That Day

Having reached the peak of technological advancement, the yet unsatiated man waged war against God. Man lost. As punishment, God removed Death from Earth, and all of humanity became immortal, doomed, in other words, to suffer the cycle of life for all eternity. That day, Hell and Heaven alike were blocked off.

There was a degree of order at first. Reproducing, for instance, became illegal, and to further enforce this, certain parts of the world instituted mandatory sterilisation. Another change brought by the sudden immortality, was the absolute prohibition of nuclear weapons. This was not as successfully established. Over the various new laws passed forth, riots and coups followed suit rather simultaneously across the world. Humanity collapsed into itself in less than a decade after having received God’s judgement. There were mass suicide attempts, illogically waged wars raged rampant, entire cities reduced to pits of flesh. The concept of sovereignty quickly crumbled. As well as countries, finances, laws. Civilisation itself, in other words, became no more.

Now, with the world order long gone, the Earth, whose name too is but mostly forgotten, has entered a nameless age of hibernation. Only that there is no rest to be had. What’s left of the Earth after a long age of chaos has come to resemble a graveyard for the living, stretching out forever. Heaps of groaning, moaning bodies fill up what used to be streets, nature, as much dead as alive, having finally given up on human thought. Phone-lines surviving the test of time stand ornamented with limbs. While there are seldom coordinated acts of violence anymore, violence is still very much present. The primal, mindless type, for those still moving. Aside from the rare human activity, insects and microorganisms roam the Earth in abundance. Every living human houses millions at this point. To adapt to the uninhabitable, barren hellscape that the environment has become, these creatures have come to look nightmarishly alien were they regarded by a sane human. The same can be said about humanity, to an extent. Despite death having, ironically, died out, evolution did not. Contrary to scientific belief up until that point, an organism's body proved in fact to be able change in accordance to its environment given enough time. The effects have been varied amongst the human race. A small portion look about exactly the same as before civilisation fell, while the vast majority has either developed insect-like proportions or denatured into quadrupedalism, both having lost the cognitive abilities that once used to define a human. Indeed, in that regard, humanity has faced extinction already. There exists not a brain nor a mind like that of the civilised man anymore. However, it’s more accurate to say that a new species of humanity has been born. Immortality killed the old one. Lying in a pile of such New humans, we have our protagonist. This one is a male, his age irrelevant of course, but immortality claimed his body at 20 years of age, and so that is the shape he has kept, while twisted and greyed by the hands of nature. His spindly arms ache as he heaves himself up until the torso from the pyramid of bodies. His hands sink down the fat of his neighbours, and it takes him many tries before he’s able to come out on top, where he now lay heaving. The bodies pulsate rhythmically under him, a low gurgle coming from the bottom. He closes his eyes in the cold sun light. Drowsily, his brain began waking from inaction. This human was of the relatively unchanged type evolutionarily, with his mind still intact enough given some effort. Words storaged in the depths of his mind begin swirling back into existence one after the other. Uselessly, his memory of language seems to have persisted this time as well. And so, with utmost clarity, the words “It seems I’m missing a leg” are the first to permeate his skull upon his awakening.