Castle on the Rock

3000

The calendar ran out of days long ago. Earth is empty and quiet. 

Soft footsteps. Padding carefully over the cracked, deteriorating cement paving.

You are probably the only person to walk down these run-down alleys since The Departure. You haven't seen another person in over 300 years. 300 years it's been since the colonies left from the earth.

You let a wave of memories wash over you...

You sit next to a young boy, looking up at you quizzically,

"Do you really think they're going to leave?"

"Yes..." you say bitterly, reluctantly. "It's not just that they have no choice, I guess, people always believe they can lead a better life somewhere new"

2 years later, the ships left, leaving behind a dead planet. Leaving behind you.

Leaving only you on the burning mess of a planet, overridden by climate change. So overridden, that the governments just gave up. Decided that there was no point trying to reverse the inevitable, what we left too late, Earth was broken.

You didn't leave though, because you'd already lived a full life on Earth, no matter how dry and drained it was... Earth was home. But the Earth they left behind is nothing like the one you walk through now. The earth that they left was dry, barren, overpopulated and disease-ridden.

But with only you left on the blue planet, the climate returned to normal, but at a price. You haven't seen another human being in hundreds of years.

You are truly and finally alone. Alone with the wind and the rain and the silence. The centuries all blend into each other, you have changed names and identities so many times, you barely remember the person left behind all those years ago.

You duck under a crumbled arch, covered in vines. The once proud city is ruled by rust and dirt.

Rain begins to fall, shockingly cold. Plastering your grimy hair to your worn face. Shoving your hands into the large pockets of your worn leather jacket, you pull out a diary, filled with dog-eared yellow pages stuffed with the cramped writing of a hundred years' worth of diary entries, the entries getting further and further apart in years.

23rd June 2102

We couldn't go outside at all today, because it was raining! The acid rains are getting worse, and people are worried about what this means for the crops, I don't really care though! I mean, my family unit is very comfortable. I don't ever want to leave!

You remember the acid rain. The atmosphere got so toxic that the rain burned skin. Only, now that the climate is back to normal, the rain is too. But the thunder still makes you instinctively flinch and expect the burning. That entry was so long ago, you can barely remember writing it... it must've been before they introduced the Centennial: the drug that adds another century to a person's life. Even after the Departure, you'd kept taking the Centennial, in the naïve hope that maybe... just maybe... if you stuck around long enough, you might meet another person...?

You leaf forward a few pages.

15th January 2251

Today we received news that the earth's population had reached 13.5 billion.

I would've thought people would stop having children, what with climate change and depleting resources? Isn't it a bit selfish to have children, just for them to grow up living inside, because of the overheating, deadly sun, acid rains and barely enough food at night? I don't think I'll ever understand people.

God, how long has it been since you've seen a child, a human for that matter?

That entry was decades ago, so babies born after the Departure will have no memory of the earth. Maybe they'll believe it was a myth?

A random thought saddens you immensely. Today's generation of humans will never get to see Earth restored to its former glory, they'll only remember it as a dry husk of rock. Still, maybe eternal solitude is just too high a price to pay for a healthy Earth. If only you had left when you had the opportunity!

You climb up a rusted broken fire exit to the top of a ruined skyscraper. As you gaze over the ruined landscape, the sky rumbles, the clouds are mauve and stormy, and icy rain falls over the grey, crumbled city, overcome by rust and vines. During the first hundred years of solitude, the silence was scary, unnerving. But you're used to it now. In fact, if you were to hear a sound now, it would be jarring and unexpected.

You continue to walk along the top of the buildings, until you reach the climax of a hill, overlooking the storming sea. The gales from the ocean seem determined to pull your hair from your scalp. To tear at the cliffs and the very earth itself.

The feeling of being in this place is strange. You must have been here before, the eight towering stones look oddly familiar.

Slipping a hand into your pocket you pull out the packet of Centennial pills, flipping it over. Ten pills left. Another thousand years of solitude. The idea makes a sea of unnameable emotion rise up deep within you.

What is the point anymore? You stayed... but for what?

As you wander over to the stones, you begin to read. The translator implant your parents paid so much for at your birth was doing its job.

You see twenty-first-century words. A sprayed "We are so screwed."

A looping J and L intertwined. 

You see carvings on the rocks, of howling wolves, and life and death and the spirit of the earth itself in the rotation of sun, sky, stars, and death.

You see the graves of people who suffered the wrath of epidemics.

Hundreds of names carved into the ancient stone.

Elyah, Matthias, Wulf... you could list them probably for another century alone. The oldest carving by far is a pair of scratched names, in the earliest known version of English. 

Æssa and Kae. 

You bend down to inspect the names further and bump your knee against a brass plaque. Lifting it up, you shake the dirt off and begin to read.

These are words taken from a digital video of the twenty-first century by a philosopher, of a sort. We believe that they are worthy of this plaque and we hope that future generations have followed this advice. It reads:

"How to win the future:

If you can wield technology your ancestors never dreamt of and use that power in a way they would be proud. If you can utilize your birth planet without destroying it, yet still take all that you need. If you can kill labor, without killing ambition. 

If you can unravel nature, without thinking yourself smarter than her. If you can tame the elements, without subverting them. If you can build your homes on distant worlds, while still taking care of the home you evolved on. If you can safeguard for future generations, without forgetting those who came before. If you can accept your violent past, while still fostering your galactic future. If you can spread across the stars, without your empire spreading too thin. 

If you can take to the galactic stage without forgetting your lines, then yours is the cosmos and everything that's in it. When you look up at the stars, what do you see? Those aren't just balls of fiery gas, they're an invitation. But you have to behave yourself until you get there, all right? For the sake of everyone who came before, and everyone who will come after.

There may not be another chance."

You look up at the ocean and, after many minutes of silence, throw the packet of Centennial pills over the hill and into the mouth of the raging ocean. The philosopher's words still ringing in your head.

"There may not be another chance."