Final Man

A Speculative Science Fiction Erotica Short Story By Cindy Johnson

Margette Thompson was standing in the motivational speaking section of the Barnes and Noble store wearing a blue shirt and white pants with dark blue flats. Her curly blond hair was in a ponytail and her large sunglasses hung from the neck of her shirt as she clutched her black purse over one shoulder. She leaned forward and perused the books on each shelf, not seeing the one she had been told by her friend to buy.

It was a strange feeling: that of being watched, but there wasn't anyone immediately around the area. She dropped low and scanned the books on the bottom shelf. The carpet gave a weak strain, and she turned around to see a young man with brown hair in his early twenties standing behind her. He looked to be staring intently at the books on the shelf, but he clutched his phone in his hand. Occasionally, he would glance at the phone and mouth something as though he were trying to find something specific. She ignored him and continued looking through the selection of self-help books.

After a minute or so, she couldn't shake the feeling that he was watching her. He stepped forward and crouched to look at something, but his phone was turned toward her. Margette cocked a brow and walked off, shaking her head.

The man who had been standing beside her was named Jordan Parks. He was likely the biggest pervert in the world, and he had a chronic addiction to filming women in what he called 'the wild'. He had a lengthy code to this twisted side hobby, and one of them was to clear the area if he realized that he'd been caught. Optimally, he liked to get his candid footage discretely without being noticed. The less of a presence he could be the more natural his targets were.

Jordan did this everywhere he went. He spent hours after work and on his days off patrolling retail, grocery, and department stores. His favorite thing to do was to go to the town-square in Southlake, Texas, and get prime footage of the young women from the upper class who were none-the-wiser to his personal attention. He would fill up every gig of data in his phone and then hurry home to upload the videos to his computer. There were thousands of videos: a terabyte and a half so far, and he had only started this about six months prior.

For Jordan, to see a beautiful woman-someone who took time to get ready to go out, spent a deliberate amount of time preparing her outfit, and who wore something that was sexy by all definitions-and not having a keepsake for her efforts, was the biggest crime he could imagine. He knew women felt differently. The times they had figured what he was doing they always became uncomfortable. It was a reaction that he understood and wanted to avoid, and yet the reasons were a mystery to him. If a woman wears specifically tight pants, doesn't that mean they want someone to look? If a woman wears a low-cut shirt, doesn't that mean they want someone to see that they have ample breasts? This wasn't a justification for rape or something ridiculous like that, but to Jordan, a woman in her prime looked the best she would ever look to him. He just wanted a momento, something to remember the occasion by.

His rules were rather interesting. He never ventured into the ladies room, or peered through the changing rooms. He had no interest in seeing a woman naked. It was their clothes and how they viewed themselves to themselves that fascinated Jordan. He wanted them for how they prepared themselves in public. He never followed a woman away from a location. He never interacted with one of the women he was following unless it was to ease an overwhelming discomfort during their encounter. If the woman was with a man, he still followed but took specific precautions to make their crossing of paths shorter than usual.

It was only a few weeks after that event that he acquired one of the most useful tools he had ever imagined. It was his favorite device of all the devices he had gotten and did something that nothing else could do: eased the discomfort that women felt when he followed. Having a phone with a camera in hand always made women uncomfortable. Even if they didn't know and suspected, it ruined the entire experience and made his own nerves fire at an extreme rate. Jordan had received his long awaited wristwatch camera. It was a Cube brand, and looked like a classic timepiece with a tiny camera hidden just above the logo. The camera took horizontal 1080P HD video footage, so when he had it positioned next to someone, the footage was upright. It stored 64 gigs of data-not a lot for what he wanted to do, but it did enough.

Jordan's life became dedicated to using the wristwatch day in and day out. If he didn't have it on him, he dropped whatever he was doing to go home and get it again because it was such a useful item to have. After awhile, he left his routine in Southlake to move to Austin where some of the most naturally beautiful women in the world congregated. He would walk down Guadalupe street alongside young women from UT, his watch trained on them like a hawk watching a mouse. People almost never noticed. A few were a little suspicious of why he followed them and kept his left to them at all times, but no one was the wiser.

His prize was a young mom at the grocery store wearing tight blue jeans and a white shirt. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Jordan actually reached across in front of her to grab some spices so that he could get a full frontal, keeping the watch facing her as he imitated browsing for the perfect selection. He was growing more adept in his maneuvers. Once he got enough of what he needed, he dropped the spice by the front and left his hand-basket full of groceries by the door. If anyone asked why, he would tell them that he forgot his wallet at home. A good technique, but it left him without an excuse next time for that location in the event that someone did ask. Every place where he followed someone, he had to be cautious and leave for a week or so before returning.

Jordan had a long list of places he visited each weekend: all three Half-Priced Books locations in Austin, the Target to the north and south, the Central Market off Lamar Street where some of the most gorgeous ladies he had ever witnessed liked to spend their Saturday afternoons. He loved to visit the mall, but there were so many police officers everywhere that considered him guilty before he had a chance to do anything that it was hard to go there too often. He was always alone, walking through the corridors for no apparent reason and he didn't buy anything. He only wanted to view the wildlife.

