Yes, Another One, I'm Afraid.
Mmhm, Nadia was bored enough to post up another of the stories she found in one of the many hours she has spent messing about on the internets during her span of time upon this Earth. Here you go - I happen to think this one is at least as awesome as "They're Made Out of Meat", if not a little more so. But then my judgement maybe scewed, who knows. In other news, watching Dylan Moran and writing a Yung post, thinking that at any minute now I should get up and actually do some work on my essay. Or at least, get up, get the books for it, then come back here and do some work on my essay. Here, currently means my lovely warm bed. Window's open, don't ask why. It's cold. And rainy. And 'up' does not seem an appealing place to get.
Humanity’s Final Message to Those Who Would Come After
Fiction by Jeff Harrell
We could have seen it coming a hundred years ago if we’d only paid attention. But we were ignorant, arrogant, foolish.
We were fools.
Today every school child - all ninety-seven thousand of them, worldwide - knows the story. Or at least parts of it. If you took a poll of random people on the streets, and believe me we have, you’ll find a plethora of partially correct answers, answers that get a piece of the story exactly right but that miss the big picture.
It’s not hard to understand why. The big picture is scary.
The big picture is that we’re all dying. Every last one of us.
~O~
It wasn’t global warming. It wasn’t pollution. It wasn’t genetically modified foods, or cell phones, or microwave ovens. It wasn’t personal computers or the automobile. It wasn’t war and it wasn’t famine and it wasn’t pestilence.
It was all of those things, and more.
The data fills a warehouse in a nondescript industrial park in Reston, Virginia. I’ve seen it. Rows upon rows of shelves soaring thirty feet high, packed tightly with boxes of three-ring binders, bound reports, data tapes, data discs, every medium of information storage more advanced that the papyrus scroll.
It’s all there. The accumulated efforts of a generation. Arguably man’s greatest single accomplishment in all of human history. A deep, comprehensive and complete record of all the things that are killing us.
Thirty years we invested in increasingly desperate research efforts. Biologists, climatologists, physicists, geologists, sociologists. Every branch of scientific study the world has ever contrived.
When the scientists failed, the philosophers took their places. And when the philosophers gave up - this happened surprisingly quickly - the priests took over.
But eventually even the priests had to admit defeat.
There is no easy answer. Just the undeniable fact.
At the beginning of the last century, the average lifespan for a human being born somewhere on this planet was between seventy and eighty years old, a comfortable margin above the Biblically allotted threescore and ten.
Today the average lifespan is forty-four. Slightly higher for women, slightly lower for men, mostly because so many of the world’s men are getting themselves killed in senseless border skirmishes and civil wars. But the average, the over-under, is forty-four.
And it’s falling fast.
We’ve been over the projections a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. We built the most powerful supercomputer in the history of the world to crunch the numbers. We named it EDEN, for obvious reasons. We created models, fed in the data, and EDEN drew beautiful and terrifying curves in psychedelic rainbow colors.
We changed the models. We omitted some of the data. We even fed the computer false data to represent certain blue-sky hypothetical scenarios.
The results were the same. In two decades, the average human lifespan will be fifteen years.
Every one of the sociologists agree - and getting sociologists to agree on something may be humanity’s second greatest achievement - that that’s the point at which society will collapse entirely. Medical science and industrialization will vanish. A fifteen-year-old might be able to start a family, plow a field, defend his home from the encroaching wilderness of post-human Earth. But he can’t learn to perform surgery or repair a turbine. There’s just not enough time.
Humanity will wither and die. It’s inevitable now.
~O~
Nobody ever seriously considered keeping it a secret. Sure, we talked about it, during the early days when the projections were merely troubling and had not yet become chillingly precise. We considered burying the evidence, coming up with silly but plausible explanations for what was happening all around us.
But as the graphs came into focus and the conclusion became unquestionable, we gave up all that talk as if by silent, unanimous consensus.
We turned our minds - those of us who still had the will to use them - to what should happen next.
We have limited time, but we do have time. We can choose how it all ends. Will we just let society collapse around us? Flame out in an orgy of self-destruction? Or will we make the best we can out of what we have left?
We started to consider our legacy.
~O~
We intended to be democratic about it. We really did. This is humanity’s last work we’re talking about here. It should be something we choose together, something we complete in the spirit of cooperation, with the intent of leaving something that speaks of who we are and what we dreamed of during our brief time on this planet.
It didn’t work at all.
Political squabbles. Saber rattling. Sectarian disagreement that became arguments that became low-grade wars. The Christians wanted to erect a field of crosses, one for every man, woman and child left alive. The Muslims wanted to build the greatest mosque ever imagined. The Europeans wanted it in Brussels. The Americans wanted it in Philadelphia. The Chinese just wanted to finish their Great Wall and leave the rest of the planet to fend for itself.
They were all thinking too small.
In the end, as has always been the case throughout all history, it came down to a small group of people - sixteen men and five women - who had both the vision and the means to make it real.
