I was leaning back in my chair, drinking a coffee, and reading the online news. It seems that there are massive algae blooms in the sea due to overuse of fertiliser to grow crops to make bread to feed people. Reading further, I saw that it was in the Pacific Ocean, and my interest waned, and I turned to the sports pages. My phone rang.

"Yup?" I answered, and I knew who it was as the phone had a built-in video, so I could see it was Mike, the telephone engineer, so no need for the very polite way we used to answer phones when we had no idea who was at the other end.

"Can you nip down to the Vault for me?"

The office building that we use is rather old and has a basement, sub-basement and sub-sub... You get the picture. At the very lowest level is an old bunker we nicknamed the vault. In days of old, it was a nuclear bunker, but now it is just used to store a few archives. However, it has an old-style telephone that, according to our health & safety regulations, has to be tested twice a year. Today was the day for one of those tests, and because it was an old analogue style, it needed someone at each end. It was my turn to go down; Mike had done the last test.

"On my way." I grabbed my cardboard cup of coffee and headed down. I could go down most of the way by lift, but the last 30 or so feet were by an old staircase housed in a concrete tube. Old-style phone, old-style transfer route to go with.

It takes an age to get down there; so many doors to unlock on the way, but eventually I got there and dialled Mike's number. Nothing.

The phone was working; I had a ringing tone, but Mike didn't answer. I tried Jock; he sits in the same office as Mike. He didn't answer either. I grumbled about what a funny gag to play as I turned the lights out, locked doors behind me and climbed the stairs to the lift lobby. As I got out of the lift, I couldn't help but notice how quiet it was.

'Oh great,' I thought. 'Obviously a fire alarm.' Have to report that you can't hear the fire alarm in the vault. There was no one in the office; it was totally empty. All the computer screens were on, not even a screen saver in sight. That was against company rules, and as far as I could tell, everyone was in trouble. No one in sight, not even the fire marshals with their fluorescent jackets that hang around to make sure everyone is out.

"Crikey," I said aloud, "is it the real thing?" And headed as quickly as I could to the fire escape and down to the car park to join everyone else.

Only, there was no one there. There was no security on the gates either. There was a car that looked like it had driven off the road into the shrubbery, but there was no one in it.

I walked around the site; there was absolutely no one. I then noticed that I couldn't hear the usual thrumming of traffic on the main roads. Nothing. This was getting weird, and I was a little spooked.

"Sod this for a game of soldiers," I said to no one. "I am going home." If World War 3 has started, I want to be a long way from here." My car and house keys are always in my pocket, so I simply walked to my parking space and drove away. The barriers on the exit are automatic, but the entrance ones are manned, and you have to show your pass to get in. There was no one manning the entrances as I left. There were no cars queuing to get in either, so no problem.

This was getting a little scary. If nothing else, the armed police should still be there, manning the gates. Their car was there, but they were nowhere in sight. Driving home proved a slow and tedious business. There were abandoned cars all over the roads. Some seemed to have just stopped where they were; others seemed to have driven onto the pavements or into the back of the car in front. I had to do a fair bit of manoeuvring between cars to get through. Eventually, I got home and turned the TV on, expecting a public service announcement about the war.

Perhaps I would be better off in the Vault at work; after all, it was a nuclear bunker. Nothing. No TV programmes on any channel, not even on satellite, not even the foreign ones.

I picked up the phone and dialled 999. Nothing. No answer. I went out to the car and checked the radio, even longwave. Nothing. Just static. Down the road from home were a couple of abandoned cars that I squeezed past as I came home. I walked down to them to see if I could get a clue. The door was locked; no way to get in from outside, as if the anti-carjacking setting were still on. The key was in the ignition, but there was no one inside. The second car was exactly the same. Door locked, key in ignition, no driver. I walked back home. Puzzling.

I sat at home looking down the valley. There was no movement. I looked in the sky: no planes, no birds, nothing. I listened; there were no sounds except a slight rustling of the leaves in shrubs and trees nearby and light wind.

At some point, the power died; I wasn't sure exactly when. I was prepared. Living in a rural location, I experienced frequent power cuts and invested in a generator. I flicked the switch to turn the thing on and pulled at the toggle, and it burst into life. It wasn't exactly quiet, but I didn't seem to have anyone to disturb.

I could not work out where everyone had gone. I remember seeing an old science fiction film where a group of people had shifted out of phase with the rest of the world, but, even if that were a possible thing, then the cars would still be moving; I just wouldn't be able to interact with them. No, if anything, every other living animal in the world would have had to shift out of phase and leave me and the cars behind in this phase. No, that was a ridiculous thought, and I chided myself for it.

It had to be some kind of prank being played on me, but I could not for the life of me work it out. It did occur to me that perhaps I was injured, lying in a coma on a hospital bed, but if that was the case, I had no idea of how to snap myself back into the living world. I decided to go with the prank, but the prank had been cleverly timed to take effect the moment I entered the vault. But how?

I decided to grab a stiff drink, go to bed and see what a new day would bring. Bloody good prank this.

