I still wonder if he saved more than he thought, and somewhere in the world are the lives and memories of uncountable people, their thoughts and works and civilization, all crumbling to atoms as what we thought was just another outcropping of rock is eaten by the goo or washed away by the sea.

Alec and I have been wandering through this stuff for perhaps eight years. The goo ate everything, of course, trees, plants, people, buildings, lights, insects, everything, yet we can eat it. There are a scattered few of us who it didn't eat, apparently the result of some flaw, or maybe some safety feature that condemned us to lives of insufferable boredom, and we can eat the goo. It isn't tasty or chewy, but it's easy to get, since it coats the whole planet to a depth of about ten feet, deeper where there were mines or subways. There are no hidden nuclear fortresses or atomic subs. We are it. Forgive me if I'm long-winded. It's all there is to do.

There's also Cynthia. She's Alec's girlfriend, having met him a few years back when our ankle deep trails of footprints through the goo met, with us at the end of them. She was as aimless and bored as us, so we kept on together, and she liked Alec better, probably because of his sunny disposition. Which is not to say that he isn't smart, because he is, which is excellent because I don't want to spend the next few decades wandering ankle deep in goo with an idiot. Maybe he just looks better naked, because the goo ate our clothes too. This isn't some fairy tale where we have ragged clothes and maybe some old notebooks and a can opener. The goo eats everything. It leaves us an inch or so of hair, but nothing beyond that, and it keeps our fingernails short and removes our calluses, or would if we had any heavy work to do, which we don't, because from horizon to horizon there is just goo.

Cynthia is quite a looker too, which is nice for Alec, and for me because she is the only thing in the world to look at besides the sky, clouds, stars at night, and goo, and Alec of course, but we tend to walk side by side and besides, I'm pretty sure he's nothing special.

We walk, and discuss philosophy, and science, and which myth we'd like to be. By unspoken agreement we stay away from the question of who did this and what we would do if we found him. We haven't spoken of it since we met Cynthia, mostly because we had done the subject to death perhaps a million times before we met her.

There are other people too, and we sometimes cross paths with them, our endless travels like Sisyphus, except that the goo flattened out the hill and ate his ball. We don't walk with them for very long. Most people's company isn't exactly right, and when it's all there is that becomes grating in a hurry. The conspiracy people are worse than the ones who want to talk about the new carpet they had just bought when the goo ate it, or how drunk they used to get before the goo ate the bar, or how important they were before the goo ate their job and the people who worked for them. When the secret government projects and alien probes come up it's time to part. I found that sort of thing irritating before the goo, and now that conversation is the only thing we have I don't want it tainted with drivel.

We just passed a line of footprints and the conversation went as follows: "Do you want to follow them?" "I don't care, do you?" "They might be interesting, you know." "Maybe. Do you want to follow them?" "You decide."

Which is not to say that all of our conversation is cut from similar cloth, perhaps not the stuff of myth and legend, but it's a difficult decision to make, and we are out of practise at that.

Eventually Cynthia, who often doesn't say a lot, says, "That's Edith Oakley."

Alec and I say, "What?" and Cynthia says, "Edith Oakley. We met her a few years back. She wasn't terribly clever."

Which is true, but she was good looking. That's beside the point: you can't tell who someone is from their footprints in the goo. It's like trying to look at a bowl of porridge and tell who was eating it. It can't be done.

So we decide to follow this person. Cynthia's weird claim has added spice to our existence, and if it takes three weeks to prove her wrong then that's okay - we don't have a lot to fill our time. So we walk along the footprints for about three weeks. I don't count days because there is no reason at all to do so, and eventually we catch up with Edith Oakley.

Now this is a strange coincidence, and although Edith isn't a sparking wit she is happy to see us, and she and I lie in the goo and make love, which is also a nice change. She is quite attractive, which after years in the goo hasn't lost its appeal. She walks with us for a few days and then we part, Edith angling away from us and waving occasionally for several hours, because there is nothing to block the view of her until she is over the horizon of goo.

Cynthia is as usual quiet, and she doesn't even bother to tell us that she was right, so we don't have to explain that it was coincidence. And we continue walking for some time without seeing any footprints, because they fade out fairly soon, and also because there just aren't that many people left.

A few weeks later, and Alec points out that it is three months later, and Cynthia snorts and says that we are clueless and it has been more than two years, we cross another trail.

This time we are ready, topics for conversation having been sparse for the past decade or so, and Alec says, "So who is it?"

Cynthia says, "George Christie, and a woman I don't know."

We are both slightly skeptical, and happy because we now have a mission. We don't question Cynthia. By mutual agreement we turn left and follow the tracks. They are pretty faint, so it takes us a while to catch up, and of course a stern chase is a long one, but we slog happily along, eating goo and making conversation, and some days or weeks later we catch up to George and his recent girlfriend Marcie.

Alec and I are flabbergasted, and so is George when we tell him. Marcie and Cynthia are off by themselves talking, which is about a hundred feet away, because there is little privacy available in the goo. George says that the odds against this being a fluke are pretty high, but not impossibly so. This may be true, but how do you do a controlled experiment in the goo?

George, Alec and I walk around in a big circle and then take Cynthia to the far side and ask her to identify the tracks. She nails it, but she could have seen us since we didn't go over the horizon, and then George and Alec argue about who was where, because they crossed over a few times just to confuse things. Cynthia is the only one who is certain, so apparently the variable we are testing has become the control.

George and Marcie stay with us for a few days and then reverse direction, wanting to be alone. What exactly one could require privacy for is hard to see, given that modesty pretty well vanished with clothing and buildings and even shrubbery, and it seems unlikely that they are writing each other love notes or cooking up a scheme for world domination. Still, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it also give one a chance to come up with further topics for conversation, something which we value quite a lot.

And there Cynthia's strange talent remains, for some weeks, or four years, depending on who you believe, until we cross another trail. This time it is Fred, of no last name, who is the most tedious person in the word, something we can say with a fair degree of certainty. Fred thinks conversation is a contest, and if you think that type of thing was tedious when you could leave, it is thousands of times worse when you have to put up with it for four months until you finally get tired of hinting about wanting to separate and sneak away in the night. Fred, unlike Cynthia, is no tracker.

So I say to Alec, as we do a hasty ninety degree angle, "What do we do if we find Miles? Follow him and kill him, or run for it because he's even worse than Fred?"

And Alec says, "That doesn't matter because Cynthia doesn't know Miles and he's almost certainly dead."

This falls into the familiar rut of arguing over whether we weren't eaten by goo because Miles built in some harebrained protective thing, or because we're just lucky, and Alec is just about to say that it had to be deliberate because otherwise why are there no giraffes left, thus sidestepping the question of whether a creature the size of a mouse would drown in the goo, and I am about to riposte with the pretty obvious idea that there are very few species that can adapt to eat something completely new even if they are starving, and are also omnivorous and can digest it, which leaves pretty well us.

Then Cynthia says, "I know Miles."

And we continue walking, because we aren't taking chances on Fred suddenly getting lost and accidentally heading back towards us, and also we can walk and talk, because after all we have had time to get good at it, it being all we have done for the past nine years. Approximately.

So I say, "Miles. Little tedious irritating bugger. Looks like a pickled onion."

Alec starts to question the depth of that description, but Cynthia says, "Yes."

I say, "But Cynthia, how do you know him?"

Cynthia apparently met Miles a few years before she met Alec and me, and she thought he was cute, right down to his horn rimmed glasses. But she doesn't understand why we would want to kill him.

I explain about Miles and how I worked with him on nanotechnology, and how we were all worried about someone making microscopic robots that could pull other things apart to make copies of themselves, and which would thus reduce the whole word to porridge-like goo. And I tell her about the rather brilliant paper that Miles presented at the big international conference which demonstrated conclusively that such a thing couldn't happen, and which then outlined a few simple safety mechanisms we could use to make it even less possible than completely impossible.

The unfortunate thing about that is that the one paper made Miles famous, and got him lab space and money and assistants. And he gave other papers, some of them brilliant and others stupid, and while I was trying to sort them into which was which he called me and said that he had made a major breakthrough. And he had, and the next day the goo came and ate everything.

Cynthia said, "So why kill him?"

I point out that if killing the entire human race wasn't bad enough, he had sentenced us to a life of walking ankle deep in goo, eating goo, looking at goo, and trying to find something to talk about other than goo.

"Oh. Then why not kill him?"

"Because there may just be a chance that he has some control over the goo. Maybe we could get him to turn it off."

Alec points out that walking around in the goo is tedious, but it may be preferable to walking around ankle deep in rotting dead goo without anything to eat. So I amend that to say that maybe Miles also had the goo preserve some way of restoring parts of the world, maybe even animals and plants. In which case he could restore the world, or at least enough to start with.

Cynthia says, "Maybe he could restore all of it. Maybe he preserved everything. But would you want it back?"

