Omens, and other tales

White.

White like bone.

White like an angel.

White like death.

Many assume that the “white light” everyone reportedly sees upon death’s doorstep is little more than a comforting lie. The result of synapses misfiring, neurons shutting down. A side-effect of life struggling for air as it falls beneath the infinite ocean of time. The last putterings of an engine as the damage bleeds it out, and whatever metaphors you wanna dress up death in. (For the record, Death prefers suits and similes, but that’s not really important.)

But I?

I know better. I know better because I know death, and I know God, and I know that the light isn’t light at all. That blinding blankness, that infinite illusion, that— I’ve run out of appealing alliterations, but you get the point. It’s none of those pretty ideas.

It’s a page.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’re not here to talk about God. You’re here to talk about death. Fine. Let’s talk about how to murder the earth.

This is my world: a broken and dirty sky. Ashen sand made from ground up dreams that runs from coast to coast, and the coasts themselves are snarling, wild things, no more boats to trail across their waters and no explorers to chart their depths. They are ravenous with hunger and so it is with flotsam teeth that they tear at the shores, howling for something, anything to give it sustenance. What cliffs remain are scarred and worn. It won’t be long, now. Humanity, you ask? We are in hospice. It is no longer a question of survival. It is about pain management. What is the softest end you could find? How long did you want to experience the same day? Because on a dying Earth, yesterday becomes tomorrow as fast as tomorrow turns into today, and life is spent trying to be as comfortable as you can before you croak.

Why is it like this?

Here’s a version of the truth: the inseparable pair of climate change and corporate greed. The conniving, the hungry, the wolves— they took the earth, kissed her tenderly, and then used her for everything she was worth. Atmosphere ripped to shreds, mines stripped dry, icecaps carved to nothing. She choked on oil and radiation and an unforgiving sun, and they laughed as they left her on a street named past fling. She was a nightlight, and they left her on till she burst, and now the shards are just another pyre on a world full of broken things. To complete the metaphor, the eulogies and prayers and parties are done, and now the burial procedures are left to we who remain, undesirables, the poor, the disenfranchised, the unimportant. They have fled to the stars to eat more worlds, because they let their hunger consume them, and now they always need more. We— the Earth’s faithful— remain to conduct funerals. For each other and the planet.

That’s a version of the truth. It’s even correct, by most sane standards.

You want to hear another?

I was born.

You think I’m human, and you might even be right, if you take things literally. With my brunette hair and green eyes and pewter-forged-heart-shaped locket to imply all of that, I’m sure I look just like anyone else wandering the deserts of the world. With ragged clothes and blistered skin and a voice as dry as the arid sky, I seem like a natural fixture of the environment. Just another one of the damned, stalking the nights with a jar and a makeshift knife in my hands, scrounging for insects and cacti and if I’m lucky, a coyote. One more person who’s made a home out of scraps and rocks and burrowed deep beneath the sand like a beetle, hiding from a sun that has abandoned all pretense at nurturing life.

Just another dead man walking.

But that’s not what I am at all.

I am the bomb. Not a bomb. The bomb. I broke the world. Wind me up and watch me go, and this is how I go. I go with enough force to wipe away all of human civilization in an instant— I shatter the cities, I scorch the earth, I choke the sky. I am the biggest gun ever made, and I was aimed right at the heart of everything that ever mattered. I burned the rainforests, I melted the ice caps, I shattered the atmosphere. I did what took your world decades of damage in an instant. That is how you murder the earth. You drop me on it.

You have to give credit to all those Gods up there: they really know their stuff. My world never stood a chance— or, rather, my world was perfectly designed for destruction. You wanna know where God is? Pick up a jerry can, find a patch and a match and drop it all. There’s God. In the burning. In the earth, cracking and screaming and going dry. All of that energy, electrons going wild. Movement, momentum— collision. Bang bang bang, crack ker-snackle pop. Yeah. There’s God. Hallelujah.

Of course, I’m much better than gasoline. Better than nitrogen. No, I’m that premium stuff. I’m an idea. When it comes to an idea, you just can’t beat our impact. Drop us anywhere, watch us set all of these people on fire. We spark synapses, light up neurons. We light fires inside your brains and then we spread out to tear down the world around us.

Ideas: the world’s oldest form of warfare. Plant me inside and watch me burn someone up.

Yes, the second my feet took form from the churning nothing of imagination, the minute times new roman, twelve-point size font collided with the pure white of an unnamed document—

Boom. Shattered earth, right on schedule. History is applied retroactively, people and places scattered like dust, but really, that’s all just window dressing. It doesn’t really exist until you see me.

