I saw the last human, wild, with her hair of grey. Her toothless face was matched by barren womb and sagging tits, tits that had never suckled a child’s wealth. It matters not what I am, for I am as insignificant as a tumbling leaf. Yet here she was laughing with shadows after years of isolation, and her mind like her womb was barren of all futures. The final ancestor of humanity, and the only ancestor of the hedge funder, who’s accumulated wealth had built the bunker two centuries before her. The man who owned everything in the end, he had built this city, as the planet heated, as the deserts and oceans silently with relentless tides decimated the cities, till the skyscrapers untended and hot, crumbled with a sudden fury to the ground, sprinkling vast clouds of diamond like dust as they fell. Yet as the dust settled on the waters or sand, that was the world of man’s final statement. Bleached skeletons of what was, do not mean a lot in the clouded skies, skies where storm systems with contemptuous frivolity collide, and there she is, affront a computer, alone and buried beneath all that was.

She is oblivious to it all, only occasionally will the ghosts of people past catch up with her unravelling mind, a mind that is caught between the hysteria of tears and laughter, numbed and blinded to terror through her loneliness. 46 years ago she had seen the last of them, and in the silence she had become a spectre of her species. She like the decaying buildings above ground had with decomposing logic, reconstructed her world of one, and she looked at the screen aware that she now owned everything. The complex and foolish algorithm’s of fiscal computing still ran, stocks still sold, automatically, and she looked as her empire had completed it’s cycle. As all she had known was this wealth, all she had learned was this wealth, all was accumulation. Accumulation was everything.

They had accumulated such wealth, and grasping it they had strangled themselves to preserve it, for wealth was power and power was everything. I had watched as they had demolished that which protected and nourished them, I had watched as their invented economics had reached a point where it became unstoppable in the minds of all of this species. All of them. They were raised in the gravy of capital from birth, and even though it was clear that it was broken, even the poorest would not let go of what they had accumulated by choice. Intertwined in the minds of all of them, this power of mindset became apparent, it has emerged, and in a wave of calamity they would not let go of it. Like a drowning blacksmith clutching their anvil as it pulled them beneath the waves, all any of them had to do was let go, but they could not.

Their prophet was profit and that was all there was to it. Decades before their self inflicted disaster had bit, they had faced a virus, yet even with the spiralling deaths came the question of cost. All faced it, as there probably wasn’t enough money in the whole world to cover the debt it created, yet none questioned it. None. This force that they had invented in their own minds, that they had empowered and fed, that had inflicted a delusional level of hell upon them all from birth to their deaths, none questioned it’s strength, none questioned it’s reality, even when they realised they couldn’t afford to fix the problems they had created, none questioned the holiest of human objects. Money.

In this bunker she struggled to her feet, stumbling to her room. Eyes dulled and blinded by the darkness’s of the tunnel she lived in, reflected her mind. Dulled by her profits, a smile flickered across her face as she broken by age entered her bed chamber. Without vanity she washed then slowly pulled the cover over her to rest in her bed. Without any awareness she died in her sleep, and I, for what it’s worth. knew one truth of humanity in her passing.

They had cost themselves out of existence.