But he was having increasing difficulty understanding why any of this mattered. Routine did all the things he said it did, but to what end? He wasn’t ever leaving this place; he had accepted that some time back. He wasn’t ever going to get out, and no one besides his friends was ever going to get in. Time was going to pass, he was going to age, and sooner or later he was going to die. The inevitability of it was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting on his lap. In the face of such an overwhelming truth, what did anything else matter?

His buddies had nothing to offer. They listened to his thoughts as he voiced them, considered his questions and shrugged.

The truth was, they had known all along something he was just beginning to realize. Even routine wasn’t enough to keep your mental trolley on the tracks. Even routine could drive you crazy. He paused at the reflective window of the door opening into the sick bay—as if the entire place wasn’t one big sick bay, ha, ha, joke—and looked at himself in the glass. He didn’t recognize the stranger looking back. Bearded, disheveled, hollow-eyed, and gaunt, the other man stared at him. A man who had let himself go, who had ceased to do anything to keep up his appearance, who had given up eating regularly, who seldom slept, who prowled the complex like the ghosts who kept him company. A man who had become a ghost himself.

I know this man, he thought, but couldn’t put a name to the face. He shrugged his indifference, taking a page from the book of Abramson and Perlo. Didn’t matter.

“Over here, we have the command center,” he continued, his narration of his daily routine, a smooth and practiced recitation by now. “You may remember its purpose. The missiles are monitored from here. All of them, all over the United States. All those that haven’t already been dispatched to their intended targets.” He grinned knowingly. “The launch switches are kept under lock and key, even if there’s no one but me left to launch them. Kind of silly at this point, when you think about it. I mean, why monitor all this when there’s really no reason. You know, before we had a world to be concerned about. When we had people and animals and cities and towns and hope. When we had a working civilization. All gone now. All you have to do is look at the monitoring screens and you can tell. There’s nothing out there. Nothing that matters, anyway. A few people, sure. A few monsters, too. But nothing of importance. Nothing that is going to change what’s happened. We let it go too far for that. We let it decay like a set of bad teeth. We didn’t brush. We didn’t floss or rinse.”