Giant events became his favorite. Christmas and St. Patrick's Day parades where beautiful women gathered with their attention on the street while Jordan moved behind them, catching their every movement, their every excited bounce and expression. No one ever suspected him of any voyeuristic activity during these events, and if anyone asked him what he was looking for, he told them that he had a group of friends waiting for him at the end of the block.

After years of this, Jordan had hundreds of thousands of videos. He deleted the ones that didn't come out well and saved his prized videos in a special folder. He had started working at a bank where moms came in with their kids and leaned over the counter to fill out credit contracts. He spent time staring at the computer, telling them that he was waiting for the program to catch up while capturing them one after the other.

His life revolved around this hobby. Sometimes he told himself that he was going to quit, that it had taken too much control over his mind, and that he couldn't have a regular conversation with a woman without the unbelievable urge to caress her with his eyes. This had become a problem, but any time he thought about quitting a situation occurred where he told himself later: "It was such a perfect moment, how could I not film her?" It was a crime to pass up that moment in the bank when the woman with the tight blue pants leaned on one leg with her middle finger in her back pocket as she signed the back of her paycheck.

Years of this passed. He continued gathering and storing video files onto ever growing numbers of external hard drives. He finally set aside his hobby and settled down with a woman named Jenny White. They were married, and the night before his wedding day, Jordan stood on the edge of a bridge by their apartment and heaved the watch-camera into the river below. He often regretted it, but he was in his thirties now, and couldn't be following young women around without being noticed. Sometimes that part of his mind got the best of him and he still whipped out his camera phone and snagged the perfect video before storing the video on a hidden dropbox account. These videos were never as good of quality as the Cube watch but he couldn't resist. He was a man, and he was weak.

When Jenny was 34, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was as though his karma had decided to cash in early. She spent three long years battling the decay of her cells before she died at the age of 36. Technology had developed cures for cancer in the last ten years, but they were so expensive that she didn't want to leave Jordan with that kind of debt to take care of all on his own. At this point, he had his own business of buying and selling parts for airplanes. It was a good job but he still couldn't afford to pay for her treatment. He spent the next two years mourning the death of his spouse.

Jordan had a good friend who was high in the digital and holographic interface racket that had taken over the world recently. His name was John Templeton, and John had developed the program that Jordan had dictated to him so many times over so many beers throughout the years. John knew about Jordan's old hobby, knew that Jordan was lonely, and wanted to give Jordan a gift to make up for the years that John couldn't always be there to help him.

Jordan had recently sold his two warehouses for a generous 3.5 million dollars, and bought a humble apartment in New York. Jordan had installed the perfect old-time, dimly lit bar setting in a corner of his flat. The two sat at the bar, watching the Ravens vs. Cowboys game on the big-screen television on the brick wall while drinking glasses of Crown.

"Do you still have all those hard drives that you stored those videos on lying around somewhere?" John asked.

"In a box in the closet. Never lost a file, but I almost never boot them up these days... not since Jenny went."

"I'm curious to see how you might like booting them up if you'd like to let me do some work in your apartment this weekend." John said.

"How much?" Jordan let his glass hover halfway to his mouth.

John laughed. "You really think I'd charge you for this?"

"Everything cost something." Jordan drank.

"No, I don't think I could charge you for this one, Jordan." John sighed.

"You sound hesitant to even tell me what it is."

"I am, because I know that when I give you this gift it will be much like me giving you a pistol with a single round in the chamber, which you will immediately use to end your own life," said John.

"Then maybe you shouldn't tell me what it is at all-if you feel so strongly about it."

"I'm honestly curious to see how it will work out. And while I say that-while I am an advocate for certain types of cerebral holographic interface-it doesn't mean I condone what it will eventually do to people if we're not careful about it."

"So your being cautious is a moral conflict of interest." Jordan observed.

John turned and met Jordan's eye, and then put his hand on Jordan's shoulder. "I'm giving you the gift, don't worry about that. But this is something I fear you will never come back from. As your friend, of course I am concerned."

"Don't be. I can take care of myself and my own addictions." Jordan turned and took a sip of his drink as John lowered his hand to his knee.

"It's not that," John growled, uncharacteristically. "It's the level of realism, Jordan. I tried the thing once, and I'll never use that program again. I'm also a married man. It stirs some strange feelings in me."

"I'm intrigued. I want to know what it is you're talking about." Jordan said.

"I can't show you at my place, and you'll see why eventually. Let me come set it up at your apartment this weekend while you're out of the house. It will be best if you try it alone."

That Saturday morning, John arrived early. Jordan had just gotten dressed but hadn't expected him so soon. Once Jordan was out of the house, John and his crew started filing into his apartment. He walked around the city for awhile, enjoying the scenery, grabbed some groceries and tried to come back. Several burly construction members of John's crew wouldn't let him pass through the front door of the building. They told him to come back in six hours, so Jordan went down to his favorite bar and got drunk for the first time in a long time.