I awoke, after a restless few hours, to an eerie silence, no sounds of traffic moving, no birds singing or tweeting, just nothing. And then there was a small tink noise, and then another, and another. It sounded like tin tacks falling on a kitchen floor. I decided it must be hail; I could think of nothing else that would make that sound. I grabbed my torch and went to the back door. I shone the torch out into the darkness. The sky was full of shooting stars, streaks of light in all directions, and before me was a rain of small white objects falling from the meteor-strewn sky. I shone the torch down to the ground in front of me; the ground was covered in small white shards of differing sizes and shapes, but all looking like fragments of bones. It was too horrible to contemplate, and I stumbled back to bed.

When I got up at some unearthly hour with the sun shining through the windows where I had forgotten to draw the curtains, I remembered the dreams of the previous night and flicked on the light switch. No power, so perhaps my nightmare was true after all. I restarted the generator, and I turned the TV on, but still no channels, nothing at all. I stood at the back door as the bread browned in the toaster and looked at a vista of white. I bent down to look more closely, and my nightmare fears were realised. Strewn before me were millions of fragments of bone, scorched as if they had been through a fire, with any flesh stripped, leaving the bones to burn in the fires of an atmosphere. I was convinced that the meteor storm I had witnessed last night was the remains of humanity coming back to Earth, piece by shattered piece.

As I sucked on my toast and drank my coffee, my generator spluttered and died. The fuel had run out, and now I was without power. If I were the only living thing left on Earth, then there would be no one to stop me from stocking up. I threw a few tools, hammers, crowbars, chisels, etc., into the back of the car and headed off. Weaving through cars, it occurred to me that there was nothing to stop me getting a more suitable car, something that would do anything and go anywhere. On the outskirts of town as I weaved between the abandoned cars, I decided on a pickup, a twin cab. That would give me plenty of load capacity, but should also give me some towing capacity. I was convinced that I would get punctures from the bone shards, but my luck held; the shards just seemed to crumble under the tyres.

The local Mitsubishi dealer was near, and I headed there. I assumed that the place would probably be unlocked and that the keys would all be on a board in the salesman's office. I was not wrong. There were a number of suitable pickups on the road as I drove there, but as I had discovered earlier, they all had keys inside but were locked. I did not want to smash the windows; no, I would try a new one.

I grabbed all the keys and tried several; I selected one that looked as if it had been prepped for a new customer, fully fuelled. Perfect. I transferred my tools and various belongings, and then took all the spare wheels. I could find them from the other pickups and threw them into the back. Better have too many spares than not enough, I decided. I then went looking for my next requirement, a car trailer. I found one at a repair garage, already hooked up to a battered Toyota. It didn't take long to unhook it and put it behind the Mitsubishi.

On the other side of town, there is a fuel dealer with various-sized tankers. I examined each of the small and medium tankers; I wasn't sure if I would be able to drive one of the larger tankers. I was sure that I would technically be able to, but there were so many abandoned vehicles that I wasn't sure that I would be able to get a large vehicle through. There were two tankers pretty full of what I was sure was diesel. I hooked my car trailer up to one, drove my new pickup onto it, and secured the pickup with the lashings that had been looped and hanging off the trailer's winch. Right. I could drive the fuel tanker home, my nice new car on the trailer behind. That would give me some weeks' worth of fuel to enable me to set myself up and run my generator, giving me hot coffee and toast. Well, the King of the World had to start setting some standards.

The next thing on my priority list was somewhere to live. Probably a farm. I wanted running water, so a largish stream. Some barns to hide my provisions from, more from the elements than from people or animals. I was quite sure I was the only living thing on the planet apart from some bacteria. I wanted to be a long way from any industrial areas; I don't want to be downstream or downwind from any pollution. I would try to find somewhere that had solar panels or even a windmill that generated electricity; at least then, I wouldn't have to rely on the generator all the time. If push came to shove, I could probably go and find a solar farm and 'rescue' it and relocate it to my new home, but finding one already in place would be my safest and easiest option.

I spent several days driving around exploring and eventually found what seemed to be the perfect place. An old water mill that had been refurbished. The roof had solar cells, and there was also a small water turbine in the millrace. The mill wheel itself seemed to be connected to a full mill wheel inside and probably would be able to mill, although I had no idea how to mill, but with time, you never know; I could learn a new skill. There were a lot of outbuildings and stores, and a number of interesting farm vehicles and tools. The land on the far side of the mill race was much lower, and so the mill looked quite safe from flooding. This looked perfect. Well, it would have been if I hadn't been the only person around. As a bonus, the mill was attached to a village of fifty-odd houses, so if I got bored, I could move.

I spent a few days moving everything to the Mill and making it my new home. I made several trips to local shops and gathered as much tinned, jarred and dried food as I could. Hopefully enough to last me my lifetime, I didn't fancy ending up having to eat plants, and that seemed the only alternative. I also kitted myself in a full array of clothes, clothes that would suit the coldest nights, the wettest days and the warmest times. I had plenty of empty houses to store the food in; storage was unlikely to be an issue, boredom probably more so.

