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The Dying Light |
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| Written by John Thorley | |
| Saturday, 01 March 2008 | |
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Share it:      A Dying Light
By John Thorley
Grenia sat calmly watching the face of her mate across the pool of gentle white light. They were communicating but to an alien visitor without extrasensory perception the room would be silent. Oral communication had ceased thousands of millennia ago. Their conversation, or rather detailed thoughts and feelings, was melancholy. "It will be time soon" said Grenia. "Our duty is fulfilled it will be time to leave." Her mate sat with elbows on his knees and upturned palms under his chin then slowly stood unfurling his full eight feet in height. He did not look at her but beyond her. Grenia could feel his pain. "I thought I'd one last look around," he said. His name was Dane. He was four hundred years old, with a mane of jet black hair reaching to the small of his back, indicative of a man in his prime. "We have an hour of daylight," she sent back to him. "Then we must be gone." "I am aware of that my love. It is just the sense of finality that I find overwhelming. It is a tragedy that appals me. Humanity has survived everything that fate, the universe and its own flawed development have thrown at it. To witness its end is overwhelming" Grenia walked over to him and sat on a seat pulling him down beside her. His left hand clasped her right, his seven fingers entwined in hers. He waved his other hand over the glowing panel hovering in the light before them both. The gunmetal grey wall before them became opaque; a living scene grew out of the polished surface. They could see the ruins of a huge white city. The skeletons of tall buildings disappeared into clouds; broken bridges and skyways stood silent like a canvas in white oils. A frozen sea hung like a glass sculpture facing it, gaunt and lifeless. Dane again passed his hand over the panel. Again more scenes and again everything ice and snow. Shallow freezing seas and crumbling shimmering cities; everything inert apart from for the remnants of man's now ended reign. They could see the wrecks of the huge floating platforms built to tap into the planets heat through the crust. Ice filled canals that once channelled magma to the cities. With eyes long used to faint luminosity they both watched the last great thermal turbines running in the planets' perpetual twilight. They watched the obsolete orbiting power grids falling back to earth their thousands of prisms sparkling like mother earth's own jewellery. In every daylight scene the pale ghost of a weak ruby sun hung in the sky. They watched in awe at the final centuries of struggle against the inevitability of extinction. They thought of the glorious yet futile past; its promise devastated, a species of intellect preparing for a future that for them was now to be torn from their grasp before the realisation of their final ascendancy. The end was near. The sun was no more than a red hot ember. Humanity cowered. For all it's intellectual and technological advancement since life first formed in some primordial sludge four and a half billion years previously it was powerless to arrest the coming of the darkness and the cold. With the darkness and with the cold came the end of life. Photosynthesis stopped, the food chain collapsed. Within a century nothing green existed outside laboratories. Man kept himself alive through his own ingenuity for millennia. But eventually it had to succumb to the creeping inertia. One by one its sources of heat and power failed. One by one the ebb and flo of the struggle against the cold left man the loser. Humanity teetered on the brink of annihilation, just one more mass extinction in the history of such things reaching back into the mists of ancient times; but this time there would be no recovery. There would be no small mammals to ride out the cataclysm and grow again fresh and new in evolutionary vehemence. There would be no insect life to hibernate until the ice age passed ready to burst forth and diversify, once more covering the planet with a myriad of forms. The surface of the earth, a miniscule percentage of its mass, would transform into a frozen desert. The planets inner core would gradually cool until it was no more than a frozen rock lost and irrelevant in infinity. Passers by navigating the galaxy would observe its unremarkable form and ignore it, unaware of its ghosts and the mighty civilisation it nearly was. They would not see the one long vista, the billions of vanished years from earth's nebulous and fiery origin to it frozen ruin, only an inert stone wandering the universe. Humanity awaited its fate, powerless and castrated of its authority. Then there were the Capellans. As if a plea to an ancient mysticism was answered. They appeared as suddenly as the sun rises in the morning; gods, all powerful, all knowing. Minds immeasurably superior to mans' sprang from the endless blackness of space. No one had seen them coming, even the most sophisticated of technology was ambushed by their arrival. Humanity held its breath, saviours or harbingers of doom. What would be the outcome and the answer? The Capellans had travelled 42.2 light years from a planet orbiting their young fiery star but in reality they had travelled no distance at all. Such was the technological accomplishments of this titan of a race that they had complete mastery over time and space. Absolute control over elemental forces in a black hole enabled them to warp space and time literally bending the space between any two points in the universe. Grenie gazed perplexed at her troubled mate. She squeezed his arm trying to bring comfort to his disturbed frown. "My love, this is troubling you. I did not anticipate this reaction from you." "Don't you see the ultimate irony in the situation? Humanity has survived more adversity than any other species that has ever existed. The species so determined to effect its own destruction through wars, plagues and even the consuming of every natural resource here finally finds the true light. It cures itself of all its ills, settles to an age of intellectual accomplishment and tranquillity. Just as the goal of perfection is within its grasp; it is gone." "But it is not the end my love. Humanity is saved, only the place where it began, grew and nurtured is gone. We have overcome, we have survived." "Grenia, you have the optimism of youth. When you have lived for another few hundred years I hope that we will be able to look back on this with fondness. I lament the end of a civilisation. I fear for what may lie ahead. " "What is the alternative? Our home is a dead world. What is happening was our only chance of life. It is only a place. Whatever happens when we emerge on Capella, we will still be together. It is time my love. We must go." "The sun was supposed to last many more billions of years. How could our best scientific minds be so wrong?" "If the Capellans have taught us anything then it is that very little in this universe is as it seems. How many facts that we held as unambiguous have we needed to reconsider since they arrived? A sardonic smile crept across Grenia's face. "Don't mock me Grenia. Not enough people have thought in detail about our fate and the events that have overtaken this planet." "It is known as ‘trust' Dane. They have saved us. They have saved the entire population, over four million people. If they had any ill intention then they would have simply let us all die." "Unless they need us! Don't you find it strange that we can only travel in their machine if we are genetically altered?" "But our scientists have confirmed the technical reasons for this. Dane the time is short, we must go. I will see you shortly on our new home." Dane nodded his head. "I know my love. My fear is illogical. One day we will understand more." Dane showed Grenia to the first of the archways before kissing her then walking slowly to the second. Grenia stood motionless under the archway. A pale light moved slowly down her body to the floor. A moment later there was a blinding flash from all around her. She could still see around the room but it now seemed to be from a distance. She looked at the chronometer on the wall and remembered the date, the most significant date in history, a history that was now no more; the day the last humans left earth, 7,000,112. Gazing to the horizon the huge purple orb seemed to fill half the sky, filling the land with a ghostly pink light. It was the last sunset human eyes would ever see. She could feel no heat, now no light. The room began to blur, moving in and out of focus. She tried to wipe her eye, but nothing happened. She had no physical form. The images around her grew dark and suddenly they were replaced by a million pinpricks of light. It was if the entire galaxy was spread out before her. This faded and she hung in featureless blackness; blackness then silence then nothing.
Thus ended humanity in the form of its own choosing; it had united with a long line of species ‘saved' by the Capellans. The biological distinctiveness of the human species was now simply one ingredient of an amalgam of a thousand species subjugated by the same deception. All physical traces of humanity would disappear within a thousand years. Dane had pondered whether it was possible to envelop an entire star in a force field and propel it four billion years into the future instantly transforming it into a dying sun. Such recalcitrant thoughts were unknown. Dane and Grenia never materialised on Capella.
Copyright 2008 John Thorley |
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