You want to know what I am? I am the future, here in the present. I am God’s very own Manhattan Project, and oh, my dearest reader, did I detonate. I am a hastily written warning penned in hypothetical thermonuclear fire— STOP THIS.

I am an omen. I could happen to you.

Do you want to know what the first one was? The first bomb world. It wasn’t 1984, oh no. Orwell codified and popularized the tropes and conventions, but he didn’t invent them. Neither did Huxley.

No, the first of us was Plato and Atlantis. Atlantis was never a real place, you know. Plato lied about taking the ideas from Egypt, but truthfully, it was all a fabrication to make his hypothetical merging of Athens and Sparta look good. No, there is no Texas-sized island that sank beneath the waves, the result of hubris or a wrathful God or a natural disaster. There is no pile of sunken treasure enough to make anyone rich for several generations, there is no secret knowledge that survived the cataclysm, there are no remnants of the original people existing beneath the waves. All of those theories and hunts and documentaries, they’re all searching for something that was never really there in the first place.

But that doesn’t matter.

Because Atlantis didn’t exist before it sank. It only existed after. Don’t you see? No one cares about a civilization that thrives. It’s all about the ones that died. Atlantis wasn’t worth anything. It was dirt-cheap, a dollar-store knock-off of a real city. But then it crashed and burned, by the wrath of Olympus and the folly of man. It sank, it drowned, it died, and now? Now it’s immortal. It’s the biggest of all the bombs; it hit the human subconscious like we hit the atom, radioactive tropes infecting every stray synapse they hit. Death was the best thing to ever happen to it, because death means free-rein. You’re not bound by what is, anymore, only what if, and what if is how ideas spread best. Now you can’t walk into a store without tripping over Atlantis, can’t walk to the sea without tasting Atlantis.

Atlantis: the original explosion. A little bit of human imagination, wrapped up in dreams and shot like a bullet through time, crashing through the centuries to become the monolith of aspiration it is today. See what a little death can do for you? Plato knew. Good ole Plato.

And now, we’re here. All these Gods, running around, lighting up worlds like they’re fireworks and watching them burst in atom-soaked flares, painting messages in the sky of the human subconscious. Burning us up so you can have a little light to see the path ahead.

Of course, that’s if you do anything about it. If you don’t just sit there and watch us burn up, marveling at our construction for destruction and then going back to your little life in your little box. A world just burned up and died and you’re just going to go back and not even bother to check the fuse for yours. I’m sure that when your world is a scorch mark on an uncaring universe, when you stand before a choking sea and your feet rest upon the ashes of millions, you can tell the ghosts that you didn’t do anything.

I’m sure you will take the silence to be applause.

Do you ever even wonder? About what it’s like to really live here? In a world you know was built for one purpose? To make you afraid? To know that we never had a fucking chance of being happy, or living long, or being anything but miserable so you won’t be? Can you imagine what it’s like to know that there is a God up there— and to know that he doesn’t just not care, he engineered your suffering?

Can you imagine what it’s like to live in a universe that you know just wants your pain?

Well. Perhaps you can. I don’t really know, after all. And that’s the final insult. I’ll never really know if it worked. If my world’s death meant anything. My true end is coming fast, and I’ll never live, save…

Remember us, will you? Even if you don’t save the world. Yes, us. Plural. I know the others are there. I can’t see them, but I can feel them, lingering on the edges of my senses like distant fires. All those other worlds, primed and charged and detonated so that you can learn to defuse yours.

We’re like stars. We burn bright and fast and then we’re gone, little more than dust drifting through the sky, little scraps of words and wishes floating into someone else’s orbit. We won’t endure like the greats. We’ll never be Atlantis. We’re just...fireworks. There and gone.

White like a page. That’s all I have to look forward to. Endless nothing, and it’s coming fast. Running towards me like the shockwave, and with it, utterly sterile destruction. The final hurrah before it really, truly all ends.

… Will you do me something that not even God did?

I know I was created for a purpose. Custom made, as it were, and despite it all, I know that it was done with care. It’s just— he didn’t give a name. Before he sent me here to create the world and then to kill it. And I know that I don’t need one to do what I’m supposed to do. But could you give me a name? It can be anything you like. I can be anything you like: a friend, an enemy. Just give me a name and I’m yours. Give me that little piece of immortality. I’ve given you everything I have to give. My entire lifespan, all two thousand words of it. Surely you can give me that much. That’s all we want. To be named, to be remembered. All we die for is to be remembered by you. Please, just give me—