Apocalyptic Survival Fiction: Count Down - The Concise Epitaph of Humanity (A Sci-Fi End-of-the-World Story) (A Dystopian Series)

by Watson, Oscar

  For most cases, the use of armed conflict has been to substantiate claims to physical property, to restrict objectionable policies by oppressors and tyrants, or to liberate those held in thrall either through revolution or externalized overthrow. Quite often, one side or the other invokes the will of their particular god, and sometimes both sides claim the same god to be behind them! Ultimately, the battles that are the most compelling are those where small numbers of aggressors somehow gain the advantage and snatch victory from the jaws of what seemed to be imminent defeat.

  Funny, that same allegory could be presented for this very exercise. As you have presented it, the overwhelming odds are in your favor. You control the variables. I have a limited number of words to use to build our strategy, our defense. Our success will be, as those masterful victories at Agincourt and Beersheba, and the liberation of Kuwait, all about how effective the individual is, and how unprepared the enemy is, in the face of superior strategy. Oh, wait, you destroyed our records, so you won’t be able to research that, will you? Of course, I may be completely incorrect, and you may actually be able to check into those battles that are considered the most heroic, most effective in changing the course of the war, most successful in shifting the conflict in other ways. You would find that the integral shifts in the battle are often those that are exploited by a smaller force against the larger one.

  If this is to be the case, your question about war begs the question of whether warfare exists in your domain. Whether you are spacefaring, dimension-shifting, or perhaps, now that I come across a third alternative, time-travelers, could it be that you are the one on the defense, the ones in decline, and the ones seeking the exploit? My, that would put a different frame of reference on this whole endeavor, wouldn’t it? Then you would need to be seen as the aggressor, in order to induce our problem-solving aspect, by putting us in the position of that which is threatened. We would be at your mercy, and by taking away our past and present knowledge base, you drive us into our most stark self-preservation mode, get us to reconsider our future in ways that would considerably change the direction of the future. Indeed, the very changes that might resolve your situation could also erase your future altogether, making your mission a one-way trip, a foray into the past to murder your grandfather, in essence.

  So, I am working on the assumption that the question about reasons for war is some kind of test, whether it is at this point in history that we have gotten over the war-making, and are on to the brighter stage. Sadly, we are not beyond the concept that war is still a last-resort option. The short answer to the main question is no, there are no good reasons for war, but the reasons for this extreme action would not have to be good, only reasonable, to be pursued.

  If grandpa was supposed to revile you for continuing warfare, or to provide you the secret weapon that will put an end to war making, you are sadly mistaken. But if this was again an attempt to put us on the defensive, either justifying or castigating our ancestral heritage, you are just as far from the mark.

  In conclusion, the tendency of human beings to engage in successively horrific wars throughout time perhaps has more to do with the consistently more dangerous and strident circumstances to which we subject ourselves. With great power, great responsibility rises. This may be just another example of the concept of making a last stand battle. So if you are going to end us, take your best shot while we are against the wall, because we will come out swinging. We don’t go down without a fight. Never have. Never will.

  Four - Explain Your Reasons for Economy.

  God and Mammon. Eternal opponents, both vying for control of the human soul. You would need to know our ancient religious documents to get a true understanding of how economy and religion have been at war throughout time. Since you made that impossible, let’s look at the core of these two, and maybe you will be able to pick up the concept anyway.

  Either things happen for a reason, with every concept planned out from the beginning, or everything is a random chance, all is chaos, and we are an accident, a fluke of nature. There are of course philosophies that fall between these two extremes, but flaws, errors in logic and confusion result from any method of combining these two opposing ideas. So the majority of human beings fall into the former, and the majority of the minority, who are well educated, believe the opposite. I am not here to explain either, but the basic concepts are nearly universal.

  The full-control theory expects people to be kind to one another, caring for their neighbors without prompting, sharing everything with each other as needed. Of many stripes from Communism to Christianity, from Buddhism to Taoism, all of these ascribe to a creator the work of origination, but hold the feet of individual members to a code of ethics, with either endless repetition until successful or an eternal punishment for failure. Great concepts for control of individuals, but not too rewarding of excellence.

  The concepts embracing accidental advancement, opportunistic accomplishment, and chaotic selfishness include atheism, agnosticism, and capitalism. The golden rule – whoever has the gold makes the rules – is fundamentally supportive of the idea of individual, random, or exploitive means of advancement. If a failure occurs, it was just in the cards, so just tighten up your belt, and get set for the next part of the ride. The progressive nature of this concept is therefore completely in opposition to the concept of helping the weak. SO, if you believe in one for one advantage, you end up opposing collective advances.

