lastborn generation-the Baby Bust as they called themselves, proving that irony was one of the last things to perish-they just carried on getting older and older until they died like people always had done.Īnd when they were all gone, that was it. The world-the human part of it-had been gelded or maybe turned barren-perhaps both-and people just stopped having kids. The “how” and the “why” slowly became less important as people got used to the “what”, and realised the big final “when” was heading towards them like a storm front that not even the fastest, the richest, the cleverest or the most powerful were going to be able to outrun.

There were as many theories as there were suddenly childless people-a burst of cosmic rays, a chemical weapon gone astray, bio-terror, pollution (you lot did make a mess of your world), some kind of genetic mutation passed by a space virus or even angry gods in pick-your-own-flavour for those who had a religion. How it ended was the Gelding, though what caused that never got sorted out, or if it did it was when it was too late to do anything about it. Don’t get me wrong: there were bangs, some big, some little, but that was early on, before people got the drift of what was happening.īut bangs are not really how it ended. Turns out the world didn’t end with a bang. That’s a kind of death, even if you keep breathing. If we’re not loyal to the things we love, what’s the point? That’s like not having a memory. And there may be no law left except what you make it, but if you steal my dog, you can at least expect me to come after you. Of all the animals that travelled the long road through the ages with us, dogs always walked closest.Īnd those that remain are still with us now, here at the end of the world. Later still, they shared our homes and our families when we built towns and cities and suburbs. They looked after us, and we looked after them. And later, when we did become farmers, they guarded our fields and watched over our herds. They guarded our fires as we slept and they helped us bring down prey in the long dawn when we chased our meals instead of growing them. When we were hunters and gatherers and walked out of Africa and began to spread across the world, they came with us. Dogs were with us from the very beginning.

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher