Somebody else might have thought to say “life as we know it” ended that year. To me that gives the wrong impression as well. There is no more we even though I am not alone. The air is still the same mix of oxygen and nitrogen and the plant life still thrives on carbon dioxide. The animals roost and root and procreate, evolving the same way they have always, since first climbing out of that primordial ooze. That is the belief held among us, at least and there is no logical reasoning to doubt it even if none of us personally has seen it.
Some time during what people referred to as the twentieth century, homo-sapien began to envision his own demise. From written literature and video movies and games the end of the world was depicted in fiction; whether by alien invasion, nuclear devastation, massive viral infection leading to zombie apocalypse, and by the rise of the machine, to name only a few of the story ideas. These stories varied widely but contained two things unequivocally in common. Within the most basic of pretexts was of course humanities very frailty. These self appointed guardians of the Earth knew they would be the cause of their own destruction. The still legendary Cold War of their time weaved its thread through the loom of their stories reminding them how fragile they were, how limiting their bodies and minds were and how microcosmic they really were in the multiverse.
The second and more important observation that was readily apparent in these narratives was survival. The most universal aspect of their literature, whether written or spoken or viewed during those two centuries, was the idea that perseverance would be rewarded. Homo-erectus crawled out of the caves and not only survived but flourished among the mammals. The passing of the Black Plague led to the discovery and colonization of new continents and mankind marched forward. The almost total extermination of a race of people during a world war led not only to new means of mass destruction but to a world populated by almost five billion, climbing rapidly to seven and then to ten billion citizens by the end of the twenty-first century.
Man constantly drove itself toward the brink of disaster and always found the strength to slam on the brakes, to skirt destiny by a hair and survive looking out over that chasm. Time and again their reality taught them this and their stories confirmed it as fact, reinforced it, and led them to believe in their universal superiority.
As the population dropped from ten billion to seven billion people, through disease and famine, man knew it was only a purging. When an additional three billion were taken by war yet again, and whole continents of life and of land were destroyed, man was assured that nature was achieving a balance. And when the four billion became two, and the two became one, and the population of Earth continued to drop over that last century of life on earth, the survivors reminded themselves that they were the chosen few, assigned by God himself, to start over anew. Even as one group rejected technology, others were destroying each other on hastily assembled moon bases. While some groups returned to the caves, hiding deep underground, only to be killed off by evolving mammals more ferocious and foreboding than their ancestors, others returned to the mountains to a very similar fate. Even while humanity’s numbers continued to rapidly dwindle and the age of the machine continued its climb forward, man held to the belief that perseverance would lead them to survival.
Even if it mattered to this narrative, the name and the location of the last human survivor is but a footnote in history. In the year 2135 the world ended. We can easily suppose that one or two rogue ships made it out of the Earths stratosphere and its ionosphere. One lonely colony to set up what life it could on some distant moon is not an unreasonable assumption. Survival, however, after one hundred and fifty years, is a statistical impossibility. The same holds true for the few hundred, or perhaps even thousands, of people who ran to the mountains. They have been searched for and not found, their bones excavated and cataloged, their mysteries a long ago memory.
If we ourselves were human perhaps this story would be a tragedy, a tale where we discover, in the final few chapters, that there was a holdout, a final group of frontiersmen and women procreating and governing and persevering, God’s chosen few to carry forth his message. But we are no more evolved from those homo-sapiens than they were from Neanderthal. Their history concerns us in the same way they studied the Jurassic Age. If there is a God with a message to bring forth, he must do it through us. Although our origins began with that man along with the turn of the twenty-first century, we evolved separately, independently. History, by nature, tends to be the words of the winning side but in reality there were no sides. Man destroyed himself and we became born, as it were, amid that wreckage.
Report given by N25A1A16 to council
