The next day, I woke up and checked whether any of the machinery was damaged.
My mother approached me with a guilty expression and said,
"I'm sorry. If I hadn't suggested sharing food, none of this would've happened."
"It's not your fault. That couple already knew where the bunker was, so this was going to happen anyway. Please don't worry about it."
I comforted my mother and checked the equipment again. Despite everything that had happened, there were fortunately no major issues.
After that, the internet suddenly connected, which really surprised me.
Turns out some hacker had unlocked Starlink for free worldwide.
Thanks to that, for five years I built a survivor community with people from other countries. We exchanged information and even made friends, so I wasn't bored.
Once we passed the five-year mark in the bunker, the number of people online dropped sharply. The general opinion was that most of them had run out of food and starved to death.
China and Russia had adopted a "let's all die together" approach. They deliberately targeted nuclear power plants with nukes. The world was already losing plants and animals to abnormal temperatures, and now the contamination made it impossible to eat anything except what we grew in bunkers.
With governments collapsed, outlaws and looters became common. Food was so scarce that some people even started hunting humans for cannibalism.
In year six, my mother couldn't even get out of bed.
Is she sick?
I checked her and found her whole body burning with fever.
"This is bad. I don't have any medical knowledge."
I frantically searched the internet, but I couldn't figure out what illness she had.
I had no choice but to get fever reducers and cold medicine from the emergency kit and give them to her. I brought cold water, soaked a towel, and kept cooling her body.
By the next day, despite my constant care, her condition had worsened.
The fever showed no signs of breaking, and the time she spent awake grew shorter and shorter.
That evening, she woke up briefly. She held my hand tightly and said, "No matter what happens, survive. You have to become strong."
Those were her last words before she closed her eyes for good.
For two days, I couldn't eat anything. I cried until I collapsed from exhaustion, over and over.
I felt like I was going to die without keeping my mother's last wish, so I pulled myself together. I wrapped her body carefully in cloth and stored it in the coolest part of the warehouse.
"Mother, I promise I'll survive and bury you next to Father."
I made a promise to her body that I wasn't sure I could keep.
By year ten, most of the survivors were people like meāthose who had stockpiled food and lived in bunkers.
It seemed like almost everyone outside was dead.
Bunkers weren't necessarily safe either. From what I heard, some bunkers were raided when they couldn't fend off outside attacks. Others collapsed from internal conflict, contamination, or food shortages.
Ironically, my bunker hadn't been attacked since the looters covered the entrance with dirt and rocks.
Once we passed fifteen years in the bunker, it really felt like only a few of us were left.
Posts in the community became rare, and the friends I used to talk with stopped responding.
My bunker was having serious problems too.
We were almost out of air circulation filters, so I had to ration them. The air quality inside deteriorated. The water purifier had broken down long ago. I was barely getting by using water from the dehumidifier and the sump basin we'd installed to control humidity in the warehouse. My health kept getting worse.
The only good news was food. I'd calculated carefully and rationed strictly, so it looked like we could last another five years.
Now it's year eighteen. I've barely held on to make it this far.
It really feels like the end now.
Two years ago, something went wrong with the solar and wind generators I installed at the house. They stopped producing electricity, and I've been living in darkness ever since.
Thanks to the air ducts connected to the outside, I won't suffocate, but without filters, contaminated air flows in directly.
A year ago, my hair started falling out in patches, and then one of my teeth fell out. Now I'm so weak I can barely walk.
"Ahā¦ is this the endā¦"
I don't care about anything else. I just regret that I won't be able to keep my promise to my mother.
[ā ABā -Xā ā L-23854 planet's last intelligent survivor has been confirmed.]
[Assessing the value of civilizationā¦]
"Huh?"