Kutor was unlike the rest of his tribe, and he knew it. They knew it. They feared him. To be fair they feared everything. Fear is a healthy mindset when competing with the elements and saber-toothed tigers. With Kutor, the fear was existential. They didn’t know what that meant. No one would define that kind of dread for thousands of years. That didn’t stop them from feeling it. They were morons. Being more politically correct, which is also an idea that wouldn’t take hold for generations, but a concept Kutor was sensitive to anyway, they hadn’t evolved past their primitive state. They weren’t so stupid that they didn’t recognize Kutor’s brilliance and the comfort he could bring them, so he was tolerated if not totally embraced.
Usually, a feeling that profound drove the tribe to act in less than familial ways by killing the person responsible. Their survival was so intertwined with Kutor’s existence, they dared not act against him. He was indispensable. They didn’t know what that meant either, but they knew it all the same. So did Kutor.
Often Kutor was heard talking to himself and drawing strange runes in the dirt trying to solve an enigmatic puzzle. And though his creations added to the welfare of his people, they avoided him. He didn’t fault them for it. They were simple people just beginning to grasp their place in the cosmos. Evolution, the biological force Kutor discovered that drives everything, was a harsh master and one that couldn’t be denied. He imagined what it must have been like for that first person to see beyond their own existence into sentience. For Kutor, he saw the contrast when he was two years old able to count past the fingers on his hand. But it made him alone. Part of them yet removed. Protected, but not connected.
He swung the door of his cave open and met the sun with a deep cleansing breath. One of his last. He held a steaming mug of brown liquid that the members of his tribe had come to understand as “morning drink.” Rich and fragrant, it had the properties of a stimulant and a laxative. Kutor sipped his drink as some of his more eager tribe folk passed by.
“Ug. Kutor.” One said in greeting.
“Good morning, Thok.” Kutor replied and waved.
It wasn’t just the way he spoke that set Kutor apart. He kept no fur on his head or face. When asked, Kutor replied, “It’s easier to maintain like this. You should try it. It helps me think.” Which made his brothers and sisters bang their fists into their heads in confusion.
All his calculations scribbled in chalk in his cave showed the same thing. He kept it secret. No reason to alarm everyone. It would be over soon enough anyway. Kutor thought about letting them in on it, but decided, through a series of mathematical equations, that it wouldn’t do any good. He was the only one who understood, who had the ability to understand. He predicted what they’d say. “We make big spear for stop giant sky rock!” “We run to cave on other side of flowing water.” There was nothing he could say to get them to come to terms with the end.
Kutor walked the perimeter of the village as he did every morning feeling the reverence from his kinsmen in the form of lowered heads and grunts of greeting. He could have explained it all. The world would go on. They wouldn’t get it. It was like talking to a tree. He may as well have told them light exhibits properties of both a particle and a wave.
He passed by one hairy man who was knelt over a pile of sticks trying hard to get a fire started. “Good morning, Krug.”
“Ug, Kutor.”
“Having a little trouble today?” Kutor smiled and sipped from his cup. Krug had a cup of his own filled with milk next to him. He made it himself with Kutor’s instruction, but it wasn’t as nice. It worked though.
“Fire not come. Me not know why.” Krug scratched his hairy head and rubbed his ridged brow. He sighed. “It cold morning.”
Kutor pulled a small stone from his animal skin tunic. He had sewn little pouches on the insides of his clothes. No one else had figured out how to do that yet. He separated the stone into two parts and banged the top on the bottom. An exposed bundle of mammoth hair sizzled with flame and Kutor held the fire to Krug’s bundle of sticks. Kutor chuckled to himself as Krug reverted to a less evolved state by running in a circle, screaming and flinging dirt in all directions as the bundle of sticks ignited.
“You’re welcome.” Kutor closed his small rock and put it back in his pocket. That’s what he called it: a pocket.
The tribe was flourishing. Kutor’s inventions, like the wheel and plumbing, made everyone’s lives easier and the world a little less harsh. He sighed. Hopefully his plan would work, and not everything would be lost.
He made his way out of the village and to his project. There was a clearing large enough a short walk into the woods where they would go and have rituals. Not exactly a holy site or anything. Religion was just emerging. But the ground was soft and the excavators he invented were able to dig deep and quickly. His explosives did the work on the bedrock.
The discoveries he made, the fossils, the geologic events, were fascinating. Kutor logged them on stone and set them aside to be preserved. He didn’t have the time to study them the way he wanted, but someone would…someday.
