a small everyday apocalypse, a soft plagiarism

I am sitting on a hill watching the man, Smith standing on the hill on the hill in the centre of the city whose people had left. Smith is looking up at the building- the one structure that dwarfed every hotel-grid, skyscraper needle, or apartmant-cheesebox packed into all the miles that lay around him […] Smith felt that he should not have come back. It had been over two years since he had been here. He should have returned to the mountains now […] I was sitting watching him, he didn’t know we were here, sitting in the villa that mostly overlooked the sea, except for this window which looked down the valley into the dead city. Smith is back, I called out to her […] Smith, tied back his long hair into a pony tail. Shrugged his heavy shoulders, in an unsuccessful attempt to shake off the days, six or was it ten years ago when he had worked in this giant unit. Before everyone died or left. […] I watched him walk up the hill to the high wide, doorway. The building was still, the air was still, the lifts open on the ground floor, the escalators still. It was like a mausoleum. There seemed no ceiling, Only the soft pat-pat of his soles on the floor. When he reached the lift. He turned off to the right and he walked up the the maintenance stairs. […] I could see his warm body walking up the stairs. He goes into the power room and after wandering around the floor he vanishes into the generator room […] Smith selected the first few emergency generators and began cleaning them, removing the dust, Checking for loose connections, cleaning and preparing, testing the circuits. He is trying to start the city again. The maintenance robots were frozen stopped in their tasks. He moved some of them out of the way, leaving them in a circle facing one another. In the reactor control room he checked for leaks, to see if anything needed repairing. The coolant pipes, the fans and pumps all seemed to be OK. He walked around the the engineering floor for the last time. He removed the control rods from the reactor. The control room had a thousand or more dials, lights, eyes. As things normalized he watched them stabilize and carried out the final few adjustments. He opened the blinds manually. and looked out the window. It was late afternoon, the reactor was working well. The other blinds opened with a hum and grating noises. He sat on the control chair and ate some food, a drink of water. He turned it onto automatic and walked out of the building. He sat on the grass outside and remembered the days when he helped keep the colonial city running. Outside the sun was setting and the lights were coming on. The building hummed into life. The reactor was heating the and the generators ran… The night fell, stars became visible and the city lights turned on. More beautiful than the stars, streetlights, building lights, windows illuminated by the lights left on by the departed. A random array of lights on the skyscrapers, searchlights, queued messages being sent into space. He imagined the people in bars, walking home, playing with machines, children, robots moving and remembering their last instructions. The reactor ran for an hour or two before it overheated and died. No don’t stop. Come on just a little longer. The lights dimmed, only a few recharged robots continued to work. He watched it fail. As the power failed the windows and the blinds closed themselves, the air conditioning units stopped. He went into the control room and waited for the lights to all fail. He left across the grass, eventually the sun rose and he left the city. I watched him leave, do you think he is happy? I asked my partner. No, he misses everyone. Should we rescue him ? No. He would hate our world.