Each time I drove out, I took a hammer with me. Every time I came to a car still in the road, I decided to move it to the side. Those cars that were unlocked, I simply got in, turned the key and drove to the side. Those, typically higher-end vehicles, that were locked received the business end of the hammer to the driver’s side window. Then I got in, started it and drove it to the side. My mission was to clear all the roads that I usually drove on. I didn't know quite why, but I just wanted to ensure that I had a clear run on the roads, just in case I needed it one day.

I had come across a shop that sold radio equipment and helped myself to an array of radios, aerials and a couple of books that explained how it all went together. I strung up a couple of long-wire aerials at home, at 90 degrees to each other, and connected up a short-wave scanner. Nothing, absolutely nothing on any frequency. This setup, according to the books, should have been able to pick up something anywhere in the world if it was being transmitted. Nothing was heard, so my conclusion is that nothing was being transmitted. I put out a few calls on various frequencies. I was not really surprised to get no responses.

Twice a day, I drove to the top of a nearby hill with good views in all directions. Nothing, no smoke during the day, no light visible at night. I started to build a bonfire at the top, taking wood in the pickup with me each time I went. After a week, I had a quite sizeable bonfire, a beacon if you will. I decided that it would probably burn for a couple of hours, so if I lit it just before dusk, then I would catch any daytime seekers as well as nighttime lookers.

I lit the beacon and stood back and watched it take hold. I find fire fascinating to watch, but I am no lover of fire; it scares me, if I am honest. I kept myself at a good, safe distance. As the night began to take hold, I turned my back to the flames and started scanning the land below using the 10x50 binoculars I had rescued from an unmanned and deserted shop. Nothing.

I waited about three hours as the beacon burnt down to a simple red glow of ash, scanning in all directions, seeing nothing. I left a small box containing some tins of food in case someone was too scared to show themselves. I hoped that the food would be viewed as a peace offering rather than bait.

I drove back to the mill. As I drove back, it started to rain. I was a bit surprised; I don't know why, but it hadn't actually rained since the day everyone died and disappeared, D-Day as I called it, and so I had just got used to dry weather and good visibility. As I drove home, I was trying to remember if I had left anything outside that would spoil in the rain. The box with the tins by the fire would fall apart, but the tins would be okay. A few flashes of lightning streaked across the sky to my right, followed shortly after by the booms of thunder. I laughed as I drove; this was the first sound I had heard since D-Day and the first light that hadn't come from the sun or moon or my generator. As the rain got heavier, my mood got lighter. Nature, it seemed, had a way of cheering me up.

It rained nonstop for three days. The mill stream filled and overflowed its banks, but only on the side away from the buildings; nothing important was flooded. The clouds must have been deep, as the daylight was gloomy at best and the raindrops large and noisy. My good mood stayed, and on the fourth day, I noticed the skies getting lighter and the raindrops smaller. "Well, that probably cleared a lot of muck out of the atmosphere," I said to the tractor. Yes, I had started talking to inanimate objects. Well, there was no one to object.

I went outside; the silence was, after the recent thunderstorms, oppressive. A little rustling of the leaves in the trees, and that was about it. No sounds made by humans, no animal sounds, no bird sounds, not even the buzz of insects. Just quiet.

I looked up at the sky, blue interspersed with white clouds. Not much chance of more rain, I concluded. Something caught my attention, and I turned to the west. A shape in the distance is getting rapidly larger. I was unsure whether to run or stand and watch.

Aliens. Obviously.

Aliens had abducted everyone whilst I was in the vault. Obviously.

Aliens had come back to mop up what they had missed. Perhaps.

I had no vault or bunker here to run and hide in, and a quick death by stealthy hand was possibly a better alternative to being the last living human on an empty world with only plants to eat, supplemented with tinned foods recovered from otherwise empty supermarkets. On my last visit, the rotting non-tinned food had created quite a stench, and I had decided to fabricate some kind of face mask for my next visit.

The alien craft was huge, I mean, really huge. It pretty much filled the sky above me, casting quite a darkening shadow on the ground. I could make out very few features, possibly because there were few to see or possibly because it was high in the sky with the sun behind it. I had no reference to help me.

The alien ship made no noise; there had been no rush of air as it approached; it just seemed to loom ever larger until the sky was filled. As I looked away from the ship, I was aware of a figure walking towards me, clothed in grey, with two legs, two arms, and a head, but obviously not human. It stopped about 10 feet in front of me, and I judged it to be around 7 feet tall. Yeah. Humanoid, not human.

"What do you want from me?" I asked, not afraid but neither excited nor even interested. I was still so numbed by the recent events that had seemingly left me as the last living thing on Earth that even a close encounter with an alien had little effect on me.

There was a sort of noise from the alien, but I could make no sense of it. Advanced it undoubtedly was, but not advanced enough, it seems, to learn English. "Look", I said, "even the French bothered to learn English."

I walked towards it as if to greet it in the old-fashioned way, but it held its arms out, hands flat upwards. I understood that.

"Stop? You want me to stop?" I asked and stood still; I was perhaps now only 8 feet away. I could see a lot more detail, gloomy as the light was in the shadow of the huge craft. The darkness reminded me of a solar eclipse from when I was a child.

