Count Down
The Concise Epitaph of Humanity
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Blue Fog Marketing - All rights reserved
Table of Contents
Precursor
Ten-Explain How You Communicate.
Nine – Name Your Greatest Advancements.
Eight – Define Your Greatest Accomplishments.
Seven – Explain precisely what you are.
Six – Explain Your Greatest Universal Contribution.
Five – Outline Some of the Good Reasons for War.
Four - Explain Your Reasons for Economy.
Three – Define the Optimum Human Remembrance.
Two – Describe What You Expect to Change.
One – Should Humanity Be Given Another Chance?
Twenty Questions for the Reader.
Conclusion
Precursor
They came to conquer, annihilate, or balance the scales. Religious leaders argue that they came to take us home, free us from sin, or send us to hell, dependent on their personal beliefs. At this moment, the only known is that for some reason my computer is the only one left functioning in all the world. I don’t know why, and don’t understand how it is operating, as power has been stopped in every corner of the earth, all at the same instant. Except for the power in my home, my recreational vehicle, parked in a campground on the edge of the Mohave Desert, its gasoline engine ticking over on gasoline I was able to get from the owner of the site, when everything went to hell.
By appearance, our nemeses are not the bug-eyed and gratuitously ugly beings one would expect. Very similar to ourselves, with four appendages that are similar to our own, albeit with a smaller head and less clearly defined skeletal form, they move with fluid grace that suggests they live without gravity, without an atmosphere per se, and that they may even be from another dimension. Walls, doors, and such do not impede them, and it seems their ability to become invisible on demand may be a result of actually existing in multiple dimensions simultaneously. Our scientists would be fast at work deducing more than I can, had they the time, the tools, and the technology. But the simultaneous destruction of our physics as well as of our written and recorded literature seems a bit extreme. We won’t get the chance, don’t have the capacity to resist or overcome. The time is simply too short.
From all accounts, it seems they simply appeared in every capital, in every population center, from towns and villages in the Andes to Washington. Paris, and Beijing. When they appeared, physics seemed to fail. Guns and combustion engines failed. Electronics and computers ceased function. The entire electrical grid of the world just went inert. The internet died. So did millions of people, as the aircraft ceased functioning, as did every auto, every submarine, every ship. The level of catastrophe was global. Books, indeed, all printed materials ceased to be, seemingly stolen from their places, or atomized in an instant. This is a textbook apocalypse. The magnitude is unfathomable. Yet here I sit, my RV is still ticking over, the air conditioning has not failed, and the tiny electric fan that cools my brow as I type is still operational.
I don’t have much to go on, save the message I received at the moment it all went to hell, from an email message sent to my account by a source called EMISSARY.
“You have been chosen. Your words will be your Emergence or your Epitaph. The Count Down begins tomorrow. After today, you have only ten. Each one will only be one thousand. Do not waste what you call time, or what you call words. Each one will be assigned by post. Do not alter or defer from the assignment, but explain all you can in the one thousand. You have today to clarify your task and to express for others what you have been chosen to do. They will need you to explain this, but do not let them lead you away from the task or interfere with it in any way. Ask for food and fluids, but all other needs will be provided during your task. “
I could bore you with the minutia, but honestly, I want to make it clear what this message means.
I have ten days, ten messages of a thousand words each, to address each day’s topic as best I can. From the tenor of their message, it appears that if my messages are satisfactory to them, we will rise to a new level of consciousness, be embraced by whole new cultures and civilizations beyond our tiny world, in a new renaissance. If my words are inadequate by their standards, we will be eliminated, some kind of experiment or test that we fail. That they chose me as the sole vessel to be tested seems inadequate or unfair at some level, but chose me they did, and I take the task seriously.
My first thoughts were to question why I was chosen, but I think I know why, even before I begin. I have had the greatest gift, in the form of children, and I have had the greatest loss, the death of one. I have had great success in my life and terrible failures. The width and breadth of human endeavor have not eluded me, and yet I strive to convey, to communicate, with a passion that few possess. I want to be heard, and I know they need to hear. It is no accident therefore that I am the Chosen One. But there is no arrogance in that admission. Only acceptance of my role.
The ambivalence with which the Emissary posted seems to suggest that this kind of test is made on a regular basis. That very real possibility gives me hope that perhaps I can accomplish this because if it failed consistently, perhaps we would not be even given a chance, knowing our history and our failures over the eons.
It is not by accident that they choose the English language, with its tiny number of characters in the language. If one must boil down the human condition into the fewest words, it might as well be as concise as possible. If we are to pass this test, we have to be able to convey the most meaning with the least words possible. Brevity is the soul of wit.
