The word “last” was always used too early. After the last war ended, another war began, and after the last settlement was built, a more distant planet was discovered. After an announcement that the last passage had been closed, an old signal arrived across a time difference. The word was wrong, but people continued to use it. “Last” meant not only that nothing would follow, but also that the present choice was exceptional. Calling something the last opportunity meant that costs no longer had to be calculated, and calling someone the last survivor meant that an entire city could be maintained for that one person.
What was rare became expensive. What was last became impossible to price. When only one member of a species remained on a planet, the government used the energy of an entire star to preserve the planet's climate. Thousands of members of the same species were later discovered on another planet. A proposal was made to discontinue the preservation program. The committee ruled that the individual on the first planet was still the last because it had evolved independently in a different environment. If genetic differences were divided into ever finer categories, every living thing was the last of something.
The number of entities under protection did not decrease. Humans, too, came to be described as last. The last human born on Earth, the last human with a natural body, and the last human with an uncopied memory appeared in succession. During their lifetimes, they were called upon to attend events where they had to explain what they were the last of. Some of them refused to be the last. One person copied his memory to eliminate his status as the last. The court ruled that even though a copy now existed, he, as the original, was still the last original. Being last was a status that could not be copied.
Time in the galaxy made determining what was last even more difficult. Under different velocities and gravitational conditions, citizens' time flowed in the same direction but not at the same rate. After the last day had passed in one region, that day had not yet begun in another. Galactic Standard Time organized the sequence of events but could not create a single present for every location. To record that someone had received the last signal, it was necessary to know that no further signal would arrive. It was impossible to confirm that a signal was the last without waiting forever for the next one. Being last was not a property of the moment of observation. It was a name assigned to the past after the whole of the future had passed.
Administrative authorities prohibited the word “last.” “Last service” became “subsequent service undetermined,” and “last citizen” became “citizen for whom no further response has been confirmed.” The last passage was recorded as “the passage most recently operated as of the present.” Sentences became more precise, but it became impossible to speak of an ending. The last scientist did not use that name for himself either. He could not establish that no human after him would choose a new question. While he was alive, his identifier was a long, ordinary number. It was the record-keeping systems that remained afterward that called him the last scientist. This was only a judgment that he was a scientist of the last human lineage, not that nothing existed after him. The records continued even after the scientist's thoughts had ended.
“Last” remained a forbidden word until the end. It was not because civilization feared the word. It was because any being capable of using it accurately had always disappeared before the last.