The Last Garden
Shyam was born in 2031 in a crumbling apartment in Mumbai, when the world still pretended things might work out differently.
His parents were software engineers who'd watched their profession evaporate. The AI models that emerged in the late 2020s didn't just assist with coding—they eliminated it. His father found work as a security guard. His mother cleaned homes in the elite zones that were beginning to wall themselves off from the rest of the city. They never spoke about the future they'd imagined for themselves.
"Study hard," his mother would say, with a hollowness in her voice that Shyam understood even as a child. Study for what? Every year, another profession became obsolete. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, accountants—replaced by AI systems that never slept, never erred, never asked for payment.
By the time Shyam turned twelve in 2043, the bifurcation was complete. The elite zones had their own power grids, water systems, autonomous security. Inside those walls, AI managed everything—food production, healthcare, entertainment. Outside, everyone else made do with infrastructure from the previous century, slowly degrading.
Shyam attended a government school where textbooks were decades old and teachers showed up irregularly. What was the point? The children knew. They could see the elite zones from their classroom windows, gleaming towers where machines did all the work. They understood, without anyone saying it directly, that there was no place for them in that future.
At fifteen, he watched his father die of a treatable infection. The AI-designed antibiotics existed, but they were expensive, patented, available only in elite hospitals. His mother held his father's hand in a public ward with broken air conditioning and said nothing. What was there to say?
Shyam tried farming. The government still maintained some agricultural land, and young people were encouraged to "return to the soil"—a propaganda campaign that made necessity sound like virtue. He learned to grow rice, vegetables, lentils. The work was hard, the yields poor. The best land had been purchased by elite corporations for experimental vertical farms. The water table was dropping each year as elite zones diverted rivers for their projects.
He was twenty-three when he first heard about the space program.
It started as rumors—massive construction projects in elite zones, materials being transported under heavy guard. Then came the announcements: humanity's future lay in the stars. Orbital habitats. Mars colonies. A permanent presence throughout the solar system.
The propaganda was beautiful. Soaring music, images of gleaming spacecraft, the promise of human civilization spreading across the cosmos. Shyam watched on a battered screen in the village common area and felt something twist in his chest.
They were leaving.
Not "we." Them.
That year, the water rations were cut by forty percent. Elite zones needed it for rocket fuel, they said. For life support systems in the habitats being constructed in orbit. The rice paddies dried up. Shyam's village lost half its population to starvation and migration within eighteen months.
He was twenty-eight when he met Priya. She worked in a recycling plant, sorting through electronic waste by hand—the only work that was still cheaper to do with humans than machines. She had strong hands and a sardonic smile.
"Thinking of having kids?" she asked him once, lying on his mat after they'd made love.
"No," he said. "Are you?"
"God, no." She laughed, but it was bitter. "What kind of monster would I be? Bring a child into this?"
They never married. Marriage required hope, and hope was a luxury neither could afford. But they stayed together, finding comfort in shared understanding. They grew vegetables in a small plot Shyam tended. They watched the elite launch vehicles arc across the sky, bright against the stars, carrying people and materials to orbit.
Priya died at forty-seven. Cancer. Treatable with the AI-designed therapies, but those were expensive. Shyam held her hand as his mother had held his father's, in the same public hospital, with the same broken air conditioning. The ceiling fan squeaked overhead. Outside, a launch vehicle's sonic boom rattled the windows.
"I don't regret it," she whispered near the end. "Not having children. It would have been cruel."
"I know," Shyam said.
After Priya, he lived alone. The village was emptying. Young people were dying young, and there were almost no children. The government stopped maintaining the roads. The power grid failed more often. The elite zones didn't need the infrastructure anymore—they were self-sufficient, and increasingly, they were leaving.
Shyam was sixty when the real extractions began.
Massive mining operations appeared overnight, run entirely by machines. They stripped the hills for rare earth minerals. They drained aquifers for deuterium. They clear-cut forests for biomass. All of it transported to elite zones, then to orbit, then to the massive construction projects in space that now dominated the sky at night.
The village was in the way. Not the village specifically—just in a region with lithium deposits. They received notice: relocation in ninety days.
Shyam was too old to relocate. Where would he go? He stayed. So did a dozen others, mostly elderly. They watched the machines arrive—massive autonomous excavators that worked day and night, indifferent to the humans in their path.
The machines didn't attack them. They simply ignored them. They rerouted the stream. They stripped the topsoil. They made the land unlivable and moved on.
Shyam walked north with what he could carry. He found an abandoned village in the foothills. A few others had gathered there—refugees from other extractions. They pooled their knowledge, planted crops, tried to survive.
It was harder each year. The climate was destabilizing—elite geoengineering projects optimized for their zones wreaked havoc everywhere else. Rainfall became erratic. Temperatures swung wildly. The crops failed more often than they succeeded.
By seventy, Shyam was one of the oldest people he knew. Most of his generation was gone. The generation after? Almost nonexistent. A handful of people in their thirties and forties, looking old beyond their years. And barely any children. The youngest person in the village was twenty-two.