If, my words do not meet their expectation, they will annihilate us, and use my words to justify the ending of our existence. These will be the only words that will survive the test. May my words meet with their approval and bring us through the veil to a brilliant world.
Ten-Explain How You Communicate.
From birth, humanity thrives on conveying meaning and requires understanding. The tiny infant, the aging senior, and everywhere between, we seek to be a part of the whole. Every human being in every part of the planet have common, and consistent needs and desires, and everywhere the populations thrive the means to achieve communication grow and expand. Physical communication is achieved through touch, motions, and facial expression. Initial learning is accomplished through mimicry, as the young emulate the actions and expressions of the older members of society. Family units, then educators from within the family or without conveying more useful terms and structures, with feedback and affirmation the primary means of expansion of vocabulary and improved mechanisms for conveying meaning.
It is only when communication becomes less personal, more encompassing, that the transfer of meaning becomes more difficult. Groups that are not close together develop varying terms and inflections, different sentence structures, and linguistics. Indeed, the broad variances of languages is at once a strength and a weakness, for it allows the disparate groups to develop their own comprehension and understanding and creates for each an identity and a core set of beliefs and practices, and it is this development of a collective identity
that creates barriers, limits, and boundaries to full understanding. One thing you must understand about we human beings is that we are subject to a fault, universally, that may not be fatal, but it certainly contains the roots of our greatest errors – the capacity to believe our position to have a “correctness” that defies the evidence. This capability to choose, somewhat arbitrarily one or another viewpoint to have supreme value, absolute accuracy, either because of, or despite of the facts in evidence, is responsible for the majority, if not every case of disagreement to impede human development.
So it is difficult in one thousand words to explain that though it is possible for one human being to communicate with another in the microcosm, it is nearly impossible for all humanity to hear a single message from others without a considerable number of variables coming into play that automatically confounds the message.
But communication, among humans, is more than just the words we speak. Our facial expressions, body positioning (so prevalent in transmitting meaning we call it ‘body language’) serves to convey everything from emotional condition to intent, from humor to solemnity. Indeed, there is so much more to be expressed through non-verbal means that even among persons of the same culture and upbringing, the messages can be misconstrued, misunderstood, or intentionally deemed unintelligible.
This first question is considerably difficult to answer, because even if we accept that you are capable of reading the words I present herein, the very nature of communication offers you, the reader, a myriad of means to either by intent or by accident not receive completely the message as I convey it. You may have presupposed opinions about my literary skills. You may decide to bring prejudice to bear on the very terms I use. Your very vocabulary could be limited, such that some or many of the terms I put forth are ignored, misinterpreted, or not understood at all.
As a test, therefore, I will take the time to add more than what it seems you are asking and answer the question not asked.
While you asked how we communicate, I will use the remainder of my words to answer the most particular question… WHY we communicate.
As a social being, one that thrives in multitudes and suffers in solitude, human beings communicate because it is in essence what we are. Philosophers bicker about whether we truly exist as individual entities, whether the very messages we convey are not themselves self-propagating, but for practical purposes, we experience life by conveying our personal interactions with the essence of being to others, and comparatively expanding our knowledge base through the interchange.
We communicate to share emotional states, to allow for collaboration, to include the others in our community to embrace, or at least be aware of, our individual and collective alternatives. We seek affirmation, challenge, or at the minimum awareness of our activities because we are collectively and individually desirous of inclusion, acknowledgment, and advancement. We make our will known and comprehended through the words and acts we take and use.
It is for us critically important that we are known. We make grand gestures in order to be seen and recognized. We spend extravagant amounts of time and money in creating and modifying things so that we can express into the world around us, even in space and the planets near Earth that we claim dominion. As fundamentally the top of the ‘food chain’ here, we naturally are somewhat arrogant on that account, and though we have learned fundamentally only a fragment of all there is to know, we have acted on most occasions as masters of all we survey. We have an insatiable curiosity, and our desire to dominate is countered by our ignorance. That you were able to overcome our advances so quickly, destroy and eliminate all we have recorded as advances only proves that point. We are dizzyingly ignorant, yet desirous of knowledge to a fault.
I am nearing the limit you imposed on the length of my answer and have had to use some of them to put a temporal sequence to the thoughts, which you may or may not require. What is most important about our communication is to know that with such a microscopic lifespan, we humans have not only an inquisitive imperative but a time-driven one, to learn all we can in as short a period of time as possible. Even as these essays provide you insight, I hope they also convey our own desire to know, and perhaps engender a give and take relationship. If we succeed, we would be a dynamic asset; if we fail, we certainly would appreciate understanding on what grounds the failure occurred. I want you to know I tried.