  Economics arises when one wants to put away some kind of return on his investments… that is to say, if I have a pile of sugar beets, and you want some, you give me something you have of value I want. The initial trade was fundamentally one for one. But if sugar beets seem to last a while and have a higher perceived value, you would have to give me more of what you have in trade, or if we develop it, some medium of exchange we both agree will hold value from trade to trade. That medium of exchange is the ‘coin’ – the basis – for trade. As the system builds, the trade value of the coin actually becomes itself a commodity to buy and sell. It is all fairly complicated, and of course, had you not destroyed our histories and records, you could see how really valuable such things can become. So for now, just take into account that the process of economics – of depending on the trades of the past to impact the trades of the future – became the third rail, the alternative to the whims of fate and the absolute nature of destiny.

  Money, in all its various forms, has a mitigating effect on the various daily tragedies in business, and, therefore, becomes itself a filter, pulling value out of every transaction. The savvy business draws revenue from the transactions, as do governances. The fascinating thing about currency (something else you eliminated when you removed all material with reading potential) is that the medium of exchange will always develop, even in places where money is nothing but a token. Thus, the accrual of value is consistently positive, even if the measure of it is tangibly just bits of paper or metal or ascribed value by the people involved in its trafficking.

  In a deeper way, though, your question of economy is a reflection of one of two possible conditions in your world. First, perhaps you may not comprehend the very nature of compound interest, usury fees, or any other means of deriving value from the process itself. How quaint. However, your decision to instantaneously devalue every currency on the planet suggests instead you do fully understand how and why money works, and your question is, as before, a cover for a deeper answer you seek.

  Ah, again I have a glimmer of insight. I note you asked about economics after you had exhausted the other themes of worth and value. You are, in layman terms, seeking our keys to the Kingdom. All that humanity has to offer in terms of treasured things, resources we hold of value. I now comprehend that you did not destroy our histories and our written works, but rather have taken them from us, stolen them as assuredly as you might steal gold or molybdenum, or whatever particular elements of our world you might desire. In my past responses, I have responded philosophically, as I would expect
a rational collection of beings to want, in terms of testing a species for inclusion in the body of intelligent races. You have sought our advances, achievements, our contributions and even the values of our flesh and minds. Now, you seek to understand our own depredations, our own means of scalping and holding down the masses through economics. I do have to once again emphasize that our collective value, from an economic basis, has more to do with the non-zero sum game that we are playing within our world, seeking new ways to derive value from the finite resources at our disposal. I fear that for your voracious need to meddle with other societies, unless you have already devised a similar system, you may be missing out on all you could embezzle, if you ascribed to the same economic model we employ.

  Time is running out on your little game. Three thousand words remain, three more days. Soon you will need to destroy us, or show yourselves as frauds.

  Three – Define the Optimum Human Remembrance.

  Three thousand words remain, and your command of our language begins to show its duality. This question has clearly two different answers, very far removed from one another. First of all, let’s read it as you probably wanted us to… what is it we human beings have done worth commemorating, remembering, and revering?

  That we got off this rock, clearly, is only memorable given how long we have been tool-makers. Six or seven thousand years from using rock chisels, to building computers that could navigate us to the lunar surface, that is pretty impressive, if only as compared with other such advances. Not bad for club-swinging relatives of the apes.

  That we confounded the odds and did not mutually eliminate ourselves with our nuclear arsenal, too, was certainly memorable. Really, your threats to eliminate us have degenerated into the hollow threats of a bully. If you had the capacity to obliterate us and take our stuff, which it now seems to have been your real objective, we would already be dead, and you would be on to the next burgeoning society without a blink.

  You know, I am beginning to regret how placid I was with the first few of these articles, how nervous I was that I would fail my race, my people if I offended you or somehow didn’t get the wording just right. I see now that the sheer length of each article is some kind of analysis tool, to check our temperament, our patience, and our diplomacy. Had these articles been written by and for a particular government, you would not be able to detect it, because a committee thinks differently, responds differently than an individual. You are not testing all of us; you are testing each of us. And I am the each you have chosen, not because I am special or unique, but because I am a fair cross-section, the example that proves all the exceptions.

  So, having given you a couple of concepts that answer the first understanding of the question, let’s explore the other. In what way will this experience warrant human remembrance?

  First off, the absolute elimination of the written word is not only a pretty good parlor trick, but it will also galvanize our attempts to make our histories iron-clad and impossible to be taken from us. Our redundant backups will blow the minds of the future peoples of the world.

  A second absolute, the need for a singular planetary language, with few ambiguous characters and a stable sentence structure will become an imperative. It may not be Esperanto, but a globally recognized and communication-intensive regiment will certainly be on the horizon. We need to be able to convey stuff faster, with less confusion. Tower of Babel, anyone?

  A deep study of the nature of dimension, time travel, and space exploration will also top the charts. If you could get here, so could any other Tom, Dick, or Mork from Ork. Our planetary defenses are, well, nonexistent. Your existence proves the possibility exists. We will have to move to prevent it in the future.

