Another little something I wrote.
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As little as most people want to admit it, all things have an end. Anybody who takes the time to examine the world realizes it immediately. Anything and everything has a point at which they simply cease to exist, from a party, to childhood, to the world as we know it. Things seem permanent at the time, of course; that’s just an abstract concept playing with our feeble human senses. Underneath it though, we all know that it is finite, it has a clear limit on how long it can survive. But there’s one thing that nobody could ever have dreamed would end.
Imagination.
The end began when the meteors came, of course. That’s when it all ended. Millions of space rocks, hitting all over the world? That’s bad enough, or course. If one could end the dinosaurs, imagine what that could do to humanity!
Well, the impacts for whatever reason did not make us extinct. There were no clouds of dust that would block out the sun for millennia, probably on account of the same strange, ungodly power that destroyed fantasy. The impacts barely killed anyone, in fact. What the meteors turned into did.
Picture this, if you can: A flaming boulder the size of a house falls from the sky, landing in the middle of a busy city street. It’s not too hard to imagine, am I right? Now, picture that boulder disintegrating, falling apart into hundreds of pieces of rubble. Again, it’s easy. Picture the rubble rising up, becoming that many monsters, humanoid creatures of pure stone, pulsing with fire, destroying anything that moves with their inhuman strength and blazing bodies. You can probably do it, unless you are particularly uncreative. Finally we come to the last part of our little game: picture this scenario happening in millions of places around the world, simultaneously, setting the entire globe ablaze with the fires of their bodies.
Can you? Can you even comprehend the logistics, the numbers, the implications and the consequences? Maybe, maybe not. I’m inclined to doubt it, to believe that you need to live through it in order to understand, but what do I know? Like everybody, I’ve forgotten how to “picture this”.
The heat of these fires melted the poles, flooding dozens of miles in from the shores on every landmass. All surviving land became ash, ash and stone and fire. Very few humans survived, of course. We stayed together in small groups, hiding from the monsters that now ruled the world.
There was resistance. Most sane people did not try to challenge the new world order, but a few insane ones did. An RPG was about the easiest to find that could hope to damage the things, but there were enough of those left around for suicidal attacks to be made, usually by just one man at a time.
They did no major damage to anything. Whatever controlled the monsters, however, seemed to find something about the attacks sufficiently annoying to do something about it. It was after about three months of this hell on earth that they retaliated.
What motivates a resistance force? The answer is dreams: dreams of a time before their hated dictators, dreams of a brighter future, and dreams of what would have happened had their enemies not won the war. Anything but the reality can be used as a force to motivate a rebellion.
They knew this. They knew that they could end our fight. So they did. They robbed us of our motivation. The force that causes forward movement, what artists call their muse and what great people call their inspiration, the thing that had always called to humanity to go onwards, upwards, and forwards to a better world; it was gone.
I don’t know how. I suspect nobody does, ever did, or ever will. But they made our imaginations into reality. They imposed fact over our fictions. It came suddenly, without warning. That day, when it happened, I was thinking about my wife, our wedding day to be specific. It was three years before the impacts. We were in a beautiful church, standing before the altar with a huge stained glass window before us.
The priest said to me, “You may now kiss the bride.” It was the greatest moment of my life. I turned to her, she turned to me. We leaned towards each other, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the world come tumbling down. A meteor crashed though the stained glass and crushed the altar and the priest.
In my mind, I was the only one who noticed. She kissed me and I was powerless to act, to resist, to save her, as rough stone hands pulled her face away from mine. The entire church was an inferno. The soldiers of Hell streamed past me, engulfing the people sitting in the pew. I saw our families crushed under foot, lifelong friends with missing limbs and heads, depressed skulls and chests. The church burnt to its foundations and still I stood by the devastated altar, watching in horror at the dream world around me that had come to mimic the real one. Only when everything I could see was burnt to the ground and dead without a doubt did one of the monsters come to me and end it.
From then on, the same thing would always happen. No matter what the dream or thought, the meteors came and the brief escape from the horror show all around mutated into a reflection of Tartarus. At first, the only effect was the cessation of a resistance. Without the ability to think of what they were fighting for, nobody fought for anything against the fiery overlords. But before long, people lost touch of the difference between their terrible, twisted dreams and the terrible, twisted reality. They began wandering out into the open, letting themselves be killed. Some did this thinking that they would awake from their dream into the true world. Other simply wanted to die, deciding that they had had enough of their condition.
Very few people were able to resist the temptation to commit suicide. Fewer were able to keep control on their perceptions of reality. I am one of the few who could. At least, I think I am. For all I know, my mind snapped long ago, and all this is an illusion. But just the fact that I thought of that possibility makes me think that I am sane. Even in this perversion of Earth, Occam’s ancient razor still cuts away to the truth. That’s what keeps me going, even when everybody I know tells me that it’s all over, that the monsters will rule forever. They forget one simple thing, which I don’t.
As little as most people want to admit it, all things have an end. Anybody who takes the time to examine the world realizes it immediately. Anything and everything has a point at which they simply cease to exist, from a depression, to holocausts, to the world as we know it. Things seem permanent at the time, of course; that’s just an abstract concept playing with our feeble human senses. Underneath it though, we all know that it is finite, it has a clear limit on how long it can survive. But this is the one thing that nobody will ever dream will end.
I came to them out of mists and rain;
I came to them in dreams at midnight;
I came to them in a flock of ravens that filled the northern sky at dawn...
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