The alien had more or less the same features as I, just different. It had eyes, but they were not like eyes – more a milky dark orb behind lids that seemed to blink up rather than down. There was a nose, but it was more like a protruding vent that opened and closed. Mouth, well, again, yes, there was a mouth in roughly the same place as a human's, but it seemed triangular rather than the two-lipped mouth I was used to.

Two arms with hands, but hands that seemed to have what looked like two thumbs, one on each side, and arms that were longer in proportion than mine. The clothes were, well, clothes. Nothing remarkable about them, especially to anyone who had watched any of the myriad science fiction films before civilisation ended.

The noise was again, obviously, from the alien, but try as I did, I could make no sense of it. I could not recognise any words in the sounds, nor could I detect any emotion or feelings. It was just a sound. I stood and stared.

"I can't understand you," I said. "You might be able to destroy all humans, but you can't say a simple 'sorry'. Pretty poor as aliens go. "It, I could not even begin to guess at gender, stood impassively, making more noises, but nothing I could make sense of.

"I mean, really, what use are you? You seem to have destroyed all life on Earth and left me all alone; well, that's a bit shit, to be honest. There is no TV, so I can't even watch something to take my mind off the lonely, boring death by starvation that is to come. No electricity, so I more or less have to go to bed when the night falls, so really, I mean, really? Why? Just why?"

I had nothing to lose; after all, it seemed certain to me that it had caused the loss of all my fellow life on Earth, which it had seemed to return as a hailstorm of bone fragments. Nice. It certainly could deal with me. I had no weapons, and even if I did, I had no experience of using weapons and no inclination to use them either.

The alien reached inside its clothes and removed a small, round, tubular thing. It stooped forward and placed it on the ground between us. As it stood back up, it pointed at me and then at the tube and then took a step back.

I stepped forward, my eyes on the alien to check for a reaction, and then leant down and picked it up. It felt warm to my hands, and I wasn't sure I could tell what it was made from. There seemed to be no controls or buttons on it. It just was.

"What's this for then?" I asked.

The alien spoke, and as it spoke, I now had a sense of understanding. This wasn't like subtitles or a direct translation; it was just a kind of realisation of its meaning.

It seemed that the planet was dying. We had killed it. It, a guardian, had to stop us and so had removed the causes of destruction.

"So", I asked, "you are a Guardian. What's that then? A god, are you God? If so, why is God using a spaceship?"

Again and again, the noise and again an understanding, not in words or sentences or even in images; I just knew what it meant.

No, not a god; there was no such thing as gods. No, just a Guardian. We humans were killing our planet with too many people, too many animals and too much pollution, and at the rate we were doing it, drastic measures had to be taken. We had nearly gone too far for recovery.

"Well, ET", I said as I digested his meaning, "that's all very well, but the planet isn't really of any use if I am the only human on it. There are several other planets not far away that also don't have humans on them, and they are useless. Taking all the animals and humans except me won't do much for the long-term future of Earth as a planet. Even plants need animals to reproduce. You have gone too far, mate."

There was the noise again, and then he walked away, simply walked backwards; it was a very surreal sight, and then he was gone, leaving me with new thoughts to digest.

And then I was alone again.

I awoke trying to make sense of the thoughts in my head. I wasn't, it seemed, alone. Or rather, I was alone, but I wasn't the last human. There were others. There was a plan to recover the Earth, to mend it, but it needed humans and animals, and I had to prepare.

"Prepare for what?" I asked no one. There was still no one to ask.

Outside, it was raining again, a long, steady rain, the drops not swirling in the wind, simply falling. I sat in the barn; the sound of the drops hitting the tin roof was mildly soporific, but it helped me think. It seemed I needed some background noise to function. Pure silence was counterproductive.

If humans are going to help repair the Earth, what could that mean?

Stop polluting the air, the soil and the sea. Well, with no humans making anything, the only pollution would come from decaying industrial buildings that we couldn't manage, such as the nuclear power stations, and no way was I going anywhere near them, and there were bound to be lots of other industrial plants I couldn't even begin to think of that would produce nasty stuff. My thoughts were that whilst we may well have been doing a lot of polluting, it was probably going to carry on with no humans to control it.

There would, of course, be no fertilisers and the like spread across the land to make crops grow, and so no run off into the rivers and then the sea. That would help, I guess.

I really could not get my head around how we were supposed to repair the Earth, especially as, as far as I knew, I was the only human. The alien had said I wasn't, but I had no evidence of any others. I had driven to the top of hills and looked in every direction at night -- no lights; during the day -- no smoke or other signs. No sounds of vehicles, nothing that might indicate I wasn't alone.

I went and had a good look around the mill and the village it was in. There were probably about fifty habitable buildings; each had beds and other useful furniture, tables, chairs, etc. So, if more people turned up, there was a place they could live in. There was a village hall that we could use for gatherings. And there was the mill, where I lived. It could, I suppose, be used as a working mill once more. There were certainly enough farm tools to grow and gather crops, not that I had any idea how to do that or even if they were the right tools. I just assumed that whoever owned the mill would have made sure that he or she had the right stuff. After I had finished, it dawned on me that each house had at least three bedrooms, and each had a double bed.

