The Last Question

Elara hadn't slept properly in three weeks. The merger deadline loomed like a personal apocalypse, turning her into something that shuffled through office corridors—coffee-clutching, hollow-eyed, a corporate zombie in designer flats. Her colleagues had stopped asking if she was okay. They simply stepped aside when she passed, sensing the particular radiation of someone running on fumes and spite.

The office cat, a sphinx-like creature named after an Egyptian goddess but answering only to Dude, had taken to sleeping on her keyboard. Elara found his presence the only honest thing in her life. He demanded nothing, judged everything, and his hairless, wrinkled body somehow seemed more comfortable in its skin than she'd ever been in hers.

At 3 AM on a Tuesday, Dude jumped onto her desk and stared at her with amber eyes that held centuries of feline wisdom. Outside, lightning fractured the sky—a sudden, violent illumination that made the empty office look like a museum exhibit of late capitalism. Elara pressed save on the spreadsheet that would determine whether two hundred people kept their jobs.

"What's the point?" she whispered to the cat.

Dude blinked slowly, Sphinx-like in his inscrutability. Lightning struck again, closer this time. The building's emergency lights flickered.

Elara's phone buzzed. Her mother. Again. Probably wanting to discuss Elara's ticking biological clock, as if her eggs were a separate crisis requiring immediate management. She let it go to voicemail.

"Riddle me this," Elara said to the empty room, paraphrasing the ancient creature whose name Dude's breed echoed. "What walks through walls but has no body? What eats time but cannot be satisfied?"

Dude yawned, showing needle teeth.

Outside, the storm broke. Rain lashed against glass like something trying to get in. Elara pressed send. Two hundred emails delivered. Two hundred lives interrupted. She felt like the last person alive in a world that had already ended, haunting her own existence.

Dude curled into a circle, paws over his nose.

"Yeah," Elara said. "Me too."

She closed her laptop. Lightning seared the sky one final time, and for a moment, she could almost believe something new might begin after all.