Last Living Thing

Okay so, the bad news: I am the only living thing on this planet.

The good news: I have enough food and water to last me multiple lifetimes, and a pretty good supply of building materials and equipment.

The better news: I am not the only living thing inside of me.

As it turns out, every human body is absolutely riddled with microscopic life of all sorts, both helpful and harmful. I've got bacteria in my gut that help break down food, bacteria in my blood that make me sick. After everything I've gone through over the years, I've probably got a decent supply of parasites and tag-alongs all in and around me somewhere too. What i need to do to get the wheel of life rolling again is get all that stuff out of me, and into a world that's ready for it.

So! Here's the plan. I'm giving myself ten years on this planet, it's all in nature's hands after that. With that in mind, I'm dividing my supplies into groups. One quarter will be for me to live off of for those ten years, there's more then enough there, i shouldn't even need to ration. The second quarter I'll mix into the soil and water outside my cave, give the whole place as much nutrition as i can manage. The rest of it I'll mix with some soil I've brought inside my cave, and I've found a pretty sizable divot in the cave floor that seems water-tight, I'm going to try and make a lake in there.

I'll also be mixing in any waste i produce into these elements both inside and out, along with blood, hair, skin, and spit samples I'll collect every few weeks, anything i can harvest. If I'm lucky, something will start growing somewhere before my ten years are up. At least that way I'll know what I'm doing here has a chance.

The air outside isn't breathable, so that's going to be a problem. Thankfully I've sealed this cave off with several layers of translucent material that shouldn't start falling apart for at least a hundred years each. With any luck, all those layers will translate to a slow mixing of atmosphere from both in and outside the cave over the next five-or-so hundred years, it -should- be slow enough to let any developing life adapt. When the seal fully crumbles, it should be able to freely leave and grow wherever it can.

I've also got some problems i need to figure out how to solve over the next ten years. The lake is too deep into the cave for anything more then ambient sunlight to reach it. I'm no geologist, for all i know trying to drill a hole to the surface for a skylight could collapse the whole thing on top of me, and without some kind of reliable energy source, any life developing in there might be out of luck... Some people thought life first developed at geothermal vents deep in the ocean... maybe i can rig up something with some decaying isotopes to generate heat at it's deepest point? Like in that film “The Martian”.

With what little scientific equipment I've managed to recover, I'm going to try and take my own cells and bacteria and see if i can modify them into independently living organisms that can survive in this environment I'm creating. I've also got to keep an eye out for anything with a chloroplast, i don't exactly have any plants on hand, so those will be important. Now I've never done this before so I'm not  holding out hope, but i don't really have much else to do for the next ten years now do i?

After all that is done, after ten years have passed? ... Well at that point, i figure either it's going to work, or it's not. Might as well not waste time. The bacteria in my body needs to get out somehow, might as well give them a feast on the way out. At that point I'll use any remaining nutrition to give the soil and water in the cave one last fertilization, and lay myself on the edge of the lake before passing on. With any luck my body will act as a whale fall, a huge source of nutrition the organisms inside of me can spend generations surviving on while slowly adapting to the conditions around them, and hopefully a few of those will manage to branch out and survive in either the soil or the water. A few hundred or thousand years later and the cave will be open to the outside world, letting anything still alive out to go fourth and multiply... God i hope this works...

I'm recording this message on every kind of media i can think of. Vinyl, CD, Floppy Disk, Blue-ray, USB-stick, video and audio Tapes, hell I've even gotten started on carving my outline and as many words and pictures as i can fit onto the cave wall and floor. I plan on sealing every source individually and spreading them out as wide as possible, all with directions back to this point. Hopefully, with any luck, at least one of them will survive long enough for something capable of understanding it to find it  and follow the directions here to learn my story, to learn the history of what happened here, and how -with any luck- life returned to this planet from just one lonely survivor.

If you're getting this message, then that means Dr. Malcolm was right. “Life, uh... finds a way.”