Humanity was here

In the end, it was our imaginations that undid us. At first it brought us up out of the savagery of Darwin's kingdom, and allowed for innovations like no living thing on our planet had ever seen. We rapidly advanced our tools and technologies, and through our imaginations never stopped coming up with new ways to branch forward. The question of chicken and egg can go on forever, and depending on how one frames their story, there is always another place that might be better to start. There's a different brush for every kind of stroke. For the sake of our story, The single minded specialization into technologies was our first mistake. We were too young, too naïve as a species, to handle the kind of power we were developing, and we lacked the spiritual development to use it strictly with the best of intentions.

With advancements facilitating the rapid increase of our population, information networking became penultimate to survival and cooperation as a species – but much of that information was highly specialized, and misunderstood by the larger society. This misunderstanding began to start grassroots conspiracies. Our unwillingness to take this as a serious movement was our second mistake; our imaginations are very powerful tools, and when left unattended the imagination can be remarkably compelling, unfathomably convincing.

As the atrocities of history mounted, humanity eventually all agreed on a global humanitarian morality. It went well for a blink of an eye, did some good, but as time went on its fundamental tenets were misunderstood by the larger society, and used to enforce a kind of mob rule. The paranoia coinciding with the worldwide insistence that every ones opinion on any subject regardless of level of education is equal, together led to a snowballing public disbelief in most specialized information, and the disciplines and that produce them or operate through them, dissolving faith in centralized authorities and experts.

Some of this dissolution unfortunately was warranted, as around the same time we as a species discovered the true depth of the roots of corruption and greed, a rampant infestation that had taken root in every aspect of our civilization – and this discovery only served to pour fuel onto the fire of panic an paranoia, the magnitude of horror that had been allowed to perpetuate itself lending credibility to the crackpot conspiracies and turning even the most rational of people into paranoid sceptics. The imagined reality took a stranglehold over humanity, and a kind of Orwellian nightmare shrouded the globe in a fog of ignorance and fear. Nobody knew who or what to believe anymore.

After that. . . it all just kind of crumbled. It didn't feel like very long at all before the worldwide revolt against the established authorities. This had the easily foreseeable but somehow at the time yet unrealized repercussion of destroying the infrastructure that kept humanity operational. This led to the era of lawlessness. It is unknown how much time humanity floated in limbo, fighting amongst themselves for the bare minimum required to make it through a day while all the wonders of our kind were forgotten.

It is unknown how humanity dwelled there, because humanity never climbed back out of this pit they had dug themselves into – eventually one of the more organized cults that had formed from aforementioned rampant conspiracies got some momentum behind them, and carried out their particular version of the apocalypse. They got a hold of nuclear payloads, and in a sudden move of either incompetence or fervent zealotry, scorched the sky and sea with megatons of inevitable demise; While the cult escaped fiery death on the space station they had had built for them, where they would wait out the nuclear holocaust, asleep in stasis pods while the radiation to subsided so they could return to the surface and restore humanity to greater glories in the name of whichever fever dream hallucination this particular denomination believed in. In a cruel ironic twist, none involved in the making of the ship were terribly well versed in the disciplines required, or working against their will, and so their pods were not properly shielded from the radiation produced from their new engines, which where designed to supply power for absurd spans of time, hopefully long enough.

On Earth, anything that survived hundreds of nuclear blasts could not escape the radiation which now blanked the entire planet. This was life on earth's last straw, a brilliant dazzling death knell. Thousands, Millions of years passed before any living thing would interact with its surface again. On the space station, slowly over the aeons the initiates' bodies and minds were inadvertently poisoned by their own devices, their own hands. When the time arrived that radiation should dissipate and life again might teem across the surface, the power for the station, calculated to last this exact amount of time and no longer, started to run out; forcing the onboard computer to land them on the abandoned planet. Humanity was long gone, however, and it was instead humanoid creatures that climbed out. Transformed into Cronenbergs over time, horribly deformed, the surface of their skin having taken on a melted wax-like texture and appearance, littered with boils and pustules and weeping scars, orifices and limbs that once existed were sealed closed and melted over, while new holes and appendages had sprouted up where they were neither wanted or needed. They also displayed the outward appearance that their minds had gone- but in fact it was much worse.