Our final message to the world, we decided, would be carved in hundred-foot-high letters on the side of a granite mountain. Two of them, one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern. Far enough away from what remained of human society to avoid the depredations to come, yet conspicuous enough to be unmistakable to whomever should arise to read the words.
Deciding what the monuments should say, ironically, took just ten minutes. A suggestion was made, heads around the room began to nod, and the message was agreed upon by unanimous acclamation. Four words, repeated in hundreds of languages, would be humanity’s final message to the universe.
Making the mountains was slightly harder.
~O~
Thanks to the cruelty of plate tectonics, the ideal places on the Earth to erect our final monument were depressingly devoid of mountains on which to carve it.
So we built them.
The effort took five years and countless trillions of now-nearly-worthless dollars. But eventually - sooner than many of us expected - it was done. Thousand-foot-high peaks of granite, excavated by machine and by long-obsolete human sweat, rose above the plains of Death Valley, California, and the empty lands of the Australian Outback, about three hundred miles southwest of Alice Springs.
Remote enough to be forgotten. Accessible enough to be found.
We had our canvases.
The carving of the words took another year, and an army of men and women - some hale, some increasingly feeble as their bodies were eaten away by cancer or viruses or any of the various deficiency diseases that had first appeared in our species a century before. Dynamite and machinery, followed by chisels and hammers, and finally paintbrushes and toothpicks.
But at last the job was done.
~O~
No one ever bothered to count, but it’s a safe bet that at least a million people joined together to build the Death Valley monument. Perhaps as many built the Australian one. Perhaps the Australian one never got built at all. None of us will ever know. The other side of the planet is as remote to us now as the other side of the moon, and we have no hope of seeing either.
When the job was done, those who dedicated the last years of their lives to this work realized - as they’d known all along - that they had no where to go back to. The world was dying out there, sometimes in peace and sometimes in horrifying brutality. There was no home any more.
So we settled here.
That was ten years ago.
~O~
There aren’t many of us left now. I would count them, but my memory isn’t what it once was - though I still recall the word that announced my death sentence, even if I don’t remember what it means; the word was “prion.” A prion in my brain, or possibly an essential prion that should be in my brain but that is now gone. I don’t know. One or the other.
Or something else entirely.
I cannot remember.
My body fails as quickly as my mind, if not more so. I can no longer walk. Standing unsupported is beyond me. I can lean against a post for a brief while, but such are the limits of my ambition.
I, like the rest of us, sit quietly and wait for the end.
But I remember. I remember what we did. I don’t remember doing much of it, but I remember that we did it. And in the evening, when the sun dips toward the distant horizon, I see the words there, the words we carved, the words I myself may have helped to carve. A simple message repeated in every language we could reproduce, plus a few we had to invent from whole cloth.
Just four words. Our legacy. Our message to whomever or whatever should return to this place after the last fire has gone out.
Our epitaph.
DON’T BE LIKE US.
Humanity’s Final Message to Those Who Would Come After
Fiction by Jeff Harrell
We could have seen it coming a hundred years ago if we’d only paid attention. But we were ignorant, arrogant, foolish.
We were fools.
Today every school child - all ninety-seven thousand of them, worldwide - knows the story. Or at least parts of it. If you took a poll of random people on the streets, and believe me we have, you’ll find a plethora of partially correct answers, answers that get a piece of the story exactly right but that miss the big picture.
It’s not hard to understand why. The big picture is scary.
The big picture is that we’re all dying. Every last one of us.
~O~
It wasn’t global warming. It wasn’t pollution. It wasn’t genetically modified foods, or cell phones, or microwave ovens. It wasn’t personal computers or the automobile. It wasn’t war and it wasn’t famine and it wasn’t pestilence.
It was all of those things, and more.
The data fills a warehouse in a nondescript industrial park in Reston, Virginia. I’ve seen it. Rows upon rows of shelves soaring thirty feet high, packed tightly with boxes of three-ring binders, bound reports, data tapes, data discs, every medium of information storage more advanced that the papyrus scroll.
It’s all there. The accumulated efforts of a generation. Arguably man’s greatest single accomplishment in all of human history. A deep, comprehensive and complete record of all the things that are killing us.
Thirty years we invested in increasingly desperate research efforts. Biologists, climatologists, physicists, geologists, sociologists. Every branch of scientific study the world has ever contrived.
When the scientists failed, the philosophers took their places. And when the philosophers gave up - this happened surprisingly quickly - the priests took over.
But eventually even the priests had to admit defeat.
There is no easy answer. Just the undeniable fact.
At the beginning of the last century, the average lifespan for a human being born somewhere on this planet was between seventy and eighty years old, a comfortable margin above the Biblically allotted threescore and ten.
Today the average lifespan is forty-four. Slightly higher for women, slightly lower for men, mostly because so many of the world’s men are getting themselves killed in senseless border skirmishes and civil wars. But the average, the over-under, is forty-four.
And it’s falling fast.
We’ve been over the projections a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. We built the most powerful supercomputer in the history of the world to crunch the numbers. We named it EDEN, for obvious reasons. We created models, fed in the data, and EDEN drew beautiful and terrifying curves in psychedelic rainbow colors.