My scouting and recovery missions took on new goals. I was now on the lookout for the stuff I would need on a working farm: crop seeds, twines, and scythes, and that was all I could think of. I knew that as I found the seed merchants and farm shops, I would see other things that, at the moment, I didn't know I needed. My barns began to fill with seeds of varying types, as many as I could find. I had no idea if the crops I grew would give us enough produce to have viable seed for subsequent years. I vaguely remembered reading that the crops we grew these days were not necessarily suitable for resowing. But I couldn't get my head around how that worked.

I did not collect things like pest traps, electric fences, guns or poisons; after all, as things stood at the moment, I was the only animal on the planet. There were no pests to poison, trap or electrocute. If they returned, then I would find a way to control them or return to the stores and get what I needed.

My next requirement was to build a library of knowledge. From the local farmers and country stores, I took all the 'how-to' books that they had. I did the same in tool shops and engineering stores. I collected ropes and other materials from Chandlers, and finally, I went to the main library in the main city. I got every reference book I could find on building, making and repairing. History books and books on kings, queens and politicians were pointless; history and the point of it stopped on D-Day.

I built a number of bookcases; one of the books I retrieved showed me how, and I was rather glad of the generator for the use of power tools. Hand saws and drills were probably something for the far future. The bookcases were all installed in an upstairs room with good ventilation and few signs of damp. These books would have to last a long time. I had no idea how to recreate them or the essential knowledge that they contained.

As I sat drinking a coffee, I began to wonder about the future. Even if there were other humans, there would probably not be enough of us to have a thriving economy with the standards that we were used to. There would be no one to run power stations, so no electricity. We would have no machines or cars, no materials apart from those that grew or that we could dig up. As far as I knew, metal had to be dug up, refined and turned into something useful, and all that processing took a lot of energy and electricity, none of which we would have.

No, we would have to learn how to hand-grow and reap crops and how to fashion wood and stone into things we could use. The buildings we had now would crumble over time, the tractors and vehicles would fail and not be repairable, the books would eventually fade and become unreadable, and knowledge would have to be learned and then be passed down from mother to daughter, father to son.

And that was another thing; we would have to have a lot of children to repopulate to a viable level, and that would mean more than just me and a woman; it would mean quite a lot of women and quite a few more men. And that, inevitably, would result in conflicts; it always had, and it always would. I began to feel depressed.

Time passed slowly. I had gone round the village ensuring every room in every house was clean and dry. Windows opened and closed as they should. I made sure every house had water butts and water containers, courtesy of visits to local DIY and garden centres. There was obviously no running water apart from the stream and mill race, but we could gather all the water that fell onto roofs.

Toilets. What to do about toilets. Obviously, the indoor toilets were useless, as there was no functioning civil sewage system. I decided that the best thing to do was to take out the old flushing toilets and replace them with camping toilets; perhaps later we would start returning to water and earth closets. People could empty them each morning after a night's use. I identified an area downhill of the river and, after a lot of trial and error with the backhoe, managed to dig a pit. Anything in there, being downstream of the river, would not pollute our drinking water. I piled the earth up around it as a sort of artificial wall; hopefully, any flooding would be held back from the pit. It was the best I could do; it was something that could be revisited when there was more than just me.

I resolved to use it myself from that point on. The toilet I had been using had gone into a cesspit, but I had no idea how full it was, and so I furnished myself with a portable toilet and sealed up the old one.

Weeks had passed since the visit. The weather seemed normal; it rained, or it didn't, and the sky was either blue, grey or a mixture of both. I had done everything I could think of. I had prepared homes; I had provided basic needs in terms of water and sanitation. I had stocked each home with a variety of the foods I had rescued from the supermarkets and shops. Each day I listened on the shortwave scanner; each day I transmitted a message on the shortwave. Nothing. Thought about starting a diary, but each day would be the same.

Day xx. Today I spoke to no one. Today I saw no one.

Wouldn't exactly be riveting reading.

I was outside building a workbench from some old, large timbers I had found when the light faded. I looked up; the alien ship was back, filling the sky, blocking my light. I put my screwdriver down and stepped back. As I looked around me, I saw my visitor friend was back. I walked towards it, the translation tube in my hand. I kept it with me at all times; I never knew if or when the alien ship would appear, so I made sure I was prepared.

"I began to think that you were not coming back," I said as I approached it.

The strange alien speech began, and the ideas formed in my head again and filled in a little more of the gaps. Earth had been ruined by man; they, the Guardians, were tasked with resetting the world. I had the sense that they were like police, watching from a distance, ensuring that rules were followed and intervening when they weren't.

"Who tasks you?" I asked. "Who do the Guardians work for and why?"

That was ignored. It seemed that the Guardians would return in 1000 years, and if we hadn't improved and if we had reverted, then all human life would have been extinguished, as man would have failed. The planet will be written off and ignored for a million years.

