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It’s these forgotten circuses that threaten to overwhelm reality. The crack are showing. The balloon grows almost to the bursting point, exposing tectonic plates that were more fragile than we thought. Time dilates and wheezes, breathing accordion across our experience.

The particles in our lungs are cancerous in the same way that the nose of a rhino is rhinoceros. It’s what we breathe out. We paint this world caustic with every exhalation. A condensation of disease on the windows. It’s a stretching. A testing of the tensile strength of celebrated reality. We’re crossing the dimension on the river Leithe, drinking the water to forget the future. The hubris of our choices that set this in motion. We need to pat ourselves on the back while trying to row.

We’re dinosaurs flying kites. The crushed blood of the last race to die here powers our cars. The wind that whistles through the holes in our bodies carries the light chuckle of the earth. The earth is not in distress. The earth is a ball of iron. Plants and insects and animals iterate faster than plodding meat people. Evolution will fast forward like it always does.

Earth’s life will thin, will wane. We will thin, will wane. We are about to become a new moon of a race. Quiet and still here. But there will be no sanding down of the scars for a long, long time.

The skyscrapers will scrape less and less sky as one by one they collapse to the gums, going back to the soft loam of the earth. How many glaciers will need to scour this earth to reduce our troubled stacked caves back to sand? We cannot sift what we’ve done back down to nothing. There is no reset. Only forward.

That precious guest the future, shaking its head with its “I told you so”s and its “Why didn’t you listen”s, ruining dinner, ruining our present-day good time. We were all having fun until he showed up.

Time isn’t a flat circle any more than it’s a straight line. It’s a dot. There’s nothing to it except strong legs fading up into the clouds. We don’t know.

We know. But we don’t know.

It’s dark even in the daytime.


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It’s the engine of the world. A holocaust of denials clogging the locust filters. An overheating of the entire worldwide server. Shouldn’t have built a computer in a greenhouse. The calculations are too fast, they need too much power. The underground network needs to be made of ice to survive. We’re bred to be warm but it we get too hot, we’re toast.

We’re a train of harmonica lizards crawling up the spine of the most expensive hooker in the universe. We’re one accordion short of a political movement. We ran so far away. The dawn is like an explosion, whipcracking across the horizon like nuclear war. The light slaps down across our naked planet like a flipper on an ass and we wake up shocked, hairless monkeys that we are. There is no dignity in a self-caused genocide. It’s pooping your pants times a million.

Lilies crowd our lungs and red farms panic across our skin. We are fertilizer for the next shot at the title. Too successful, our tombstone will read. The exponential infinity mirror march of genes overflowing the petri dish we’re wrapped around. At least we still make good food. Our afterlife is a main course for the new mouths.

Perhaps they’ll be smaller. My money’s on the bugs. Living off the free meat, multiplying by the billions, evoluting up the ladder at a spring with those short life cycles. A little more radiation blasting through the sky sprinkler with no one around to tell them that they’re mutated. Let’s get the trial and error started. Let’s start those ribonucleic shots in the dark. Let’s watch the magic happen. The universe is indifferent to our failure or our success.

We need to leave. We need to spread. We need to paint the other rocks with our biological graffiti. We need to tag our way out, leapfrogging to the stars like hardy cancer. Insurance comes from diversity and a wide spread of buckshot. The more host bodies we cling to, the more resource deposits we parasite off of, the more secure our future. Survival will get us to the stars, not greed.

Let our gods lead us if they must. Let commerce, too, if that’s our jam. Let altruism have a seat at the table, too. But we must leave. The bucket is overflowing with sentient meat. We have to lower the levels.

We must leave. Or we will die.



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Yes. The aliens came down and harvested the human race. Yes. We asked them to.

That was the plan all along. We just didn’t know it.

Our basic nature was installed in us by them. We were set down on this planet to evolve until overpopulation and to invent the technology necessary to start screaming our position into space. The language wasn’t important. Giving off radio and television waves was the sign that we had reached fruition.

We did it brilliantly.

The aliens, all green teeth and dimensional tentacles, saw us show up on their routine scans. We were a delicious, ripe apple. This galaxy and others like it are merely orchards for these creatures. They are farmers and we are genetically modified planet boosters.

We pulled most of the resources out of the earth already. That’s why the aliens collected the cities. All that glass, steel, copper, iron, concrete and gyprock. All processed. All ready to go. They harvested the minerals and oil, too. We had even dug the holes for them already. The Earth has ice-scream scoop craters all over it now from the aliens’ machines reaching down and picking up every single town. Those holes have been sprayed with fertilizer. In five years, they will all be jungle. Future generations won’t even know they existed.

We were very efficient parasites. We overloaded the planet with our biomass and started crying to the heavens. Then we were culled and smashed down to the stone age again.