Which, like almost everything else, is a topic which Alec and I have discussed. We would like to have something back, maybe trees and clothing and food that isn't goo. Would we accept civilization and gridlock and condos and the whole human race to get that? Probably, but I am personally hoping that we won't have to.

Alec points out yet again that if Miles has the whole human race backed up somewhere we are morally obliged to return them to life. "But," I say, "are we?" Making an exact copy of someone who is demonstrably dead isn't the same as having that person back again. It's like breaking the ugly vase your girlfriend gave you: you can buy another just like it, but it won't be the original one, and you will again have saddled yourself with something ugly. Alec points out that if you act contrite she will probably buy you another anyway, which really doesn't bring any light to bear on our problems.

So we walk a while, and I realise that it did. What if we browbeat Miles into restoring the world, and he does the whole thing? There are a number of outcomes for this situation, and most of them aren't good. Half of them involve another idiot doing exactly the same thing ten minutes later.

The most likely, even if Miles is alive, is that he is just as trapped as the rest of us. He won't have a lab with him, or any way to manipulate the goo, even if it can be manipulated - the ability to make tiny machines which can tear apart the whole word doesn't necessarily include the ability to have them put it back together. I'm not even sure it's likely. The research was aimed at doing exactly that, but the first working model may have been merely a disassembler.

Still, this gives us material to talk about for a few weeks, or maybe a couple of years, since I don't ask Cynthia, who has a habit of knowing things.

And after a while we meet up with Fritz, who is a solitary individual but someone I like, and we tell him all of this. And we stay together for three days, and when we part Fritz says, "Listen, guys, I saw Miles not that long ago. Maybe twelve years. That way." And he points a certain way, which could be any direction at all but Alec and Cynthia nod, and then we say goodbye and walk off, waving once toward evening.

At night we sit in the goo, seriously wishing that we could have a fire, but we can't, and then we lie down in the goo and sleep, sometimes lying touching if it is cold, although goo is pretty good insulation despite being goo, and in the manner of people too primitive to have a fire to sit around and talk, we sleep until morning.

Except that I lie awake and look at the stars, and watch the occasional meteor streak across the sky, and dream of other planets where there is no goo. Then I think of a meteor impacting the surface of the goo and being eaten, as everything is eaten. And I wonder what myth we are, or would be if we could get rid of the goo and have a creation event, and I sit up, wide awake, and then I wake up Alec and Cynthia.

"Wake up, Alec! Cynthia, Wake up! Come on!"

And after a while they wake up. Alec is at first angry at being woken up, and then he realises that this is unusual and thus maybe interesting, and he is happy.

"What?"

"Alec, Miles can control the goo. He has artifacts. Let's go and find him."

"What artifacts does he have? Pickled onions?"

And by the starlight I can see Cynthia's face wearing an expression of wonder. "His glasses. I didn't see it before."

And Alec is just as amazed, and we set off in what they assure me is the right direction in the dark.

It takes us months to track down Miles, so the early start may have been unnecessary. On the way we talk about what we will do if we are wrong, which is to continue to walk ankle deep in goo. We also discuss what we will do if Miles has control over his glasses and nothing else, which is kill him. We discuss methods, but since we can't dig down ten feet in the goo with our bare hands and get a big rock while he waits to have his brains beaten in, we try other ideas. Inevitably it comes down to strangling. We play rock paper scissors to the best of twenty-seven thousand, and Cynthia is way ahead. I get to help if she can't do it.

And something else comes up: if Miles can selectively restore just what we want, and can be browbeaten into doing just that, then whoever finds him first can remake the world just the way he wants. He can be Prometheus, but with something a lot stronger than fire.

So we have reintroduced politics and intrigue to the world. Fortunately nobody but us knows about it, except maybe Fritz, and he would probably leave the world the way it is, being thoughtful and solitary. We are different: we have a cause, and our lives, while still insanely monotonous, have purpose.

One bright warm day, if one not noteworthy for any other reason except a generous abundance of goo, we cross a set of tracks, and Cynthia says, "It's him."

And we follow him. It takes months, as though Miles knows we are after him. Which he can't, but if Cynthia can identify footprints in porridge, maybe Miles knows when he's being followed. Or maybe he's just looking for a girlfriend, having found a way to keep a set of glasses away from the goo but never figuring out how to make women not loathe him.

Eventually we catch him. He has nowhere to hide, and he greets us by name, cheerfully, especially Cynthia, me less so. Alec he doesn't know.

He's wearing the glasses.