  There will be a lot more, down the pike. The very nature of that ambiguous question actually further fires the furnace that is human hope, because your imprecision belies your alleged pre-assault position. You came in as a superior force, against which we seemingly had no defense. You asked for answers that would strip us of our wealth and our self-confidence, but the responding to them has engendered a solid belief that you cannot accomplish what you had claimed, and that whatever purpose you came with, you are not leaving here fully satisfied.

  Either we are less than you expected, in which case your need to quash us is unsubstantiated, and we will no doubt be offered the extension and the continued existence. Or else we have more than exceeded what you came to take from us, and that taking does not warrant the abject elimination you threatened because we are what you expected us to be.

  Either way, I now see that your test, your challenge, was only partially about our worthiness. It isn’t for the purpose of cleansing the inadequate that you make such tests of developing species on backwater planets around insignificant suns. Your purpose may include exploitation of the unwarranted advancement, but it is also about outreach, about introspection, and about re-setting the creativity of a species that has become too fixed on the failures and inadequacies they see in themselves. You take from us all the written and recorded failures, so that the variables that we had seen as constants are back to being mysteries to be solved, questions to be asked again, and to take off the table the “We already tried that, and it failed” aspect of precedent history.

  So, as we wind down to the last two days of our examination, I anticipate that your mining operation has either been an abject failure, not worth the elimination of our kind, or has been a complete success, and that invitation to join the Galactic Community will not be too far in the future. I may not have the time nor the words later, but I thank you for your choice, that I was honored with the role of the correspondent in this endeavor. I hate and revile you for your tactics, your clear selfish motivation to act as you do, but I admire and respect you for the difficult task you have to determine the worthiness and the value of all forms of sentience and all dimensions of rationale you must endure in your task.

  In closing, the memory of this work will hopefully be recognized not as solely the words that saved humanity, but perhaps as a clarion call for preparation. I will hope and dedicate myself to preparing each and every one of my brethren (and sisters as well) to respond in like fashion, should they one day be the ‘Chosen’. I hope we never have to prove ourselves again.

  Two – Describe What You Expect to Change.

  Finally, your question gives affirmation of the possibility of success, not the nuanced threat of failure. Forgive my pompousness, but honestly seven days of threats, one night of fear that I had pushed the envelope too much, and this morning, I know that we’ll succeed.

  It is humorous, but yes, there is an answer to your question, and it also may be a duality. We have, it seems, been given the chance. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, or if you prefer, Frank Cross, we have been shown through this odyssey the very nature of our souls, have been challenged to justify, or at least recognize and explain our value.

  It has been important that we acknowledge the sheer lack of advances, achievements, and accomplishments that we surely could have achieved in our brief time, had we been able to see beyond sheer survival. The capacity for diplomacy, the willingness for warfare, and the ease of evil economics have been our bane. And now, there are a lot of changes on the horizon. And a lot of human misery and deaths.

  If your promise holds that this will be our emergence, then perhaps we will start off with a welfare state, dependent on new technology and resource allocation assistance from the outside, from your vaguely promised emergence being an introduction to methods and means we do not currently have at our disposal. These ten days have not only disrupted all human interaction, it has no doubt led to violence across the economic spectra, as the wealthy no long have their own resources, and those that had even less no doubt fought against starvation as best they could.

  Of course, we hold to your account the many riots, fights, and societal disruptions that ten days without internal combustion, gunpowder, and nuclear power caused. There is plenty of blood on your hands to demand some le
vel of justice for the rest of us. I don’t see you withdrawing from this engagement without some form of major compensation. Again, I go to the realms of Science Fiction and suggest that your recompense should at least end our problems with disease, sanitation, and such. Cancer and the Common Cold among them.

  So, the changes we expect are beyond just those we enact on ourselves. Your procedures going forward, if they are to be embraced, should include automatic recompense to those who suffered loss during the test, or should mitigate the losses in some measurable way that could be construed as justice, fairness or at least common decency and mercy. You have gleaned countless riches of us; quid pro quo demands repayment in kind.

  I believe the changes now will have to be drastic, though, for the most part, they will not be easy or pleasant. The status quo will shift to those that adapt the quickest, and the mediums of exchange for our economy will shift forever. If the chemical laws have changed as it seems they must have, then oil and gunpowder will soon be replaced by other reagents. If my fellow human beings heed my words, read these responses, maybe we can enact a different mindset. Certainly, new religions will form either following the words of this test, what they collectively perceive of me, or, much more likely, in worship of you, the benevolent beings that granted us this new opportunity. All of which is folly, but as I stated, you don’t grasp how stridently we human beings can accept and adhere to perceived truth, even in abject opposition to the facts in evidence.