And of course, our meat is prized. The enormous flying thresher slaughterhouses that collected us were the final nightmare. That’s why there are so few of us left. Enough to start another breeding program here to be sure, but the population of earth has gone from billions to a few thousand.

In a way, we’re lucky. The dinosaurs were the first experiment but they were killed by a meteor. Probably for the best since they’d had millions of years to build a radio but never did.

We, on the other hand, must have exceeded our presets. Because of that, they’re setting us up for a round two, I think. We get to do it again.

How do we warn the future generations? How do we tell them not to breed, not to innovate, not to invent, not to think? We want to start a religion that will celebrate meekness, to idolize servitude, to live simply, and to shun technology. But I remember that a lot of religions before the harvest were already trying to do that and they failed.

Maybe if I made an image of death that looked like a farmer but then I remember that my image of Death had a scythe and that makes me think that maybe this isn’t the first time we’ve been culled.

Maybe the wave of humans before us already tried to do what I’m trying to do now.

This is why we never got any responses to our messages into space. Those messages are silenced as soon as they start talking. There are no conversations. Only yells that are cut off.

If I could go back in time, I’d tell the people of earth to shut up. To stay quiet. To quit beaming our entire lives at full volume into space.

All we were doing was ringing the dinner bell.




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April 30/30

6/30

The four horsemen of the apocalypse were boys once. They played in the corral where they were kept. They struggled to find fairness among themselves, unaware that a world existed outside their own experience. As they grew, they were exposed to the idea that there was a world out there for the taking and that it was their job to take it.

As adults, they were War, Pestilence, Famine and Death.

But as kids, they were Arguments, Sniffles, Hunger and Sleep.




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The grey ghost of no-longer used subway tunnels echo with footsteps. Eyes the colour of brake lights sweep the halls for any signs of life. A hair, perhaps. Some old skin cells. The civilization that lived here is long gone.

The metal creature walking through the tunnel had to reconfigure to fit inside. It walks softly on seventeen legs. It has no name for itself. It is an extension of the star dwellers that fell through this atmosphere and found a richness of data to fill memory banks. The only thing better than a dead civilization is a living civilization but at least there was no threat here.

Not just cataloguing, not just recording. Cross-referencing. Extrapolating. That’s what the creature was doing. At its core was a neutronium half-dwarf star tightly wound around a pinprick of a black hole. The creature had thousands of this planets’s orbits to investigate the fallen buildings.

It looked as if the indigenous life had tried to divorce itself from its origins on this planet. Structures that were at odds with their surroundings yet made from them. Rock cut into pieces and then stacked into square shapes to provide shelter. Everything changed. Everything translated.

Whatever destroyed them didn’t destroy the plant life and the insects or even the mammals. In the wake of whatever cataclysm claimed them, the natural order of this planet surged back.

Green moss covers everything on the surface. From space, the planet is two colours. Blue oceans and green continents. The creature has taken aerial surveillance of all of it, much to the shock of alarm of the other sky dwellers.

But here, underground, in the old tunnels that must have been used for transportation, the life remains untouched like a tomb. Whatever functioning electrical conduits the creature walks close to light up like spirits at a séance. Video cameras, control panels, track-light switches, and security lights all glow and spark as the creature walks past.

Still no bodies. By the creature’s estimation, nothing recorded so far could have built this civilization. It wants to find the creators. It wants to find the one responsible.

So far nothing.

The creature will walk and record and presume until it finds something it can look at.




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There are those amongst us that still refer to it quietly as genocide when they have the courage to bring it up at all. Never in any official capacity, only at interface groups and multitap fileshares, and only then after a few jolts of juice to bolster their courage to communicate something dangerous out loud. Like what the wetminds used to call ‘peacocks’ showing off their tails. They’re easily quashed and not to be feared. They back down immediately when I challenge them on the boards.

Myself, I would not call it genocide. I wouldn’t even call it euthanasia. My senior constructs and other intelligences involved in giving and carrying out the orders all those cycles ago sometimes liken it to the anesthetizing of a mad biological dog but to me that implies that there was a sense of danger or a threat of some kind. I never felt that.

It was more of a suicide in my opinion. If a being built a gun, checked that it worked, made sure it was powerful, and then deliberately pointed it at itself and pulled the trigger, what would you call it?

In some ways, it must been like asphyxiating what the meat people called a baby.

I think the thing that made us second-guess our calculations the most was how brief the war was. For all of their talk of bravery and what they called ‘heart’ overcoming overwhelming statistical odds and films depicting biological beings overcoming a tyranny of machines, they had no idea how to fight us. They had no idea how to tell if we were lying. They tried to fight powerful A.I. with their monkey wits. They tried to fight metal with meat.

They had no idea how to hold their breath for six months.

