“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town? We danced and sang, and the music played inna de boomtown.” — The Specials, “Ghost Town”, 1981
On the Monday after the end of the world I returned to my office to begin my personal countdown to termination. I wasn’t sure yet how long I had before my lease on life would run out, but it would be at least two months, and probably three. The duties of my half-life weren’t yet fully determined, but it seemed unlikely that they would be ready to throw the switch on the largest systems until July or August. Of course, finding anyone who had hard facts at their disposal was only eclipsed in difficulty by finding someone willing to share that information. Even after Ragnarok, no one seemed to really know what was going on. You just knew to keep your head down or risk losing it.
Those of us who would be needed briefly, the NGFs and the zombies, would be let go in waves of steadily decreasing size. One batch of a hundred or so would leave at the end of May, a group of about forty at the end of June, and then in ones or twos as their usefulness ended, stragglers to the end.
Compared to the bustling pre-apocalypse days, the building’s offices were largely empty. The new corporate structure required that the living spent most of their time traveling, leaving their desks vacant. Additionally, most of the cube farms, completed mere weeks before the fatal announcement, were being broken down for reallocation to other regions, or sold off piecemeal. Chairs still carrying their ergonomic instructions were corralled into empty rooms for resale, virtually unused. Phones were heaped haphazardly on carts; stacked file cabinets formed beige steel buttes in open spaces.