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“She’ll be liable to erase me if she finds out I’ve shown you this.”
    I promised Howard I would not tell, and was actually grateful to have something I could share with another male, even if he was just a computer recording. We talked more and more, Howard and I, while Tab and I remained close, if gradually more separate. One evening when Tab thought I was asleep, I slipped out of bed and moved silently through the air to the doorway to her room, where I heard she and Howard talking. Pillow talk, my mother would have called it, made strange by the fact that Howard was not actually in the bed with his wife.
    “He’s going to be a man soon,” Tab said sadly.
    “He became a man when his Daddy died,” Howard replied.
    “Probably true. But you don’t know how happy I’ve been, finally having a young one around to look after. We tried so hard, all those years, you and I. And nothing. Then, like Sarah, God sends me this boy in my old age. Only, I never got to have him as a baby. He was mostly grown up when he came, and now….”
    I felt a lump form in my throat while Tab quietly wept.
    “He’s a good boy, Tabitha. We can both see that. And I think he loves you. He won’t say it when I talk with him, but I can feel it.”
    Tab barked out a mocking laugh. “Hah! A computerized man who can feel!”
    “You know what I mean, woman. Now hush up. My sensors tell me the boy is lurking at your door. He’s probably heard everything we’ve been saying.”
    “Sorry,” I said, letting myself in, sheepishly smiling.
    Tab was there, wiping tears from her eyes. “Don’t be, Mirek. I’m just a sad old lady who never had a chance to have any children of her own. Don’t mind it if I’ve become too attached to you.”
    In fact, I didn’t mind it. I didn’t mind it at all.
    Using my arms, I launched from the hatch and grabbed Tab in a bear hug, squeezing her as tightly as I remembered her having squeezed me that first day I decided to stay with my new family, and seek the Outbound.
    She wept anew, for joy this time, and I told Tabitha and Howard Marshall how much I did love them, and how thankful I was that they’d found me and given me a home when the world had taken all such things from me.
    • • •
    By the time I was sixteen, I suspected that the full burden of humanity’s self-annihilation had yet to settle on my shoulders. Some crucial part of me remained numb to the idea that everyone had ceased to exist, and that all the artifacts of humanity on virtually every world had been antimattered to dust. How ironic that perhaps the only surviving tokens of human intelligence, were the final remaining warbots which continued to prowl the solar system, seeking targets and enemies which did not exist. Such thoughts were depressing, and depression again became a common companion.
    I’d have liked very much to have another young woman around to talk to, to touch, and to hold in my arms at night. But the way things stood, I might not ever see another woman again, besides Tabitha, and this grew to be an irritant like no other.
    With Howard’s surreptitious help, I began to distill spirits from the grains grown in the farm domes.
    Shortly after, Howard began to worry that he had an alcoholic on his hands.
    But how else was I supposed to bear it? I had a dead past, and an unknown future. The only living young man left in the universe!
    Homesickness and abstract horniness accentuated my depression, giving it a melancholy flavor.
    I began to drink daily. Alone. In the private module I’d built out on the face of the observatory’s foundation, where Tab couldn’t touch nor talk to me. I neglected my daily exercise in the spin room. Why bother? What future awaited me now? I’d been young when I left Earth, and young I would remain for many years. But what was youth without joy? Without a girlfriend? I found myself daydreaming endlessly about all the older girls I had ever been attracted to: their faces, their expressions,