I don't bother with formalities. "Miles, you useless fucker, have you given any more thought to your paper on how this couldn't happen? Or was this deliberate?"

"No, I kept them isolated in a Pyrex beaker. There was no danger. It even had a lid."

I feel like getting down on my knees and begging for something not to have happened which I know did. "Miles, you dropped the beaker, didn't you?"

Miles looks very defensive. "It didn't matter, you know. They could pull the silicon atoms right out of the glass. I just saved them a few days."

My hands instinctively reach out to pick him up by the lapels and shake him, but he doesn't have any. I consider using his ears, but Alec steps between us.

"Miles, can you restore the world? Did you keep a backup?"

Miles looks very sad, and I can see his eyes beginning to fill with tears behind the thick glasses. "I didn't have time. I was going to make them record stuff as they ate it, but there wasn't time."

I remember drinking with Miles, and debugging programming for him, and how much Misty the cat had loved him, and I realise that I can't really kill anyone, least of all Miles. "Shit." He wasn't really that bad, he was just an idiot. If he hadn't done this then someone else would have. It's not like advances in science are made by people with sense. And Miles has been feeling bored and guilty for however many years it has been. Plus he still doesn't have a girlfriend. "It's okay, Miles, it wasn't just you. Someone else would have done it anyway."

Miles nods, sniffling. "I did save some stuff. It isn't all gone."

Alec says, "Like what?"

"I got all the plants and animals, DNA and cell structure. And we can get more from fossils, probably. And music, I have a whack of music. And books, machinery. I could make you a car, a Corvette even. I have all the myths, Greek, Roman. And plastic models."

Cynthia says, "So you can make stuff?"

"Oh yes, the goo isn't just disassemblers. Even animals. I lost a lot, but the goo still puts us ahead of where we were."

Alec says, "So what do we do now? We can't restore the old world."

Cynthia looks relieved. "I don't want it. I hated it."

"Why, Cynthia?" I felt as though Cynthia again knew something that was invisible to me.

"Because I was fat and middle-aged and I had a job I hated. I didn't like the city or the people, and I was lonely and bored. I wasn't the only one like that. The world wasn't that great. Even the goo is better."

Alec says, "Cynthia, you aren't that old. And you're gorgeous."

She raises her hands to her face in exasperation and disbelief, then talks through them. "Guys, how long have we been walking through the goo? Months? Years? Weeks?"

I know the answer to that one. "About ten years, Cynthia."

Alec says, "Actually fifteen."

'We have been in the goo for two hundred and thirty years. It took us fourteen years to find Miles."

I speak first. "Cynthia, people don't live that long. I know it seems longer but it isn't."

Miles says, "She's right. Two hundred and thirty-six years, ninety-five days, four hours."

"So why are we still alive?" I realise I have folded my arms defensively.

Cynthia cuts off Miles before he can speak. "He did it. The goo doesn't eat us, but it doesn't ignore us. That was your breakthrough, wasn't it? It repairs us and keeps us alive, and it makes women good looking."

"So why," asks Cynthia, doesn't it make men better looking?"

I shake my head and Alec laughs, seeing it. "There are a thousand magazines to tell us what makes a woman pretty. How was he supposed to know what makes men attractive?"

"He could have asked a woman."

Alec and I say it together: "He doesn't know any."

Miles says, defensively, "I didn't think of it. Who cares what men look like?"

I feel a strange affection for my friend, and I understand that his flaws, as well as his genius, are products of a flawed society, one that is now gone. "Don't worry, Miles, we'll do better next time."

This seems to comfort Miles. He takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes, and we all feel better. And we walk along together as the sun sinks, and talk about doing better.

And we do. We talk long into the night, on a smooth but solid outcropping of rock in a sea of goo, with a small fire burning in the middle of it. Cynthia has the thing she wants most, a pair of stylish designer jeans, but after two hundred years they feel too strange, too confining, and she can't wear them. She folds them neatly and puts them on the rock beside her. Miles makes us blankets instead, and a metal saucepan ful of coffee, which we heat over the fire and drink from china mugs.

And, miraculously, we do nothing more than that except think and talk. The next day there are no gleaming cities, no armies of robots, no beacons to bring in other survivors. Just us, talking and thinking and in no hurry. And even for Miles there is hope, because when I look at the saucepan in the light of day it is no gleaming abstraction, just an old battered steel pan.

That afternoon I sit and read a book of mythology. Who are we, the Titans, the gods sitting on Mount Olympus, Brahma dreaming the world? Maybe this time, when we're ready, it will be time to make our own myths.