by Zach Smith

(image c/o youramazingplaces)

January 1, 9766 BC

Jerry didn’t like the lifestyle that his father and his father’s father, and all the five million people on Earth had engaged in since forever.

The tribe spent their days hunting game and gathering fruits and vegetables.

The lifestyle was uncertain.

Too many times, Jerry had returned from a hunt and/or gather chastised for his empty hand.

One day, he returned with vegetables, and instead of offering them to the community, as was the custom, he placed them in the fertile ground, saying that in time, there would be far more vegetables, more than enough for the whole tribe, and gathered by just a few of the tribesmen, possibly just one.

The idea, like all new ideas, did not go over well at first. While the Alps in the far north melted, and Ethiopians in the southwest graffitied on stones, the other tribesmen fought with Jerry.

Some men tried to dig up the so called “wasted” vegetables.

Jerry had to protect his process, so he built a wall.

Then, he was proven right.

By himself, he fed the tribe, and they no longer had to wonder.

The tribe became a village, then a city, and they named the village after the bold man whose ideas had so vastly improved their lives, and the city was called Jericho.

April 6, 8744 BC

Dhakk and his tribe had been tracking a herd of woolly mammoths across the frozen plains and onto a thin muddy strip of land with vast cold ocean on either side. 

It was Dhakk’s first hunt. His father had spoken of frozen oceans before, vast snow-covered, just a little too perfectly flat, that you could feel the rise and fall of the water beneath the ice as though it were breathing land. 

Those stories never mentioned how muddy the land was.

The hunt was a success until they tried to return west to the Far East.

As the first loaves of bread were being broken with friends, and the virginal soil of other new farms was being broken by farmers in the fertile crescent, and the Jomon were breaking the wilds of Honshu, Dhakk watched as the land bridge from Russia to Alaska was broken into a hundred islands by the warm rising waters.

November 3, 7657 BC

Everyone was expected to bring something. 

Nut brought peanuts; cracking the individual shells seemed to take more effort than the food was worth, and the others complained, yet they couldn’t get enough and kept cracking long into the night.

Dholl brought maize, ears of multi-colored kernels, sweet and savory and delicious.

Zalruvu brought avocados; it took some finesse, opening the hard skin with sharpened rocks and eating the green goop from the insides. Some were hesitant, but it tasted better than it looked.

Bhod brought beans; perhaps they didn’t taste as good as some other foods, but they were hearty and filling.

Domkulk brought sunflowers, pretty to look at, and their seeds quite tasty but even harder than peanuts to open.

Khargok brought cocoa, bitter and sweet; the women seemed to go crazy for it, and the kids too.

Tag brought tomatoes, slightly sour and juicy and refreshing.

Khor brought cotton, some tried to eat it, and they looked at him questioningly. “It’s not for eating,” he said. “You can make rope or cloths out of it.”

Bhorill had the best: chili peppers, which the men took turns eating and trying not to react to prove their manhood amongst their fellows.

As megaliths were being constructed in Tell Qaramel, and cities were being established in southern Anatolia, somewhere in the Americas, they were celebrating their first harvest festival with all kinds of newly cultivated foods.

July 4, 6806 BC

The old man walked slowly along a dirt trail cut into the emerald sod, his faithful dog trotting at his side. 

Some said he was crazy; the story he told year after year was a crazy one, but there was enough in the story to suggest that there might just be a little more truth to the story than one would expect. 

Whether his story was true or not doesn’t particularly matter. People have come from all over the island and the world to hear his tale. His name was Tuatha de Dannon, and oh what a tale he tells. 

In time, he will be known as a god. In truth, he was the first seanchaí, telling his epic run in the first person.

“One hundred years ago, we took off from the launchpad of Quark. Our planet was dying, and we set forth with all the raw materials we needed to build a new society on a planet in the Zygorch Star system. The starship was a wonder, the pinnacle of what our society could create. She was covered fore and aft with panels that drew power directly from the stars, sails that could ride the wind of the stars, and twenty-seven rockets to blast her off the planet. We called her the Eringostar.”

The old man took a sip of his whiskey, a drink he claimed to invent, the recipe a secret he shared with few, as the potion was quite powerful.

“We were hauling quite a load, everything we could scrape together from our dying planet, and everything we needed for the new one: uncut cloth, Erinite stone, Olblinorse hides, genome sequences, efrutogs, and even some dogs.”

He scratched his dog between the ears.

“Plus, we had seven million barrels of whiskey, and I don’t need to tell you what that is.”

The others in the Pub laughed.

“We gathered men and women from all over the planet to join us. Peter the Piper, Barney McGee, Hogan Tyrone, Malone Westman, Johnny McGurk, Slugger O’Toole, Bill Tracy; every one of them had a story of their own. And we can’t forget Mick McCann because he was the Captain of the Eringostar.”

The old man took another swig of his whiskey and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, catching his breath for the next part of the story. The subtle actions he made were somehow part of the tale.

“The life of a starman is not what you may think; it’s a lonesome one, sitting there knowing there is nothing left of your homeland, homesick for a place you can never return. Many of us longed for the whores of home who once melted our troubles away.”

