[ WP ] You are the last human alive but you are immortal . You meet Death who wants his retirement .

Sam blinked and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes when his wife woke him up at sunrise. She did n't need to sleep since she was a last generation robot. He ordered her with the looks of Marilyn Monroe, and she did look exactly like the long lost diva, but Sam found her kind of cold. 
 
 In the sterile kitchen, over the breakfast table, as he drank his coffee with milk and sugar and ate his toast with honey and cinnamon, and his wife stood across from him watching with a smile, he noticed something terrible. Emma Lawrence's obituary. As far as he knew, Emma was the only human left alive in the whole world, apart from him. After the robot riots, when Earth's population was still counting millions, humanity finally found a cure for death. The price was reproduction, but everyone thought it was a small price to pay for paradise. But people were still killable; slowly, murders, bursts of uncontrollable diseases, accidents, all these killed all humans, one by one, until two were left. 
 
 Sam knew Emma well. Together, they were the only people left alive. He stared at the screen for a long time. 
 
 `` Darling? What's wrong?'' 
 
 `` Emma died.'' 
 
 `` Oh, I'm sorry. What happened?'' 
 
 She sounded genuinely bothered by the news. After humanity started to die off, the robots kept improving themselves, until they resembled humans in everything, on the surface. If he did n't knew better, he could have sworn she was a beautiful young woman, upset by sad news. 
 
 That night he had a peculiar dream. 
 
 He dreamed of a desert made of stone. The hot sun was hurting his eyes, but when he lifted his arm to shadow them, he noticed a forest in the distance. His bare feet hurt and he was scared by the scorpions he saw moving in the stone cracks. He walked a long way, but finally reached it and collapsed in the grass under the trees. 
 
 He had n't seen a forest, or a desert since his youth, before Earth became completely populated. 
 
 `` Hi Sam.'' 
 
 `` Emma?'' 
 
 She was just outside the shadows thrown by the trees, as if she walked just a few steps behind him. He could n't distinguish her features clearly because the light was blinding him, so he called to her. 
 
 `` What are you doing there? Why do n't you come here?'' 
 
 But she did n't move. 
 
 `` Emma?'' 
 
 `` I'm not Emma, Sam.'' 
 
 `` Then who are you?'' 
 
 `` Ca n't you tell?'' 
 
 `` Would I ask if I could?'' 
 
 `` Maybe.'' 
 
 `` No, I would n't.'' 
 
 `` I'm Death, Sam. And do you know why I'm here?'' 
 
 `` Why do you look like Emma?'' 
 
 `` I'm here because I want to retire, Sam,'' she replied ignoring his question. `` And you know why I ca n't?'' 
 
 `` Because of me?'' 
 
 `` I thought you do n't ask questions if you already know the answer. I'm tired. You're the last living thing in the Universe. With your death, I will also cease to exist.'' 
 
 `` But I do n't want to die.'' 
 
 `` I've existed for so long, Sam. It's time for Death to die too.'' 
 
 `` But...'' 
 
 `` Please!'' 
 
 Sam woke up drenched in sweat. He had n't had a nightmare in hundreds of years, since pills for pleasant dreams were designed. He snapped his fingers and light flooded the bedroom. Marilyn was n't in the bed next to him, but he found her on their rooftop garden, watching the buzzing robot city in the distance. Her familiar profile comforted him. 
 
 A dream, he told himself. Yes, just a dream. But it was a dream he had nightly for the next seven hundred years, until he finally became more machine than human and stopped dreaming altogether. 
 
 
 -- -- -- 
 
 -089