A disconnect in the mind had formed, a separation of the aspects of the psyche. .and while they still retained enough of their intelligence to be aware like before, and have memories of what they once were, they could no longer control their animal impulses. . The rational, secular intelligence of the mind was caged, and gagged. The deformed facial features made evolved social queues unintelligible – mouths and teeth mostly fused shut, barely capable of grunting or eating, so language was impossible – and none of those who remained knew if any of the others had any semblance of humanity or civility left, so they hid theirs in fear of being singled out and weeded from the herd. They built some small semblance of a society, a nomadic wandering tribe with clubs and spears and furs, which lasted about 60 years, but after a particularly harsh winter and accompanied viral outbreak devastates their numbers, combined with a mechanical inability to reproduce, they too go extinct, the last human alive a broken mind trapped inside a feral beast, welcoming the cold and inevitable embrace.

The last relic of the human empire to survive, was an ornate heart shaped locket of exquisite beauty and expert design, a platinum chain of intricately fashioned vines of silver and leaves stained the faintest hint of phthalo green, which overflowed across the surface of the silver heart locket which itself had a noisy and chaotic fractal spider-webbing design of flowers and thorns and petals and vines, giving the appearance that that metal plant had come to life and grown around the heart in a binding embrace. The pattern covered the entire surface of the heart save for a small, perfectly smooth oval in the middle, with T.J.S carved in flourishing cursive letters in the center of the smooth space. It was made by a once in a generation talent, one of the last humans we would still recognize as one, a jeweler and metalworker of rare dedication and skill. Intended as a memento for future sentient life and left hidden away in a compartment of the space station he was working on, the locket lay concealed and unnoticed by the crew of the ship for the short amount of time anyone aboard was conscience and outside of their pod, during the initial phase of launching the station. The compartment was jettisoned some years or decades into the space stations operation, ditching pieces of the craft that were no longer useful to preserve fuel. Over time all but the strongbox containing the necklace and the necklace itself weathered to nothing in space. Over time, the strongbox collects dust and debris, and becomes a meteorite hurtling through space.

The next life forms to find it, millions of years in the future, are fascinated to find signs of a construct at the meteorites heart; signs of sentient life. They use its trajectory to find earth, or the solar system where earth once was, to see if they can find signs of life. When they get there all they find are the remnants of dying sun, inflated to well beyond its size when we knew it, and of a different color. They see nothing of the sun we knew. They make note that we lived under this kind of sun, and there is no-one and nothing to correct the misunderstanding.

In the excavation of the meteor, they find DNA, and use it to artificially create one of the monstrosities that were the last mutates remnants of us. They marvel at our inability to mate unaided (like pandas) and speculate how we had devolved to this point. Extensive testing shows no signs of noteworthy sentience, and certainly no intelligence capable of metallurgy, as well as appendages far too clumsy to do such intricate work. It seemed impossible to them that these cloned things were capable of creating something like the artefact before them, and they concluded just as much; humans go down in the footnote of this society as putrid, clumsy, meandering brainless savages, which regressed into an evolutionary dead end. For the sake of novelty, they clone a few hundred each year, to replace the ones in display on zoos who die off, or for private sale as pets, sport, beasts of burden, and food. Like a muscle atrophied away, or a limb grown necrotic from not being used or moved for a long time, what intelligence is left in these

To the lifeforms that happened upon the meteorite, the artefact to them that we knew as a locket necklace, held no meaning. Its purpose unknown, lost to the difference in our societies. Its function hidden, lost to the difference in our anatomy. Its origin uncertain, found inside a meteorite hurtling through space for an unknown amount of time, estimated to be from some ridiculously sized region of space. Their investigations discovered evidence of parchment, inside the locket, on it a message which once read “We lived and then we died. We loved and laughed and cried. We failed but at least we tried; Humanity was here.” but now says nothing, for they do not recognize it as language, or take its meaning, so worn is the paper as to just a pile of dust, so faded the ink it is no longer distinguishable from the parchment, and so thoroughly alien are they from what we once were they could not even venture as to guess. . .

Today - a word which holds little meaning now, for the days we measured no longer exist and the species in question does not measure “days” - the locket takes on much plainer and meeker appearance. In exchange for its aesthetic it was granted a certain reverence, and more respect than the future generations of humans, now living in the cages of their bodies and the cages of the society around them. A cryptic relic on a stand in a glass cabinet, the locket lives on as an object of debate and mystery, its chain barely clinging together in places, the twisting overlapping vines waning and fading away; break, crack, rust and ruin to be found littered across its surface. The heart locket polished over countless spans of time, it now holds just the faintest of impressions, the last wisps of testimony to the delicate and painstaking craftsmanship of the jeweler who made it, and to the civilization that produced it, lost forever to the sands of time.