Nine – Name Your Greatest Advancements.
In the presence of your clear superiority, this question seems a bit trite. I must assess from its proximity to the question on how we communicate that you are looking for introspection, in terms of our interaction with our world, because you have, from the beginning, put to naught those interactions from which we as a people have derived value – the power to put our history down for future perusal – by destroying our computers, as well as our millennia of written communication, our great libraries. You have annihilated our ability to use combustible fuels, as well as our gunpowder or other weapon systems. So clearly self-defense, transportation, and chronologic recording do not merit your consideration of advancements, though perhaps Nobel, Ford, Einstein, and Edison might disagree.
Therefore relinquishing what we historically have held to be our greatest advances by this logic, I would have to say that the development of diplomacy, medical triage, and the awareness of the microscopic and macroscopic universe would have to be the three I will start with, and we will postulate and derive from there.
With the glaring human tendency to create for ourselves the means to communicate within our social groupings, and to seemingly intentionally obscure the meanings and terms of those outside our particular communities, it is therefore not too considerable an accomplishment to devise means to communicate with outsiders at all. Your choice of an English speaker suggests you have considered the economy as a core basis for human interaction, and you would be right. Though there are truly self-denying purposes for interacting, the deduction that personal gain is strong, almost pervasive motivating factor certainly is not too veiled for observation to will out.
By far, it is more acceptable to come to an agreement wherein one profit economically without complications like bloodshed, theft or other entangling means. So it is that economic influences go a long way to developing bilateral or multilateral agreements. With those economic influences a constant impetus, over time greater concession and agreement can be had, and arguably the world, at the moment of your arrival, was at the best place historically in terms of such agreements. I dare say were we given more time, this might be our greatest accomplishment-a global language, a universal understanding. Further, your presence also provides a strong impetus to a more collective and unified communication basis, and I dare say it would spur us on more rapidly than our own meandering economic gain.
The concept of the impact of time on living organisms was long in developing in our thoughts, and the very idea of choosing whom will receive help, and whom should be overlooked in the short term, as well as to what extent even the dying should receive some aid was a long time coming. Arguably, the meddling nature of religion and our more historic animistic and mystical ancestry impeded the more rational, coherent, and arguably more humane processes of the past two centuries. From that point forward, we have recognized a necessary means to limit our losses by first acknowledging the reality that loss will occur, and to give our healers the opportunity to do their best work on those most likely to survive. I would hazard, from your arrival, that there may in this be a culling, even a decimation of our population in the process when we succeed in passing your assessment.
Finally, arguably our greatest advancements, though impacted considerably by the technology you have deemed irrelevant, or at least have intentionally impeded without prejudice, is our observation of, and appreciation for the universe itself, and its inner and outer workings. From microbiology, by which we have averted if not eliminated biological threats to our existence, to astronomic and astrophysics exploration, trying to comp
rehend the width, breadth, and depth of the universe. Obviously, our advances were nothing compared to yours, and it is evident that we are mere novices, but the reason I hold these as some of our greatest achievements is because regardless of the origins of these, the collective knowledge developed was not branded or relegated on that basis. I believe its universality reflects our highest point of collectivism, those fields where the source is not considered, only its efficacy and utility of pursuing knowledge.
As in your first question, I see in this second one a deeper search, the unasked question of how we measure advancement, what we consider to be the basis for these particular items to be such. To that unasked question, I answer that as a species, we measure advances collectively, though we pursue very different ones individually. One doesn’t set out to make life better for other altruistically, but rather in pursuit of individual human objectives – Fame, Wealth, or Power. In the midst of that selfish rabble scrabble for the self, the benefits for the whole emerge. The greater we pursue our selfish ends, the more rapidly we achieve the unselfish ones.
IT could be argued that military advances lead more directly to those with the greatest collective good. (Triage was developed in our first ‘World War’, microbiology in the shadow of our Second World War). Inevitably, I anticipate you will ask of our ‘warlike history’, but I want to first advance that the technology was developed to mitigate, not exacerbate, the impact of warfare. Like the unruly child that needs to learn that hurting others leads to their own hurt, our warfare and our skills at killing one another are the tools that sharpen and teach, not wear away and destroy us.
In this light, as I had at the end of the first response, I must plead again for the world, because though we are becoming more adept at warfare, I hazard to say we are improving on reducing its impact on the planet overall, and reducing its necessity through diplomacy. Triage and science further limit its long-term effects, and soon, we may see an end to war altogether. Doesn’t that effort count for something?
Apocalyptic Survival Fiction: Count Down - The Concise Epitaph of Humanity (A Sci-Fi End-of-the-World Story) (A Dystopian Series) Page 1