"Did you wipe out the dinosaurs?" I asked, imagining the brontosaurs and tyrannosaurs in my head as I asked. I wondered if the old CT boundary was going to be replaced with a new boundary for archaeologists to find in a few millennia.

That was ignored, too. Images and knowledge began to fill my head again. The Guardians had removed 99.9999% of people from the world. They had been returned to the world as their constituent elements so as not to deprive the Earth of essentials. So, I was right; the bone rain was the earth's population, or what was left of it, raining down. I could not get my head around how you could be concerned about something's welfare but destroy almost everything that made it what it was. The images kept coming in.

The Guardians were setting up settlements of 300 people across the world, and each settlement would be in a different part of the world to create isolation and diversity. This would reduce the risk of a disease wiping out the entire population. There would be a ratio of 1 male to 5 females. This would give an optimum mix of breeding mothers.

In order to make this work, the Guardians were specifying some rules or laws. Commandments, I wondered?

There were 4 basic laws.

1. No Violence -- Wars, Rape, Weapons. No exception.

2. No Ownership -- Everything belonged to everybody and was part of and from the Earth.

3. Everyone is equal. No Dictatorships – Consensus Rule: have to follow consensus, cannot opt out; the optimum society was communal. Everyone sought to look out for everyone else. No one was in any way superior; some may simply be better suited to some things.

4. No prisons. Nonconformance means exclusion/banishment. That was the only form of punishment allowed. Everyone either conformed or left.

"How are we to survive then?" I asked, "300 people are too few to learn how to make the tools that we need and too few to run the machines to make things." Oh. That was a bad thought. My head began to hurt, and images of polluting factories began to flash in my mind and only eased when images of hand-working land and simple country living came to the fore.

"Okay, okay," I shouted. "Okay, I get the picture. We are to become prehistoric."

It seemed that we were to become more pre-industrial, a little more like medieval times. Animals would be provided as well as humans in the restocking, and we had to learn how to manage them and gain the best advantage without overstocking and going beyond what was needed for self-sufficiency.

The alien began to do his backwards walk thing, and then he was gone, and once more I was alone, alone with my thoughts. Crikey, 5 wives, what happened if I didn't like any of them? Or worse, none of them liked me?

I spent the next few days making sure that the fields around the mill were animal-safe, that the fences were complete, that gaps in hedges were secured and that there were gates for access. I had no idea if animals would just appear randomly or if they would suddenly turn up in a field, one type in one field, another in another, or all mixed together. I also turned some of the smaller storage barns back into stables, just in case horses were in the mix.

And what about people? Would they just appear, singly or in groups? How would we pair up? I had no idea what to think. I just decided to get everything as prepared as I could. The working actually saved me having to think.

I was having an early morning coffee, sitting on a chair and enjoying the rising sun, when the sky darkened. Interestingly, this time the alien craft didn't fly towards me; it rather flew down, just getting bigger and bigger right above me. My alien friend appeared.

"I suppose I ought to have a name for you," I said. "I mean, I can't keep calling you ET." Unsurprisingly, that was ignored. The sounds came from his direction, and holding the device, the ideas and images formed in my head. It was time. I had done what they wanted. Perhaps I had passed a test; I didn't know. It 'felt' like I had. I suppose it was a good job that I didn't know that I was on trial for the future of humans. I may not have done it the way that 'they' approved of if I had tried to do what I thought they wanted. Luckily, just doing what seemed the right thing to do met with their approval.

As ET walked backwards away, I had the overwhelming thought. '1000 years. You have 1000 years' worth. Crikey, a millennium – what was that, 40 - 50 generations? A lot can go wrong in a very short time. I tried the maths. If I had 5 wives, and they produced 5 girl children each. Not counting the boys, then I would have 25 female children and 125 grandchildren; if they then each produced 5 girl children, then I would have 625 female great-grandchildren. If all 25 women in our little commune produced 5 females per generation, and so on, in 4 generations, we would have around a million people. The mill and village wouldn't be big enough.

Perhaps we ought to think about some rules, perhaps five wives for this generation and then four wives, and then three, and so on, until we get to a point where we have one-on-one relationships producing just two children. In four generations, that would mean 3000 people. Still rather more than we could manage. This obviously needed a lot of thought.

I looked up from my musing to see a small group of people standing, looking at me. My god. People, real people. I rushed across and started hugging people and grabbing hands and was shouting "Hello" at each and every one. Nothing came back. They all just stood around and didn't respond. I had no idea what to do with them.

As I grabbed and hugged them, I realised that the group were five women. Just women, no men, and all were a little catatonic. Had the selection process started, I wondered. Were these my selected five? Had the Guardians worked out DNA and genetic profiles and found five perfect matches for me? I hoped to God that these women weren't going to scream blue murder when they came round. I took two by the hand and led them to my house, settling each in a room, before returning and getting the final three. They seemed easy to lead, came when pulled, but didn't respond in any other meaningful way. Oh great.

