It was just after five as I walked down the hill from Eastwood railway station. The sky was pale and colorless, Venus was fading slowly in the east – but the street itself already looked exactly as it did by daylight. Just inexplicably deserted. My carriage on the train had been empty, too. Last-human-on-Earth time.

Birds were calling – loudly – in the lush bushland which lined the railway corridor, and in the labyrinth of wooded parks woven into the surrounding suburb. Many of the parks resembled pristine forest – but every tree, every shrub was engineered: at the very least drought and fire resistant, shedding no messy, flammable twigs, bark or leaves. Dead plant tissue was resorbed, cannibalized; I’d seen it portrayed in time-lapse (one kind of photography I never carried out myself): an entire brown and wilting branch shrinking back into the living trunk. Most of the trees generated a modest amount of electricity – ultimately from sunlight, although the chemistry was elaborate, and the release of stored energy continued twenty-four hours a day. Specialized roots sought out the underground superconductors snaking through the parks, and fed in their contributions. Two and a quarter volts was about as intrinsically safe as electric power could be – but it required zero resistance for efficient transmission.

Some of the fauna had been modified, too; the magpies were docile even in spring, the mosquitoes shunned mammalian blood, and the most venomous snakes were incapable of harming a human child. Small advantages over their wild cousins, tied to the biochemistry of the engineered vegetation, guaranteed the altered species dominance in this microecology – and small handicaps kept them from flourishing if they ever escaped to one of the truly wild reserves, distant from human habitation.

I was renting a small detached unit in a cluster of four, set in a zero-maintenance garden which merged seamlessly with the tendril of parkland at the end of a cul-de-sac. I’d been there for eight years, ever since my first commission from SeeNet, but I still felt like a trespasser. Eastwood was just eighteen kilometers from the center of Sydney, which – although ever fewer people had reason to travel there – still seemed to hold an inexplicable sway over real-estate prices; I couldn’t have bought the unit myself in a hundred years. The (barely) affordable rent was just a felicitous by-product of the owner’s elaborate tax evasion schemes – and it was probably only a matter of time before some quiver of butterfly wings in world financial markets rendered the networks slightly less generous, or my landowner slightly less in need of a write-off, and I’d be picked up and flung fifty kilometers west, back to the outer sprawl where I belonged.

I approached warily. Home should have felt like a sanctuary after the night’s events, but I hesitated outside the front door, key in hand, for something like a minute.