We changed the models. We omitted some of the data. We even fed the computer false data to represent certain blue-sky hypothetical scenarios.
The results were the same. In two decades, the average human lifespan will be fifteen years.
Every one of the sociologists agree - and getting sociologists to agree on something may be humanity’s second greatest achievement - that that’s the point at which society will collapse entirely. Medical science and industrialization will vanish. A fifteen-year-old might be able to start a family, plow a field, defend his home from the encroaching wilderness of post-human Earth. But he can’t learn to perform surgery or repair a turbine. There’s just not enough time.
Humanity will wither and die. It’s inevitable now.
~O~
Nobody ever seriously considered keeping it a secret. Sure, we talked about it, during the early days when the projections were merely troubling and had not yet become chillingly precise. We considered burying the evidence, coming up with silly but plausible explanations for what was happening all around us.
But as the graphs came into focus and the conclusion became unquestionable, we gave up all that talk as if by silent, unanimous consensus.
We turned our minds - those of us who still had the will to use them - to what should happen next.
We have limited time, but we do have time. We can choose how it all ends. Will we just let society collapse around us? Flame out in an orgy of self-destruction? Or will we make the best we can out of what we have left?
We started to consider our legacy.
~O~
We intended to be democratic about it. We really did. This is humanity’s last work we’re talking about here. It should be something we choose together, something we complete in the spirit of cooperation, with the intent of leaving something that speaks of who we are and what we dreamed of during our brief time on this planet.
It didn’t work at all.
Political squabbles. Saber rattling. Sectarian disagreement that became arguments that became low-grade wars. The Christians wanted to erect a field of crosses, one for every man, woman and child left alive. The Muslims wanted to build the greatest mosque ever imagined. The Europeans wanted it in Brussels. The Americans wanted it in Philadelphia. The Chinese just wanted to finish their Great Wall and leave the rest of the planet to fend for itself.
They were all thinking too small.
In the end, as has always been the case throughout all history, it came down to a small group of people - sixteen men and five women - who had both the vision and the means to make it real.
Our final message to the world, we decided, would be carved in hundred-foot-high letters on the side of a granite mountain. Two of them, one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern. Far enough away from what remained of human society to avoid the depredations to come, yet conspicuous enough to be unmistakable to whomever should arise to read the words.
Deciding what the monuments should say, ironically, took just ten minutes. A suggestion was made, heads around the room began to nod, and the message was agreed upon by unanimous acclamation. Four words, repeated in hundreds of languages, would be humanity’s final message to the universe.
Making the mountains was slightly harder.
~O~
Thanks to the cruelty of plate tectonics, the ideal places on the Earth to erect our final monument were depressingly devoid of mountains on which to carve it.
So we built them.
The effort took five years and countless trillions of now-nearly-worthless dollars. But eventually - sooner than many of us expected - it was done. Thousand-foot-high peaks of granite, excavated by machine and by long-obsolete human sweat, rose above the plains of Death Valley, California, and the empty lands of the Australian Outback, about three hundred miles southwest of Alice Springs.
Remote enough to be forgotten. Accessible enough to be found.
We had our canvases.
The carving of the words took another year, and an army of men and women - some hale, some increasingly feeble as their bodies were eaten away by cancer or viruses or any of the various deficiency diseases that had first appeared in our species a century before. Dynamite and machinery, followed by chisels and hammers, and finally paintbrushes and toothpicks.
But at last the job was done.
~O~
No one ever bothered to count, but it’s a safe bet that at least a million people joined together to build the Death Valley monument. Perhaps as many built the Australian one. Perhaps the Australian one never got built at all. None of us will ever know. The other side of the planet is as remote to us now as the other side of the moon, and we have no hope of seeing either.
When the job was done, those who dedicated the last years of their lives to this work realized - as they’d known all along - that they had no where to go back to. The world was dying out there, sometimes in peace and sometimes in horrifying brutality. There was no home any more.
So we settled here.
That was ten years ago.
~O~
There aren’t many of us left now. I would count them, but my memory isn’t what it once was - though I still recall the word that announced my death sentence, even if I don’t remember what it means; the word was “prion.” A prion in my brain, or possibly an essential prion that should be in my brain but that is now gone. I don’t know. One or the other.
Or something else entirely.
I cannot remember.
My body fails as quickly as my mind, if not more so. I can no longer walk. Standing unsupported is beyond me. I can lean against a post for a brief while, but such are the limits of my ambition.
I, like the rest of us, sit quietly and wait for the end.
But I remember. I remember what we did. I don’t remember doing much of it, but I remember that we did it. And in the evening, when the sun dips toward the distant horizon, I see the words there, the words we carved, the words I myself may have helped to carve. A simple message repeated in every language we could reproduce, plus a few we had to invent from whole cloth.
Just four words. Our legacy. Our message to whomever or whatever should return to this place after the last fire has gone out.
Our epitaph.
DON’T BE LIKE US.