I loosened clothing; I absolutely was not going to undress them and took off everything except underwear and one layer of outer wear -- that would be enough. Shoes came off, and as they lay on the beds, I covered them with the quilts. It took me over an hour, and as I was putting each of them to bed, I was telling them that they were safe now, that my name was Jules, and that we would all soon look after each other. I hoped that they would be happy and that soon other friends would be arriving.

It took me over an hour, and when I looked outside after having done the last new arrival, I saw another group. This group was a man and five women, again all in an apparent state of shock, unspeaking, and staring blankly ahead. They had the same treatment, but at the house next to my mill house. This had three double rooms, so it provided me with a bit of a quandary as to how to allot the arrangements.

"You know what?" I thought. "You can sort out when you wake up. I led the man and the woman standing nearest to him; they went into the first bed, the next two women into the next and the last into the last. I spoke to each as I eased their clothing, and as I shut the front door, there was another group of six.

It was dark by the time I had settled everyone in. The last few groups had simply been led in and laid on the beds. I didn't have the time to get them all settled if I had carried on chatting and undressing as I had the first two groups. I was absolutely shattered. All fifty properties in the village were now full.

The night was cool and full of the sounds of people sleeping, sounds I was totally unused to. The woman next to me, blonde, fulsome and definitely not unpleasant to the eye, was a burbler. She made burbling noises in her sleep. At least one of the others in the other rooms was a snorer.

One of the things I had recovered in my later reconnaissance had been a large catering boiler. It was full of water, connected to the generator and sat on the bench outside my house. It was quite a reasonable area, and I wasn't sure if we could all fit in, but I had a load of cups, a load of instant coffee and a pile of collapsible chairs. I sat in my chair supping my coffee, wondering if these newcomers would ever wake up, if they would be terrified, if they would still be catatonic, if the alien would return, and what the weather would be like. Currently cloudy and dry.

I had written down the Alien Laws on paper, one copy per house, and a few extra here on the bench. Might as well start, as the aliens mean us to go on, I decided.

A woman came out of the house.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know what is going on. Where am I? What has happened? Why am I here?"

I hoped that this wasn't going to be the case with all 300 new arrivals.

"It's okay, you really are safe; no one is going to harm you. My name is Jules. Here, have a hot drink. It's only coffee, I am afraid, no milk or sugar."

She walked up to me a little warily, which I understood. I put a spoonful of coffee into the cup and added water from the large urn. 'Here, this may help. What is your name?"

She took the cup from me and held it between both hands, cradling it. "I don't know," she replied. "I don't know how I got here. I'm Rachel Burrows, and I live in Leeds. Where is here? Why am I here? Where is my family?"

I groaned inwardly. It was going to be a very long day by the look of it.

"Hello Rachel, I am not really sure about everything myself. I was the first to arrive, and I, well, I just kind of get everything ready. There have been a few problems, and, well, things are a bit different, and I will try to explain as the others wake up and join us. I think I will call them all; hang on."

I turned away and shouted, as loudly as I could, "Coffee is on; if you want it, come and join us."

People began to appear, and soon there was a large throng of people supping at coffee and talking, all asking more or less the same thing: Where were they? What had happened? And where was their family?

"Hello, please listen," I shouted, trying to get everyone's attention. "Let me tell you what I know, and then we can all try and fill in the gaps and work out what to do next." I paused and then continued. "Please try to remember what house you came from; that is your home for the time being. If you aren't sure, then the outer clothes that you had with you are in the bedroom that you woke up in. I am sure no one will mind if you have to search a few bedrooms until you find yours."

I paused and let that sink in; they started looking around and looking at the clothes they were wearing. "Right then. First things first, I am not in charge. Let me repeat that: I am not in charge. I was just the first to arrive, and that was probably by accident. You can, as far as I am concerned, leave the village at any time you like, but before you do, let me just explain a few things." I stopped. Took a drink from my coffee and looked across them all, trying to make eye contact with as many as I could.

"There is no electricity anywhere. That means nothing anywhere outside this village works. There are no telephones, there is no TV, no hospitals, no trains and no buses. There are also no people, no people anywhere except us here. You can leave by all means, but as far as I know, and I have been alone for several weeks, as far as I know, there is no one else."

Nearly everyone started crying out questions, shouting, calling. I couldn't make out a single question. I held my hand up high, and when the noise had stopped, I resumed. "As far as I know, it was aliens. Yes, honest to God, aliens. They abducted you all and killed everyone else. 'We humans had destroyed our world,' they said. "We have one last chance," they said. "We, all three hundred of us, are that last chance." I sat down and let them all take it in and then shout and talk. Some cried, some just said things to whoever would hear. I heard nothing but noise. It was easy for me. I had weeks and months to get used to what had happened. These had woken up and found the world that they knew was gone. The people that they knew were gone; everything that they could hold onto as their identity was gone.

"I have worked to set this village up, to try and prepare us for the future, but that does not make me a leader. Does not make me in charge. It makes me first, but not the first. They spoke to me, the aliens – well, actually, 'spoke' is not the right way to explain it. They put images, pictures, and thoughts into my head. "I told them the things that I had been told. That there was not a God or prophets; that there were to be no leaders or violence of any kind; that we were the future of the human race, and that we had one thousand years to get it right.