The crew was hard at work. They followed Kutor’s instructions to the letter. He gave them each such a specific task and clear instructions it was impossible not to. Scaffolding surrounded a pit thirty lengths of Kutor’s arm span wide. Counterweights on long beams were operated by his people. They raised them up and down pulling massive baskets full of soil and rocks from the hole. Activity was buzzing with grunts and high-pitched screams.
“Ug, Kutor.” Naka, a young woman holding a large bone club said. She was bigger than most of the villagers and had an air of command. Kutor installed her as the overseer of the project mostly because of her size and ferocity. It’s what his people accepted. Truth through intimidation. Malarky for the most part, but Kutor resigned to use his people’s antediluvian notions to his advantage. Naka also had a strange knack for cunning. Her eyes didn’t glaze over when Kutor explained what they were going to do. She was one of the few that could see beyond herself.
“Good morning, Naka. Where are we?” He sipped his drink while surveying the project. Naka scratched her ridged brow and seemed unable to answer. She looked down and around searching for a literal response. Kutor chuckled at his forewoman and rephrased.
“Apologies.” He cleared his throat. “How is the project going today.”
Naka smiled, a big blunt-toothed grin. “Go good. Almost ready for big box.” She pointed her giant hairy knuckled finger at a massive metal cube dangling by a series of intricately woven ropes. It was nearly as wide as the hole it hovered above and bigger than any of the homes in the village. Getting enough metal out of the ground was the first thing he had to convince his people to do. Then building a smelter. Then casting.
“This make us never die?” Naka interrupted Kutor’s inspection. It was an honest question. One that deserved an honest answer. Kutor convinced the tribe to go all in with his project because he told them their lives would be preserved forever. True. But rather than explain what that meant, Kutor allowed them to believe personal immortality was the result of their hard work. He smiled at Naka. His choice of leader for his project was a good one. She didn’t take things at face value. She had questions. She needed clarification. Unlike the rest of the proto people, She was skeptical. Like him.
Kutor looked at his massive undertaking, the largest of any ever, before he answered. The teakwood structures holding ropes and pulleys, the ramps of people waiting to put a part of themselves in the metal vault and sighed hoping this wasn’t truly the end. He cleared his throat to hide the sob that escaped his lips, and Naka tilted her head at him like the wolves Kutor domesticated when they didn’t understand. “Once we fill the giant box and bury it, we will live in the future.”
“Fuu…tuurrr?” Naka rumbled and banged her fist against her head as was customary with her people when they were thinking.
Kutor smiled. “In the time after now.”
“All time is time after now.” Naka said. And Kutor raised his trimmed eyebrows at Naka’s delivery of an abstract idea, impressed.
The queue of knuckle walking near apes wound up the scaffolding, each person holding something personal to put inside the vault. “You must put something of you inside for the magic to work.” Kutor explained when he brought the idea to his village. Again, true, but also not. Charg, the oldest member of the village at thirty-two, put his walking stick inside the receptacle. Zurg, the Chief’s daughter followed placing a small piece of leather with a print of her mother’s hand. That part of the assignment, to Kutor’s surprise, they all understood.
Kutor already put etchings of his favorite equations and discoveries on the walls of the vault: Three symbols, the first two separated by a small cross and the third by two small horizontal lines, all three accented with a smaller symbol next to a triangle. A double twisting vinelike scrawling with four different symbols attached on the inside, and the image of a circle on fire falling from the sky onto their world with the world destroyed. There were many more. That was his contribution.
He stayed there supervising his work watching his people leave their offerings. When night came, Kutor activated the lights he invented that didn’t require fire. They were brighter than the twinkling dots in the dark sky. One light up there used to be nothing but a twinkle too, but it had grown over the past few weeks. It would be on them soon. Working nonstop was the only way to get everything done before…before it was all over.
Kutor watched as Naka held her bone club to her protruding forehead and put it in the vault. He smiled at her and she smiled back. She used her powerful amrs to saunter up to Kutor. She grabbed his hand, a little too hard. Kutor winced and tried to pull away. “Naka will lay with you.”
Kutor gasped. “What?” he managed to cough out half in surprise half in disbelief. He’d never been with a woman. His projects and studies always kept him too busy.
“Naka will lay with you.” She said. “This only chance?” She tilted her head again. The big woman waved her heavily muscled arms at everything. “All gone soon?”
