You are listening to a Clark's World Magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clark's World Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

This is our fourth story for the month of January 2020, issue 160.

Once again, I'd like to thank you for your ongoing support of this magazine, especially if you go over to Patreon.com

for slash Clark'sworld.

Just a dollar a month or more can help us continue to bring you wonderful fiction each and every month

plus our art, our podcasts, and our non-fiction.

Free fiction isn't quite free.

Our story is titled The Last to Die and is by Rita Chung Epig.

Rita Chung Epig is a writer, neuropsychologist in the Bay Area.

Her stories have appeared in McSweeny's quarterly concern, Kenyan review online, conjunctions, and elsewhere.

So my dear listeners, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

The morning the glass woman arrived on the island,

all the security cameras blinked out at the same time. Surveillance drones swooned

from the sky, tumbling softly onto genetically modified lawns that smelled like wildflowers

grown in beakers of rain and cleaning fluid.

Safety bots power down mid-task and scandalous poses, legs akimboe, rears in the air.

The last to die hardly new. Kimboe, rears in the air.

The Laced I hardly knew what to make of this strange turn of events, having lived the past few decades

under the around-the-clock care of these machines. Some of them feared that catastrophe had struck the

outside world from which they dwelled in relative isolation. Others barely noticed their minds long ago having decomposed into yard waste.

The synaptic branches cut, the nuclei withered like week old rosebuds.

...