Although the old man would say many words that no one on Earth would understand for thousands of years, “whore” was not one of them.

“We had voyaged for seven years when the Glamour Rash broke out, and the starship lost its way in a great dust cloud. Our massive crew quickly died until all that was left was myself and Old Tykiphe, the Captain’s dog. Then we hit an asteroid, and the buffet caused us to lose all control. We flipped around nine times and crashed into Doggerland with such force that it left a crater that was filled by the ocean. The dog and I washed up on this newly created island, and I named it after my starship, but you folk have had trouble with that name, so we simply call it Erin.”

March 31, 5327 BC

Hassan and Jihane spread a blanket down for a picnic lunch. 

They drank an altogether new drink, the juice of ripened grapes, patiently aged and fermented with yeast, sweet and tangy, which alters the mind, body, and spirit.

With their inhibitions loosened, they braved new foods, such as milk coagulated into a semi-soft brick that could be eaten rather than drank. Smooth and sour, creamy and good.

While the Aboriginals smoked eels in Australia, and Zhaobaogou comes ashore on the Luan River, a couple has a nice snack of wine and cheese in the endless green fields of the Sahara.

October 23, 4004 BC

Although man has been around for millennia, on this day, an altogether new man was created with an altogether new method. 

He was made out of clay, in a pit, in a garden that contained all he will ever need and ever need to know, and one forbidden tree.

The creator, who has created the man and the garden, touches the effigy, and in that instant, it becomes him as he comes to life, fully grown and ready to learn all the creator has done for him.

The new man’s name is Adam; he is one man among forty million others, or perhaps he is the only one.

March 12, 3807 BC

Jack walked along a path in Shapwick Heath. The road had been built to manage the woodland and help the farmers cross the woods, but it has another purpose that couldn’t quite be explained nor even understood by everyone.

Jack walked along the road because he could and felt a compulsion to do so.

Maybe one day, the road will be a vast network, connecting the fifty million people in the world all the way to the new kingdom of Egypt, where Kushim the Accountant has his name recorded as the first of many names recorded in history.

September 29, 2958 BC

Enhaduanna sits down with a bowl of wet ash and a reed, about to do something that the sixty million people in the world never thought possible, or at the very least never thought to do on their own. 

He uses the glyphs he had learned to record events and speech on paper, and he records a story that has never happened before. Although it could have happened, and one day it might.

While the Pharaoh of Egypt becomes a living god and the city-states of Sumer and Akkad go to war yet again, Enhaduanna becomes the first in a long line of authors, and the first story is born.

February 19, 1234 BC

A baby lion was seen in the east, eating, growing, rising like the sun. First a village, then a town, and so on and so on, and now it is a superpower to rival the influence of Egypt. The baby lion is growing up, into Babylon.

April 3, 910 BC

The Nok in Nigeria. 

The Latins in Italy. 

The world had 50 million people, divided into many cultures. 

The Priene in Western Anatolia. 

The Iranians in Persia. 

The world is blossoming with new cultures. 

Bronze tools are retired and replaced with Iron.

There’s an early horizon in the Andes with the Chavin and the Paracas, and the center of the world was the United Kingdom of Isreal, under the rule of a wise king with the simple name of David.

June 6, 26 CE

A hermit walks through the desert. 

With him, a man that nobody could see. 

He had been fasting for 40 days; out of nobility, spirituality, insanity, or lack of sustenance in the desert; who can really say? 

The invisible man makes offers to him bread from stone, a leap of faith, and finally all the kingdoms of the world.

The hermit denies the specter thrice.

His story after that is well known; his end is not pleasant.

February 2, 694 CE

The sword had been mounted in a boulder in the woods. 

Anyone could take the sword; whoever took it would be king, undisputed. 

Yet, no one had been able to claim it. 

People tend to assume the sword was buried point first in the stone, but this is wrong; it was buried by the hilt, and the only way to grab it was by the ever-sharp blade, while the grip pummel and cross guard acted as an anchor.

That changes the story quite a bit.

September 22, 1349 CE

Where it came from, nobody knew. 

Why it came, people had theories. 

It started with a mild fever, then you started dancing uncontrollably, after that things got really bad. 

Sven wasn’t sure why he had been spared so far.

On a dark fall day, as Sven the gravedigger dug the last grave for his village, he wondered if he was the last man left on Earth; it certainly seemed like he was.

November 23, 2088 CE

Thor Hillendale blew his brains out while sitting at his computer. 

He was in his library, which consisted entirely of story collections, libraries within books within a library. 

He has a glass of whiskey in one hand and an unfiltered cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.

On his computer was the finished product of what is widely considered the best story he had ever written and (more narrowly considered) the best short story of all time. 

Nobody knows why he took his own life, but he was 104 years old.

June 8th, 3583 CE

In the morning, Derock thought about going to the park to fly a kite, but he had to go to work. 

He sat in a cubicle all day, working on a list of different projects that seemed to spring up in multitudes every time he could complete one.

