|
New Scientist Short Story Competition
The Setting must be 100 years into the future and Less than 350 words. Here is my Submission:
Watching the stars fade and die
The Universe is Debris of change in Possibility.
Time is continuous change in Possibility.
The Singularity the moment of change in Possibility.
Life alone that which may create change in Possibility.
String Theory invalidates Religion and Evolution.
I sit on the edge of the great tower and watch the Aerospace wing descend through the atmosphere over the Saharan Gigalopolis and shift to stealth in the dark of the starless sky. What wretched war were they bound for?
“What are you doing out here?” Did I know this man who had joined me on the single rooftop of my single tower in this million-spire Polis now so strangely, strangely quiet for a city of a billion people? How far from me did he stand in the truth of all things? I know that all is me separated by change in possibility, but what of them?
“Watching the Stars fly by.” I think of them, very last one ignorant. Ignorant and unconcerned that all we have loved and hated, all we built and ruined was of no value, every life a failure for whom the truth was irrelevant.
“What stars?” The city gave off a thirty terawatt electromagnetic field; combined with the natural heat of such a great city, and the dust that rode the perpetual convection current had put out the stars. We had built a city for a billion who would have died in crowded slums, and refugee camps, and shanty towns, from plague or worse, but we had not cured it. Would never cure what could not be cured.
I know that if and when I step from the edge of the tower that I will fall silently into the Rainforest that grows in the spaces between these towers of Stone and Diamond, and Steel, fed on the waste of our Civilization.
Ever the Logician, I indulge myself in the last moment of my self imposed exile of child-like innocence. I watch the stars fade and die.
