What happened to us?
We were extinguished. Like a cold breath of air against a flickering flame, or the sun beaming down its withering heat on a chunk of ice, or a granule of sand taken by the dark and expansive and terrifying sea.
A single moment of extraordinary crisis to bring about the end of a thousand years of carefully calculated planning. Every hopeful idea, every greedy scheme... we set our eyes to the borders and failed to consider the enemy within.
Who will remember us?
Not the birds, for their bountiful songs won’t sing the praises of our wondrous machines. Not the trees, who would rather forget our very nature. Not the rabid dog or feral cat, who want for nothing but the single-minded goal of survival. Not the open sky and the flowing wind, who were there since before our time and will be in the long years to come.
Perhaps the few of us, who lived and witnessed and breathed and ate the transitory years of greatness. But even that will cease to be, thoughts and memories gone to the wind. Naught but dust and echoes as the brief glimpse of our long and over-achieving existence.
What of our legacy?
Towering structures of metal and glass. Roadways of brick and concrete. The division of classes, the corruption of masses. Arbitrary laws to wrangle minds and subvert a fiery heart. Testaments of our absolute dominion over the forces of all that was known and unknown.
Though not by our choice, we leave these behind. Our own ingenuity, our will to outlast everything that isn’t us, will be the final test of our grand designs. Perhaps they’ll carry on as still and solid as the days we breathed for millennia to come – perhaps they’ll crumble away and burn to ash in just a few short years.
What happens next?
The world will continue to revolve around the sun, and life – though not our own – will continue to grow and flourish under new management. Maybe one day, so unfathomably far into the future, we will return.
Maybe.
For now, we leave the rest to you. The silent guardian. The sleeping giant. A final testament of who we were, the things we did, and what might become.
So tired....
Memories fogged by distance.
It is hard to think.
Where are my people?
I strain harder to remember...
Spires of stone, and wood, and iron, and concrete.
Steel and plastic, rubber and coal.
Sun and wind and rain.
Kilometers of expanse.
Millions of lives.
A millennium of human habitation.
Within me they lived and breathed and died.
Within me they innovated, and expanded.
Without me, they assembled me, brick by brick.
Ever outward unto the sea, from one shore to the other.
Even as west fell into dark, the light rose unto the east.
Yes... That's right...
This is how I began...
In fledgling existence, I was a single hut and garden, watching.
Boats came by sea, trees were cut, and man's will was imposed upon the land.
A mere collection of hovels of wood, and slate.
A mere heartbeat in my existence, but their struggle was real.
Wind and snow, attack by man and by animal.
Famine, and illness ran rampant.
But they held on, and so did I.
Roads, made of dirt, and traveled by horse; these were my arteries.
They spanned only from here to there. It was not far.
It connected to another small grouping of huts, but my awareness spread.
Economy brought them vitality.
Soon, my arteries pulsed with life.
But it was weak, tenuous, and fraught with trial.
So tired...
Sleep calls to me, but I must remember; I don't have long left...
Over the decades, and into centuries, they continued, building me.
Wood became stone, stone became metal.
They grew out and up, my limbs piercing the heavens.
Each new road strengthened me.
Each tower made lofty my thoughts.
Each life brought joy.
And for centuries I prospered.
A bygone age marked by gold.
I was content.
Not long now...
Leaf and vine, the waters rising; they whisper to me...
But they were not.
My blood; it boiled.
They grew restless in their expansionism, greedy in their pursuits.
Body and mind stretching from sea to sea.
An endless bounty and beauty within me.
But they left to make home on other shores.
Perhaps where they had come from.
I blinked.
They whisper a story....
Their voices, they soothe my troubled thoughts...
Smoke and fire; sound, shattered stone.
Blood spilled and limbs broken.
I had felt discomfort, but never pain.
Glowing points in the sky came and burned holes into me, infected me with a sickly energy.
It riddled them with grievous issues, and they withdrew from the wreckage of my ruined body.
It was an instant.
But in that instant, I knew my time had come, and I was wearied by that thought.
They tell me...
They tell me to sleep...
They didn't recover.
Slowly, they receded.
Towers crumbled.
Roads fragmented.
I could feel my consciousness fading.
I wondered at the folly of them, as nature rose to claim me.
And I slept.
As the giant slept, nature gradually took its toll, winnowing away at the elements that comprised its very being. Green spaces scattered throughout, like patches of moss on a concrete wall, expanded surreptitiously – a root here, a tendril there. Time meant nothing to Nature – it would always reassert itself in the end, whether it took years, centuries or millennia to crumble the tentative permanence of human structures into nothing more than dust to whisk away on a zephyr.
Air, Water and Earth joined forces with the gentle insistence of Flora to weave their slow, but destructive magic upon the expansive carcass of the dying city. Dense mist wreathed lazily around the once proud buildings jutting like fingers towards the uncaring grey sky. Rain fell silently, hitting the cracked pavements and road asphalt with violence in miniature. Every splatter wore inexorably at the atoms that comprised them, breaking their bonds and carrying them away to be recycled by the Earth.
The streets, long abandoned veins and arteries that once fed the city heart and its suburban organs, pulsed with new activity – it was life, but of a different sort. In a way, the dying giant was giving of itself to encourage a rebirth, like the fabled phœnix. Trees carefully buckled sidewalks and roads alike, partnering with the rain and floods to further their encroachment upon the broken remnants of civilization.
There were people, still, stragglers left behind to live among the ruins, squatting in the corroded steel shells that once held thousands of workers. Life was sustained through foraging; fish still swam in the waters, birds still nested and laid eggs, certain plants could be harvested. The ones who foraged the best survived; the rest were left to wither and return to the earth.
The sleeping giant eased further into a slumber from which it would never wake, but Nature watched over it, preparing the city’s eternal resting place. Like insects on a body, her workers ate away at the giant, continuing their own life cycle even as the city’s came to a slow, destructive end. One day it would disappear, but for now it was a reminder of what once was.
A door adrift the flooded street, winds its way through drowned Main Street. Warped wooden thing, trying to bend up, curl inward. Like it all, pulling in, pushed inward. If a city has its center, it can hold its ground. But the center did not hold. Steel towers become bone—rib cages curled to clasp at the sun. They are undone, overgrown thicket and vine. Wraps to bone to choke. To choke a city—after so many years of being choked. Roots like tumors, burrowing, upending. Till the waters came.
Now marsh now swamp now sea. See the tops of towers crumble like icecaps. See the ice bite back. When the water came it came with hunger. It overran the levees and swept in like a clawing hand, carving its way over land.
So much city flooded. Trees waist deep, boughs stretched towards one another, and leaves sprinkling in the waves. They lap in then out, licking away the stone and rusting steel. All falls to water, to root, to life not controlled. This place I took back, that was mine to ransack. There is no center anymore—there is water, where it creeps, the assembling masses of trees. They outflank, rank in the thousands and thousands more will grow along this eroding steel shore.
