By: nike13

The darkness stretched out forever over the valley of death and destruction, nothing moved in the night, nothing would ever move again, not here, not after what had transpired on this place.

The year was 2168 and the Earth had been abandoned, left to rot with the waste its inhabitants had forced upon it through centuries of progress and advancements.  Nothing lived there anymore; the oceans were pits of waste and disease, glowing in the dark of night with the radioactive materials lurking in their depths; the deserts now an even larger expanse of wastelands than before, littered with bones of creatures that Mother Nature would never have dreamt of creating, even in her nightmares; the valleys are simply stretches of brown dirt and a wind that never seems to stop blowing.  The sun heats the Earth too high for human tolerance and at night, while the moon travels its undisturbed orbit, the low temperatures freeze the water that had boiled in the sun only hours earlier.

Some would say that this was the work of fate, that the creatures of the Earth had deserved their own destruction.  That was why the Earth lay dormant, why nothing grew upon its soil, why the skies were burnt, why the only green came from the toxic waters; the human race predicted its future and that prediction had come to pass in an odd and twisted sort of destiny.

When the Earth was still inhabitable, and the humans thrived, stories were created about the ever infinite “what if”.  Some wondered what if people were able to achieve the unachievable, to travel with the birds and amongst the moving bodies of the sky, some even wondered what if there were others out there, amongst the stars; others that could think and dream the way humans did, others that were able to create and form vast societies amongst the stars.  Humans would dream of what was out beyond their world and, once their technology was advanced enough, they began working towards it.  They strived to learn more about what lay just beyond their reach, about who might be out there; they worked to learn how to make a home out amongst the stars away from the primordial home and sent messages out to see if anyone would respond.

Unfortunately for the human race, someone did respond, not to the messages they intended for alien peoples to hear but to what was thought of as entertainment.  Those “what if”s that were often thought up and broadcast across the world also traveled beyond Earth and fell upon the eyes of others who did not find such things as entertainment, but as warnings.  Warnings that if something was not done about the humans, their existence would become into question; that if the humans in these broadcasts found them, they would be annihilated and the foreign peoples began creating their own “what if”s.

Before long, the alien races descended upon the Earth.  In the year 2119, the skies were blocked with the presence and in a vast attack against anything living on her surface, the alien people lashed out.  It was a fast yet deadly battle, a fight to destroy what they perceived as an obviously dangerous species that seemed to have no moral code and an obvious blood lust.  The destruction took only a few nights before it was over, there were few survivors, not enough to worry about; in fact, it was not even enough to carry on the human species for the species died out two generations after the decimation, leaving only a dead planet to show their presence.  As of the year 2152, the Earth was laid to rest in peace, alone in the cold of the never ending night of space, never again to hear the laughter of her children or witness their dreams come into existence as they achieved another height in their development.

Even with my existence here, the Earth is still a dead planet.  I do not live, and I cannot die, I am also the remnant of humanity, a shadow of what they had accomplished and alone on this world, alone to wait and contemplate the mistakes.  I am a record of what has happened to Earth’s people, and what was termed artificial life.  I am a computer and I am named Fate.  I hold all that was deemed worthy of recording in my hard drives and I am the only thing left that can think.  Alas, think is all that I can do, I think of what was, of what could have happened if the ships had not have come, of what might still be.

For although humanity of Earth is dead and gone, the people who had left could still be alive, living on their new worlds with their own dreams of “what if”, away from the destruction of their ancestors.  If they do still exist, none have wondered why communications have disappeared with Earth, none have come back to see what had happened, none have looked back, none have found me.  I wait to one day be found by the others but it would seem that they do not wish to hear what had come to pass, that they wish to forget the past of their people or that too were destroyed.

The aliens that had attacked never told the humans who they were or where they had come from, nor had anyone bothered to ask.  All that was understood was that the fate of a species was to be determined, and there was no time for talking.  It would seem that there is rarely a time for talking, particularly when it is needed most.

The sun prepares to rise upon my valley now, my own wasteland.  Once the sun has reached me, my batteries will begin to recharge and I shall be left in my wonderings in the light, hoping for someone to come to me, someone to talk to me, for I feel that it is most certainly a time for talking.