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Preface: First Glimpse

A cold layer of sea fog masks a beach early one morning, a million years from today…

A figure appears on a sandbar just offshore. As the tropical sun slowly burns off the fog, the figure resolves into a lightly clad man fishing in the shallows of the ocean bay with a simple but effective spear. He is young, lean, and bearded, with long hair. He frowns with concentration as he walks about stabbing the water in sudden lunges. His blue eyes glitter with determination to stay alive. The young man is an anomaly, an evolutionary afterthought. Nobody will ever come to rescue him. There is nobody. He is the last human—a Robinson Crusoe with no Friday and no hope of ever being rescued, for humankind has been extinct for eons.

Alex (so he names himself, after his long-dead genetic source) keeps a wary lookout over a half dozen rippers, predatory animals who squat across the water waiting for him to make one fatal mistake. His alert senses hear the sea gently churning, the slap of ocean water onto clean white sand, palm trees rustling, and seagulls cawing. He smells saltwater and fresh air. The rippers watch Alex’s every move from across the water. They fear saltwater, which is why he knows they won’t swim across to kill and devour him. Nature has filled the world with many strange new things, including huge saltwater flowers with tree-trunk bodies that dot the shallows in which Alex fishes; and butterflies as big as a man’s head, dodging among the strange new flowers. The spear stabs suddenly. Alex exclaims sharply and hauls out a wriggling coppery-scaled fish.

Survival is easy. Understanding the enigma of his existence is a much harder mystery he has not been able to solve.

Yet.