"Truly Leo, I'm sorry."
"So I'm dead then?"
"I'm sorry," the doctor repeated, snapping the clasps on his briefcase.
"How long?" Leo asked.
"A month ... three at most," said the doctor, walking to the door.
"Damn it, I'll miss the millennium."
As he returned from seeing the doctor out, Leo caught a glimpse of his reflection in the hall mirror. He did not look ill. His faded eyes were clear, he wasn't overweight, and he'd given up smoking long before it became fashionable. Yet he was dying and all his accumulated millions could not save him. On impulse he locked his penthouse suite, took his private elevator to the basement garage and waved away his startled driver.
"I want to walk, Garry."
Leo hadn't walked anywhere in years, it was like reawakening. He smelt the rotting refuse behind his favourite restaurant; tasted the acid in the moist air; drank in the unfiltered lights, through the haze; felt the uneven surface of the broken pavement through the soft soles of privilege, and wondered, as countless millions had before him. What's it all about.
As if on cue, a billboard attracted his attention.
IS YOUR ETERNAL LIFE SECURE?
Leo was a non-believer. No eternal life for him. He had even rejected cryogenic storage, the nearest equivalent. From what he'd read no corpsicle had yet been revived. The storage company simply ate up the client's fortune and when it was gone, you were still dead.
The slogan, however, did spark his imagination ... it suggested a way in which he could achieve a surrogate form of eternal life. He could leave his body to the future, have himself buried in a time capsule that would automatically open in a thousand years: just before the next millennium.
"Truly Leo, I'm sorry."
"I'm not dead then?"
"I'm sorry," repeated the holographic image of his doctor, echoing its long dead prototype.
If it were not so tragic Leo would have laughed. "How long ago?" he asked.
"Our investigations indicate nine hundred to a thousand years."
Good god, thought Leo cynically, I died just in time.
"A comet we think," the spectral doctor continued. "We have evidence of a ninety-percent extinction rate. Your species was just one of many."
He was shown thousands of images. How the surface had been when they arrived. How they had gradually terraformed it to their requirements over three hundred years. Leo thought the result subtly beautiful.
Life as Leo knew it had perished, leaving a random assortment of survivors: sharks, crocodiles, rabbits . . . cockroaches, and him.
His alien hosts had resurrected him into a brave new world in which he could linger indefinitely. His face twisted in an ironic smile. Tears formed. His eternal life was secure, but as the last of his species, devoid of human companionship, he wanted none of it.
Leo's penultimate request was a hollow fulfilment of his thousand-year-old dream. "Damn it, I want to see the new millennium."