Kutor yanked his hand away stumbling back. He darted his head around to see if anyone else had heard. He looked back at Naka who gave him a sad grin and pulled her stringy brown hair out of her face.
“How can you possibly know that?” Kutor whispered in response holding his palms down asking Naka to speak softly. She didn’t.
“Me not as,” She tapped her head. “As Kutor. But me not like tree. Me bury father. Me bury mother. Everyone bury dead. Now we bury whole tribe.” Kutor’s mouth hung open. Within his little world was someone who, while maybe she wasn’t on his level intellectually, she was perceptive. She saw. “Me not like tree.” Naka repeated.
Kutor looked into her eyes which were not dim and struggling to understand. They were clear and the color of dark honey, and she got it. He took her hand. “There’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“No.” Naka said. She wasn’t asking a question.
She led him back to her cave and stoked a pile of embers into a fire. The cave shined with flickering flames. Kutor’s eyes went wide. Strewn in her home were the failures of Kutor’s ideas. Equations on stones that were crossed out. Little inventions that he could never get to work properly.
“You kept all this? Why?” Kutor asked. Naka didn’t answer. She wrapped her big hand around his head and led him to a pile of soft animal skins.
Morning came and they both stared at the ceiling spent from a night of lovemaking. Kutor puffed on a rolled tube of a plant he’d cultivated. The smell was rich and deep. He passed it to Naka who took a puff as well. Kutor reveled in the light headedness brought on by the burning dried flowers. He always felt as if he was above the ground when he smoked it.
“How long?” Naka said having difficulty speaking as she held in the smoke before exhaling like Kutor instructed.
“Ten days.” He said and he blew a gout of pungent smoke into the air.
She took the smoldering tube and inhaled. “Still time.” Kutor turned to her and mimicked her confusion from earlier with a tilt of his head. “For put this in balt.” She motioned to her cave and all Kutor’s near misses.
“Vault.” He corrected and rubbed her shoulder. “No. None of this goes in. I don’t want to be remembered for the things I did wrong.”
Naka pursed her lips in thought. “But things wrong make thing that work. You see what wrong. You fix. Maybe in Fuutuurr,” Naka forced out the word. “Someone else see your wrongs and they fix?”
If Kutor could have kicked himself, he would have. Naka had insight. She was smart, for them. He’d been so alone with no one to talk to, no one to get him. And here she was right under his nose the whole time. He wiped his eyes. He only had a little more than a week left with her.
With a furry hand she clumsily wiped his wet face dry. “We lay together more. Then we put all inside Vvvaaalt.” She pushed it out while she pointed at the items in her house that she saved. Kutor nodded as Naka climbed on top of him.
“Wait.” He said and with great effort pressed his hands on her chest to hold her back. “Why did you save all this, and why did you take so long to be with me?” He started to tear up again lamenting the lost time he could have had with a partner.
“Me took all because…” Naka looked away and her face turned red. “Me like you. You different. Special.” She kissed him and he felt the warmth of her mouth and tasted the smoke on her tongue. “Me not tell you because, you know,” she pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. “Me shy.”
Kutor smiled. The biggest and most powerful person of their large tribe admitted to being nervous about expressing her feelings. She truly was special. “You could have say something too!” She poked Kutor in the chest and they both grunted in laughter reverting to guttural speech.
For the next few days living forever was as simple as living together. They watched their people struggle making the simplest of tools and picking bugs off each other’s backs. They kept the project going being front and center when the vault dropped into the hole and was buried. They sat staring at the night sky as their doom that started as a twinkle ages ago grew into the extinction it was.
“If we had baby, what name it?” Naka asked as the fiery death got closer.
“It doesn’t matter.” Kutor said watching the comet streak across the sky.
Naka gave out an angry snort and grabbed Kutor’s chin. He expected her to jerk his face to hers, but she was gentle and pulled him close. She wrapped her massive arms around him. “Then why we do this? Why we save village in VVValt?”
Kutor opened his mouth to speak. Naka swatted him playfully, if a little roughly, on the head to indicate she didn’t want to hear an answer. “It matter.” She said. “You matter.”
Kutor reached up and cupped Naka’s wide face in his hands. He pressed his forehead to hers. There was a tremendous boom from far away and a great trembling of the ground. Incessant shrieks and howls from his people were drowned out by a rising groan from the firmament itself.
“I like the name Clark.” Kutor said.
Naka smiled and wiped tears from Kutor’s face then from her own. “Me like too.”