"And if we don't?" someone shouted.

"They will come back and eradicate us." I said, "And if you have any doubt about what they can do, wander to the edge of the village. All around you will see small white fragments. Look closely. They are bone fragments, all that are left of countless billions of humans and animals the aliens abducted and destroyed in an effort to save the Earth. I cleared away their remains from our village, but they are spread everywhere I have been before I got here."

I looked out across the group. "As I look at you, I see people of all sizes and skin colour, all types of hair and all types of build. I don't know how we were chosen or how we were grouped, but I do know one thing. We cannot allow any form of intolerance. We are the future of the human race, and, I am sorry to say this, we have got to breed if there is to be a human race, and you know what that means. The house that you are in is the grouping that the aliens put you in. I have no idea why. Ladies, I am sorry, but the old way of families is gone. Each family is now a group of six. There is one man per family and five women. As far as I can tell, each family is a variety pack. The aliens mean us to mix up our genes and DNA. I have absolutely no idea how we are going to make this work."

I took a drink from my coffee; the cup was empty. Another spoonful of granules, hot water, and I was ready again. "No idea how to make this work, but make it work we have to. I have already said that if you want, you can leave, but before you leave, just consider this: you will be taking essential DNA from our very small DNA pool. I am now going to shut up and go into my house, which is the one next to the mill, and no, it is not the best house, nor is it the worst. It is just the first one I cleaned up and tidied. The five ladies who woke up there are welcome to come and talk to me or even just come in and sit silently, but I have no more to add, and I know that we all have a lot of getting to know each other to do."

It was dark, well, almost. It was a full moon. I sat on the bed in what I called my room. Rachel was standing at the doorway.

"This is a lot to take in," she said.

"I know. I was on my own for weeks; it took ages for me to accept that this hadn't been the result of a war or that it wasn't a prank. I was numb, so luckily I didn't get scared."

"My family are gone. My husband and daughter."

"Yes, I am afraid so."

"So, you are now my family. How is this going to work? You have five wives now. Every man's dream."

"I don't think like that anymore. Families, wives, they are the old way. I don't know what we will call the new way. If this group of 300 decide to say no, then that is the end of us; we die out. Not my call."

"Don't be a prat", she said, "we need to start here."

She walked over to the bed. "I hope that you are more enthusiastic about this than you look; I have only ever been with my husband, and he isn't here."

"Oh, I am very enthusiastic, Rachel. I also didn't have a lot of girlfriends, and certainly never more than one at a time, so this is, well, interesting, and can I say, to me, you are absolutely gorgeous."

"I didn't expect that," she said later.

"What?" I asked.

"Well, when you were talking earlier, I imagined that we would all just take it in turns; it would be functional. That was anything other than functional. I am not sure I am going to want to let the other wives take turns.”

I hoped she was joking; our community was too small for jealousies to start.

"It is quite an adjustment for all of us. I am not used to having a collection of girlfriends or wives, and when pregnancies occur, it is going to be tough. I wonder if any of us were nurses in a previous life."

"Thanks. That is a scary thought. Women die in childbirth."

"True, but many more don't."

I wondered which of my wives would visit me the next night.

A Millennium Later

"George, go on, tell us the old stories of giants that will return to destroy us." A small group of children were sitting in the ancient hall. An elder sat in a chair at the end; a fire of wood and charcoal crackled in the stone hearth, giving some warmth to the early spring air.

"Oh, you youngsters have heard this a hundred times from your parents as you grew and learned to talk. You don't want to hear it again. Hush now and let me snooze; I am an old man."

"No, George, no, it is not sleepy time yet; tell us, tell us," the voices from the children chorused.

"Very well then, children. A thousand years ago, the Earth was full of people and exotic animals, animals that no longer exist. Many of these animals, the people of that time killed for fun; some they killed just for food, and some they killed just by being careless. They grew their food over great areas of land, putting down things that helped the plants grow, but that killed the rivers and seas and all the creatures in them. The people on the Earth were more than the biggest number that you can think of, and they hunted, and they ate, and they made more and more children and more and more poisons." George paused, a small twinkle in his eye as he told the tales, handed down from generation to generation.

Eventually, we had reached a point where we were doing things so dangerous that the Great Guardians came to stop us, but we did not listen to their words, and so in a last effort to save the world, the Guardians stole all the people and animals from the Earth. The Guardians entrusted the future of the Earth to our ancestors, loyal, honest, trusty humans who could keep the light of Earth alive for the future."

"How do the aliens know we are doing the right thing?" asked a young boy.

"Oh," George said, "they watch us, and after one thousand years they will return and make sure that we have followed their guidance and saved the Earth. If we have not, they will cleanse the Earth and move on. But we have been good and followed their codes; they will not need to cleanse the Earth. The Earth is once more a wonderful place to be."

Just outside the big hall sat Jeston and Almack. Listening, drinking from a wooden beaker of berry-flavoured water.

"The thousand years are long up," Jeston said, 'and no sign of their return."

"Indeed," Almack replied, "but when the bastards do return, we will be ready for them."