The glass did not give at once, his fingers kept slipping, his hands had long stopped obeying him. The old man worked the edge up with his palm, the glass slid aside, and under it lay two buttons. The red one already pressed in, the blue one left. He did not sit down, he knew that if he sat he would not get up again. So he stayed on his feet, leaning on the edge of the console, and looked down at the blue button.
The air only reached the middle of his chest and went no further. His heart would race, then drop away somewhere entirely, and into those gaps grey seeped in at the edges of his sight. Ninety-one he was, maybe ninety-three. He had long stopped counting. He would not last till next winter anyway, nothing there to count.
He brought his finger to the button and took it away. Brought it and took it away. The finger would not go down, that was all.
He had eaten the fish two weeks ago. The last one, from the aquarium. It was still thrashing when he ate it. Or he had dreamed that. Lately he could no longer always tell where the dream was. The aquarium stood empty, its light still working and humming quietly, a little water left at the bottom. Nothing else breathed within these walls. Only him.
He had pressed the blue one three times in his life. The red one he did not count. The red one was easy, the red one was just “no, not this, take it away.” But the blue one asked him the same thing every time, and every time he did not know the answer.
It was his father who had left him the pressing. Not taught him, left a recording. The old man still kept it on the far screen, sometimes ran it in a loop. Not for the words, he knew the words by heart, but to look at the face. His father in the recording was younger than the old man remembered himself, and spoke fast, as if he were in a hurry somewhere.
Nothing was left up top, his father said. Everything that breathed breathes no more. We are the last who saw it ourselves.
Then came the part about the protocol: red erases, blue starts over, the system will obey you at eighteen, no sooner, do not try.
Then his father would stand and walk out of frame. He went up top then to check for himself whether it was really empty, and never came back into frame. That part the old man never rewound. He just waited for the recording to reach the empty chair on its own, and switched it off.
That was the family he had now: an empty chair in a recording and a few faces he was afraid of forgetting, so now and then he said their names out loud, checking he had not got them wrong. The fish he had called by a name too, his sister’s name, though whether it was a sister he could no longer vouch for.
The first time he pressed it he was eighteen, though he had been itching to at fourteen. By then he already understood why he was here, he would run to the console and jab at it, but the system would not take him. Not for minors.
He would go off to the monitors and look at that world on the other side of the wall. He remembered the world poorly, did not even know if the memories were real or dreamed in childhood.
At eighteen the system took. The main program ran, the wasteland began to put on life. The first wave. He sat at the screens for several days then, not leaving.
A year later, to the day, he pressed a second time. It seemed to him that everything had stalled, that the program had died and nothing was growing. He did as the protocol said: red erased, blue raised the backup.
The backup came up at once, no waiting. Extremely aggressive, with fast-evolving parasitic species. The things changed as they went, became different overnight and took on such hideous shapes that the old man turned away from the screen. And he pressed it anyway. He did not think long: red, then blue, a third time.
The third world he kept the longest.
At first it was quiet there. Green pushed up out of the wasteland, the creatures did not tear one another, they watched, they fitted themselves in. The old man knew every hollow and every pack in that world, sat at the screens for years and slept easy in those years, which had not happened to him before or since.
Fifty years passed like that, maybe sixty.
And then, as always. One species turned out a little faster than the rest, spread, crowded out the others, made over for itself the hollows he still remembered bare.
However many times he hit those buttons, in the end there always turned up a species that dominated the local ecosystem and subjugated all the rest.
And toward the end they began to lift their heads up, to the mountains, to his mountain. A camera at the foot caught them once at the very mouth of the cave. They stood and looked straight into the lens, straight at him.
This morning he went over that world with his eyes one last time and laid his palm over the red one.
Erased.
All those frames he had hoarded for decades, thousands of cameras — all of it to zero at once.
And here he was again, over the blue one. Finger up and not coming down.
The red one was already done, no way back. What was left was to start the next one. Which one comes up, he does not choose. Not his to decide which.
He wanted butterflies.
He remembered only butterflies. As a small child he chased them in a meadow, when civilization was still at its very peak. That was before the cave, before his father, before everything.
If butterflies turned up again in the new world, he thought, then it had gone right.
Only instead of butterflies, every time up came the one who subjugated the rest.
His finger hung over the blue one.
And what if this world was not worth starting over at all?
The thought set his head spinning. He gasped and sank down onto the blue button, gripping the protective glass hard with both hands.
Little Q peeked carefully out of the shell. He did not have his own yet, it was his mother’s shell, but today that did not trouble him at all. The sun was warmer than usual, there was food aplenty in the lake, and from the mountain nearby the machines were humming again — a new program of revival was waking.