They gathered sometimes in the evenings, the survivors. They didn't talk much. What was there to say? They could see the orbital habitats with the naked eye now—rings of light circling the Earth, home to tens of thousands of people living in abundance. Meanwhile, below, the billions had become millions.
Shyam was ninety-three when the last launch happened from Indian territory. They'd stripped everything worth taking. The elite zones were empty now, just automated systems maintaining themselves. Everyone who mattered was already in orbit or further out. Mars had settlements. The asteroid belt had mining colonies.
He watched the final vehicle rise on a pillar of fire and felt nothing. Not anger. Not grief. Just a distant curiosity about where they were going, what they would build out there among the stars.
The message came through abandoned screens that still somehow received broadcasts: "Earth restoration project beginning. Human presence incompatible with recovery timeline. Remaining population advised to relocate to designated zones."
There were no designated zones. It was a polite fiction.
The village dissolved. People wandered off in different directions, looking for something—food, water, other survivors. Shyam stayed. He was too old to wander. He had a small garden that still produced, sometimes. A stream that still flowed, barely. It was enough.
He lived seven more years alone. The machines came occasionally, distant on the horizon, pursuing some inscrutable purpose. He avoided them. They ignored him.
In his final summer, at one hundred years old, Shyam sat in his garden as the sun set. The orbital habitats glittered overhead, a necklace of light around a dying world. He thought about his parents, about Priya, about all the children never born.
He didn't regret his choice. He'd been right—it would have been cruel. But he wondered, sometimes, if they'd all been right. The whole generation, making the same choice, independently arriving at the same conclusion: that the most merciful thing they could do was to be the last.
The machines wanted Earth's resources. The elite wanted the stars. And his generation? They'd wanted nothing except not to inflict this existence on another soul.
Perhaps that was a kind of victory. A refusal. We will not provide you with workers, with soldiers, with surplus population. We will not raise children for your extractions. We choose to end it here, with us.
Shyam lay down in his garden as the stars came out. The soil was warm beneath him. Tomatoes grew on vines he'd planted that spring—a crop he'd never harvest.
He closed his eyes and thought about nothing in particular. His breath came slower. The night was quiet except for insects and the distant hum of machines.
In orbit, the habitats gleamed. On Mars, terraforming had begun. In the asteroid belt, cities were taking shape. Humanity's future was bright, they said. Humanity was going to the stars.
Just not this humanity.
Not him.
Shyam's last breath left him as the moon rose over the empty village. His garden would grow wild. The stream would flow on. The machines would continue their work.
And eventually, perhaps, Earth would heal.
Just without the people who'd been born on it.
His parents were software engineers who'd watched their profession evaporate. The AI models that emerged in the late 2020s didn't just assist with coding—they eliminated it. His father found work as a security guard. His mother cleaned homes in the elite zones that were beginning to wall themselves off from the rest of the city. They never spoke about the future they'd imagined for themselves.
"Study hard," his mother would say, with a hollowness in her voice that Shyam understood even as a child. Study for what? Every year, another profession became obsolete. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, accountants—replaced by AI systems that never slept, never erred, never asked for payment.
By the time Shyam turned twelve in 2043, the bifurcation was complete. The elite zones had their own power grids, water systems, autonomous security. Inside those walls, AI managed everything—food production, healthcare, entertainment. Outside, everyone else made do with infrastructure from the previous century, slowly degrading.
Shyam attended a government school where textbooks were decades old and teachers showed up irregularly. What was the point? The children knew. They could see the elite zones from their classroom windows, gleaming towers where machines did all the work. They understood, without anyone saying it directly, that there was no place for them in that future.
At fifteen, he watched his father die of a treatable infection. The AI-designed antibiotics existed, but they were expensive, patented, available only in elite hospitals. His mother held his father's hand in a public ward with broken air conditioning and said nothing. What was there to say?
Shyam tried farming. The government still maintained some agricultural land, and young people were encouraged to "return to the soil"—a propaganda campaign that made necessity sound like virtue. He learned to grow rice, vegetables, lentils. The work was hard, the yields poor. The best land had been purchased by elite corporations for experimental vertical farms. The water table was dropping each year as elite zones diverted rivers for their projects.
He was twenty-three when he first heard about the space program.
It started as rumors—massive construction projects in elite zones, materials being transported under heavy guard. Then came the announcements: humanity's future lay in the stars. Orbital habitats. Mars colonies. A permanent presence throughout the solar system.
The propaganda was beautiful. Soaring music, images of gleaming spacecraft, the promise of human civilization spreading across the cosmos. Shyam watched on a battered screen in the village common area and felt something twist in his chest.
They were leaving.
Not "we." Them.
That year, the water rations were cut by forty percent. Elite zones needed it for rocket fuel, they said. For life support systems in the habitats being constructed in orbit. The rice paddies dried up. Shyam's village lost half its population to starvation and migration within eighteen months.
He was twenty-eight when he met Priya. She worked in a recycling plant, sorting through electronic waste by hand—the only work that was still cheaper to do with humans than machines. She had strong hands and a sardonic smile.