To make it worse, his supervisors intentionally looked for anything wrong. She was looking for any reason (major, minor, or imagined) to fire people.

However bad the work was, it made the time in the park all the more special.

“What are you doing this weekend, Derock?” asked Tyse.

“The weekend is still 3 days away,” said Derock.

But he didn’t think, do or say anything all day.

Instead, he took a pill in the morning that simulated an entire day in his life, his synthetic real life, and his thoughts of something better.

Those pills were great, but only the people who manufactured them had any kind of actual life, and their livelihood was on the verge of being lost to machines that could do the job even better.

August 6th, 4589 CE

Paddy was one of the lucky ones to stumble across the small patch of green grass. Underneath was a small cache of lumpy waxy unblighted potatoes. 

Like the rest of humanity, he lived alone near his food source. 

In his solitude, he had weird thoughts, such as how mouths and eyes were becoming obsolete, there was little left to eat, and no one to look at.

Was this, was he, the end of the story of mankind?

Was he actually alive? Was man still alive?

Since the beginning, people thought the world would end. Maybe it would this time. There were twenty million people worldwide, and the numbers were going down every day.

Chances are, the world would somehow keep going.

May 1, 5874 CE

“Absolute technology corrupts absolutely,” said Nonel. 

He was a harvester, one of the feeders of the machine. At least, that’s how he started. From there, he became the leader of the harvesters, then onward to a sort of profit.

“The men of the machine do nothing. They lay dormant all day and all night in their sarcophagi while we, the harvesters, harvest the fodder that keeps the machine running. And what does that machine do? It lets them all live lives of unobstructed, aconsequential hedonism. Or at least they do in their minds; their arms hang limp, and the machine lives out their own fantasies for them. Five million people in the machines, one harvester for every five. They do nothing and say we are the lowest class. I say we are the only class. I say dismantle the machine. The only harvest we should be collecting is the destruction we sew.”

February 14, 6109 CE

Zager and Adlyna were looking forward to growing their family. 

A century before, they would have had to throw the dice for gender, malformity, and every other known unknown. Now, they were planning their family in the modern way.

They had twelve potential children in test tubes at the Rumsfeld Laboratory, with pictures and statistics of what would or might be depending on which long glass tube they chose: gender, projected lifespan, sexual orientation. 

The ones with congenital disabilities had already been discarded.

Zager tenderly held Adlyna’s hand as they picked which test tube would be their family’s future.

Most families were planned the same way, though a few purists still insisted on the flawed traditions of the past.

May 21, 7011 CE

Man had been his pet project. 

He created one out of clay long ago and brought it to life. 

For his entertainment, he put a lot of anger and mistrust into his creation, and he watched for a while, occasionally lending a helping hand, though that usually seemed to make things worse.

Then, he kind of forgot about his project.

Many years later, he returned, wondering his world to see what had become of it in the ten thousand years since his last visit.

Some people called him god, though he preferred “the creator.” Some didn’t believe he existed, even when they met him. There were 25 million people on Earth and 25 million different opinions.

He was not loving or just, but nor was he evil.

Some say he worked in mysterious ways, but more simply, he operated in different ways that are not analogues to his creation.

He looked around at his creation and decided it was just about time…

October 21, 8010 CE

Everyone was waiting for judgment day, however, the creator didn’t work fast. 

People stopped raising families at the levels they had been, as they were expecting the world to end soon. 

The 16 million people on Earth wondered whether he would be pleased with mankind or think about hitting the proverbial reset button. Would he nod his head yes or shake his head no?

He hadn’t moved in so long, by human standards, that they didn’t know if he was entirely alive anymore.

Then he stood to cast his judgment.

April 7, 9337 CE

Little is left; every story has been told; every machine that could be made, for better or worse, is now broken.

There are about 200 people left throughout the world; a dozen hermits live in the outskirts and the rest huddle in small hamlets that now make up city-states by comparison. They have little reason to continue.

Everything has crumbled; entropy has won.

Judging by how the world is, it seems like this is the end of mankind, and indeed, all the indicators are there that the end is nigh…

Then again, mankind has come to these seeming dead ends before, and they always seem to prevail.

Will there be more?

What is next in the story of mankind?

Is this the end or the new beginning?

December 31, 10766 CE

Evan thought there was a better way than what all the five million people on Earth had done since forever.

The tribe hunted and gathered, their lifestyle was uncertain.

Too often, Evan had returned from a hunt chastised for his empty hand.

One day, he returned with vegetables, and instead of offering them to the community, he placed them in the fertile ground.

“In time, there would be far more vegetables,” he said. “More than enough for all of us, and gathered just by one man.”

The idea, like all new ideas, did not go over well at first.

The other tribesmen fought with Evan.

Some men tried to dig up the wasted vegetables.

But his method was proven right.

By himself, he fed the tribe, and they no longer had to wander. 

Who knew what the future would hold?

The tribe became a village, then a city, named in honor of the bold man whose ideas seemed from the future; the city’s name was Eventuallia.  

 

Zach Smith’s most recent previous story for us was “Hey Mr. Tombaugh Won’t You Name a Star For Me.”