He ended up coming home after six hours. John and his crew were long gone. Jordan entered the apartment and saw that nearly everything had been moved a little. All of his furniture was sitting on plastic that covered the floors. The walls were coated in plastic, and so were the ceilings. Jordan flipped the light switch through the wall of plastic and looked around. His stuff was the same, but in the far corner of his livingroom, his television had been replaced by a large elaborate dentist's chair with a VR helmet attached to the top. There was a computer monitor next to the chair and a keyboard and mouse.

The only instruction for the machine was a single sentence that John had scrawled on a sheet of paper that read, "upload drives here," with an arrow pointing to a USB port on the machine. Next to the USB port was a power button for the computer. Jordan went into his room and found his hard drives in the boxes where he had left them, and brought them to the machine. He plugged in the first into the computer and pressed the power button.

There was a simple operating system that he had never heard of-probably to keep it from connecting to the web-that allowed him to upload all of the contents from his drives. It took about two hours to upload everything at a remarkably fast rate. He had a lot of files: some of the files so old that he had stored them originally on floppy disks in the early nineties while he was in elementary school, when you bought porn on VHS players and had to rewind and play to get to the good parts. All of this made him feel really old when you could stream porn on your phone and see a hundred beautiful women in five minutes almost anywhere you could imagine if you really wanted to. The difference between those videos and what he had stored on these devices was that what he had made was art. It wasn't trash that some dumbass slut or douchebag ex-boyfriend wanted everyone in the world to see. It was the product of work and effort and patience.

Once the computer got to his videos, it took a long time to process. Once he finished the last of the drives it took another twenty minutes to scan and process everything. Jordan didn't know what it was processing. Once the bar finished moving across the screen, the computer said that he had-with all the pictures of actresses, models, and images of people he had gathered over thirty years of being a perverted man-4,687,048 different women processed. He didn't know exactly what that meant yet, but it was a large number and it seemed right, considering he had gone through a phase during the height of Facebook where he had been saving pictures of friends of friends of friends for hours and hours when he wasn't out patrolling for ass. He'd saved so many pictures that it now seemed ridiculous; over four and a half-million women he had ogled over. Had he put that time into something productive he might have made something of himself.

While he didn't feel particularly randy, allowing this computer to examine every file of almost every woman he had ever come into contact with, he had come this far and needed to see what was next. The computer prompted him to put on the VR helmet. Jordan did as he was instructed, pulling the helmet over his head. There was nothing but blackness. He couldn't see anything no matter what he tried.

Finally, he felt a pinprick in his arm and felt a darkening relaxation flood over his body. The last thing he saw was the VR helmet being pulled off his head, and seeing John over him with an empty syringe in his latex gloved hand. "Sorry, buddy, it'll all make sense later. Trust me."

Jordan's world dissolved into darkness.

-

Jordan Parks woke, suspended in a blue beam of light. There was no depth to this light, but that was his world and that's all he could see. He was in his body and he was naked, floating in the blue hued light. He tried to move around and he could, but it still didn't do anything. He spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand why and how he was here. He was cognitive enough to understand his surroundings, he could remember things about his life, but just woke up here.

"Jordan," John's voice echoed in his ears as if he had a pair of headphones on. "Jordan, can you hear me?"

"Yeah, I can hear you, but I can't see you." Jordan replied.

"Well, I can't exactly tell if you just responded, but if you did then my program is working. I have some bad news and good news for you, Jordan. I'll start with the bad news: in two days, the Earth is going to undergo a series of heating a cooling phases, beginning with the surface of the planet getting as hot as around four-hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit. Most of us are going to be dead within a few hours of this as most of the planet is going to drastically change in a short period of time. That's the really bad news.

"The good news," John continued, "is that you and about ten thousand others have been selected to be launched into space for the next six-hundred and eighty years where you'll remain in cryostasis until you're safely back on Earth at the end of the heating and cooling period. Why you, you ask? Because, since I originally invented the program, I was promised a spot but... not my family. It all happened so fast, and since you no longer have a wife, and we're best friends and all-plus you had this debilitating habit that might actually keep you sane for nearly seven-hundred years-you were the only person I could think of who might stand a chance. That's the tricky part: not going crazy.

"Until you arrive, we need to keep you entertained so almost anything you can imagine can be done from your mental self-image here. I know how much you like your videos and pictures, so I had you scan and upload everything into the computer. You're welcome, buddy. I'll be dead in three days at most so I just wanted to let you know what happened as a courtesy to you. I'm about to go spend my savings and take my family to Disney World because I want to be there when that castle goes up in flames. If you need anything, I built a help avatar of myself into the program."

Jordan watched a short, animated version of John walk up and wave at him. He had captured John's thinning brown hair and goatee perfectly. It wore a white lab-coat over his black shirt and blue-jeans, and had shiny black loafers on.

"If that's too creepy for you, you can turn him off." John said and the avatar disappeared into a puff of smoke. "I programmed this to fulfill your every need, want, and desire, so have fun and be careful. If you hurt yourself or die here, you might die out there. You never know. Unfortunately, there's a good chance you're going to get really bored and try to make things interesting in here. I'm sure it will be, but don't forget that it's all a dream. I'm afraid I need to be on my way, so good luck, Jordan."