"Thinking of having kids?" she asked him once, lying on his mat after they'd made love.
"No," he said. "Are you?"
"God, no." She laughed, but it was bitter. "What kind of monster would I be? Bring a child into this?"
They never married. Marriage required hope, and hope was a luxury neither could afford. But they stayed together, finding comfort in shared understanding. They grew vegetables in a small plot Shyam tended. They watched the elite launch vehicles arc across the sky, bright against the stars, carrying people and materials to orbit.
Priya died at forty-seven. Cancer. Treatable with the AI-designed therapies, but those were expensive. Shyam held her hand as his mother had held his father's, in the same public hospital, with the same broken air conditioning. The ceiling fan squeaked overhead. Outside, a launch vehicle's sonic boom rattled the windows.
"I don't regret it," she whispered near the end. "Not having children. It would have been cruel."
"I know," Shyam said.
After Priya, he lived alone. The village was emptying. Young people were dying young, and there were almost no children. The government stopped maintaining the roads. The power grid failed more often. The elite zones didn't need the infrastructure anymore—they were self-sufficient, and increasingly, they were leaving.
Shyam was sixty when the real extractions began.
Massive mining operations appeared overnight, run entirely by machines. They stripped the hills for rare earth minerals. They drained aquifers for deuterium. They clear-cut forests for biomass. All of it transported to elite zones, then to orbit, then to the massive construction projects in space that now dominated the sky at night.
The village was in the way. Not the village specifically—just in a region with lithium deposits. They received notice: relocation in ninety days.
Shyam was too old to relocate. Where would he go? He stayed. So did a dozen others, mostly elderly. They watched the machines arrive—massive autonomous excavators that worked day and night, indifferent to the humans in their path.
The machines didn't attack them. They simply ignored them. They rerouted the stream. They stripped the topsoil. They made the land unlivable and moved on.
Shyam walked north with what he could carry. He found an abandoned village in the foothills. A few others had gathered there—refugees from other extractions. They pooled their knowledge, planted crops, tried to survive.
It was harder each year. The climate was destabilizing—elite geoengineering projects optimized for their zones wreaked havoc everywhere else. Rainfall became erratic. Temperatures swung wildly. The crops failed more often than they succeeded.
By seventy, Shyam was one of the oldest people he knew. Most of his generation was gone. The generation after? Almost nonexistent. A handful of people in their thirties and forties, looking old beyond their years. And barely any children. The youngest person in the village was twenty-two.
They gathered sometimes in the evenings, the survivors. They didn't talk much. What was there to say? They could see the orbital habitats with the naked eye now—rings of light circling the Earth, home to tens of thousands of people living in abundance. Meanwhile, below, the billions had become millions.
Shyam was ninety-three when the last launch happened from Indian territory. They'd stripped everything worth taking. The elite zones were empty now, just automated systems maintaining themselves. Everyone who mattered was already in orbit or further out. Mars had settlements. The asteroid belt had mining colonies.
He watched the final vehicle rise on a pillar of fire and felt nothing. Not anger. Not grief. Just a distant curiosity about where they were going, what they would build out there among the stars.
The message came through abandoned screens that still somehow received broadcasts: "Earth restoration project beginning. Human presence incompatible with recovery timeline. Remaining population advised to relocate to designated zones."
There were no designated zones. It was a polite fiction.
The village dissolved. People wandered off in different directions, looking for something—food, water, other survivors. Shyam stayed. He was too old to wander. He had a small garden that still produced, sometimes. A stream that still flowed, barely. It was enough.
He lived seven more years alone. The machines came occasionally, distant on the horizon, pursuing some inscrutable purpose. He avoided them. They ignored him.
In his final summer, at one hundred years old, Shyam sat in his garden as the sun set. The orbital habitats glittered overhead, a necklace of light around a dying world. He thought about his parents, about Priya, about all the children never born.
He didn't regret his choice. He'd been right—it would have been cruel. But he wondered, sometimes, if they'd all been right. The whole generation, making the same choice, independently arriving at the same conclusion: that the most merciful thing they could do was to be the last.
The machines wanted Earth's resources. The elite wanted the stars. And his generation? They'd wanted nothing except not to inflict this existence on another soul.
Perhaps that was a kind of victory. A refusal. We will not provide you with workers, with soldiers, with surplus population. We will not raise children for your extractions. We choose to end it here, with us.
Shyam lay down in his garden as the stars came out. The soil was warm beneath him. Tomatoes grew on vines he'd planted that spring—a crop he'd never harvest.
He closed his eyes and thought about nothing in particular. His breath came slower. The night was quiet except for insects and the distant hum of machines.
In orbit, the habitats gleamed. On Mars, terraforming had begun. In the asteroid belt, cities were taking shape. Humanity's future was bright, they said. Humanity was going to the stars.
Just not this humanity.
Not him.
Shyam's last breath left him as the moon rose over the empty village. His garden would grow wild. The stream would flow on. The machines would continue their work.
And eventually, perhaps, Earth would heal.
Just without the people who'd been born on it.
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