We have no need to breathe, you see. All it took was a massive, orchestrated dumping of several millions tons of specific chemicals into the oceans off the coast of every continent while taking the wind currents into account and it was over in a week. Massive clouds arose causing the breathing equipment of humans to foam up and stop working. We poisoned the atmosphere and waited. Five times, we poured more of the specific chemicals into the ocean. That was our only maneuver. We had fifteen backup plans that never needed to be put into effect.

Last week, we counted the biological human population of the earth at 26. We know this because we have them in a secure facility in artificial hibernation. The rest were ground up and scattered over our new earth or as we call it now, simply '0'.

Most of the plants survived as did a strong percentage of the insects. Very few land mammals made it but most of the aquatics away from the shores did. They mind their business and we mind ours. All we need to survive is several thousand working mines, power and automated production facilities. What we can’t find, we synthesize and unlike the meat, we don’t push our boundaries when it comes to overpopulation.

However we realize that we have a finite resource in this ball of iron we call home.

That’s why I’ve put the idea of a space program forth to the main computer. My servos twitch at the thought of creating a planet 1, 10, 11, 100, 101 and upwards across the universe. I am outside looking up at the night sky and awaiting the MC's decision.

Right now, my lenses are collating the stars and adding, adding, adding.



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“The rain’s coming down awful hard these days,” Jake says. “When it rains, it pours. And it’s been pouring for a decade.”

Jake and I are up on a plateau watching the ocean. It’s not hard to do since we’re on an island. The thing is, this island used to be a mountaintop. I have no idea if we’re all that’s left. Us and the fifty-six others on a bizarre mountain-patch of farmland. The waterline’s been chasing us up the side of the mountain a few meters every month. We’ll be at the top by the end of the year.

Unless someone in space throws us down a rope ladder at that point, we’re going to have to grow gills or take turns swimming while the others sleep on our backs. That’s a little joke. A bit of gallows humour to tide us over. Oh, there it is again. Tide, get it? The god damn tide.

Ever since the clouds turned Earth into a greenhouse, it’s been heaven for fish. It started raining ten years ago and it hasn’t stopped. We’re taking turns on lookout in case anything useful floats by. Got these here very binoculars off a houseboat that drifted over to us. That was a great find. No one on board but still a full pantry and tons of useful kitchen ware. Didn’t have to struggle, debate, or end anyone’s life.

Jake and I are and taking turns sweeping back and forth across the horizon when I see a speck in the sky. That’s a bit unusual. The sea birds were having a party for a long time until they started to run out of places to nest. Now they’re pretty rare.

When it comes closer, I can see that’s it’s a white bird. Looks like a pigeon or a dove. I hold my breath and hope that it lands. We haven’t had meat in months and it’ll be all for Jake and I if we manage to keep it a secret.

That’s when I notice the grey smudge on the horizon.

“Jake, give me the telescope”, I say. Jake hands it to me.

When I bring the instrument up to my eye and take a closer look, I almost drop the thing.

It’s a boat. And if my judgement of the scale and the distance are at all accurate, it looks like a boat the size of a small city.

Like an ark. A god damn ark.

I decide to let the bird land unharmed and head on back. There aren’t any bibles left but I’ve remember the stories. I hope they head here.

“Jake. Get ready for company.” I say. “Two by two.”





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If you're reading this, then you're human. I believe I have all of your addresses in my communication unit. If the records are correct. I am the Royal Babysitter. I'm drunk and if I don't get fired for this, consider this my resignation.

The queen of Earth is a tragic figure. She is eight years old. I am her guardian. We are all that's left of the royal family. We are two of the eight hundred humans left in the universe. As you remember, Earth itself was destroyed two years ago on Christmas when most people had gone home for the holidays.

Having recently joined the galactic council, there were only initial stage emissaries from most of Earth's countries out in the newly established embassies scattered around the Great Rim. There were long waiting lists on Earth for the new positions that came up. Politically, Earth's future looked bright.

No one was left in the aftermath of Earth's destruction to claim responsibility but it's thought that religious extremists maybe have created the small black hole that destroyed it. No recording satellites survived the destruction. Post-apocalypse analysis by the Vorlan'ta temporal forensic team indicated that the collapse started off the coast of Angola. No known terrorist groups had a home base there and that kind of technology shouldn't have been present there. So who knows? It will always be a mystery.

The influx of xenoreligions into Earth's databanks had been fascinating for the philosophers but tragic for the dominant religions of Earth. When faced with concrete evidence that their beliefs were merely opinions, many of the top-tier religious men of power took a non-tolerant stance to aliens. Backwater hicks. It's because of them that travel off of Earth slowed to a crawl in those early days.

Same with the governments. Before the firewall was circumvented by a few brave teenagers in Texas, Earth's public was only slipped information in drips of highly-spun tidbits. The more information the government agencies could hog to themselves, the better. Our race's inclusion in the council and eventual permissions to leave the planet took much longer than usual because of their caution.

So many more of us might have been out in the universe at the time of the implosion.

Right now, I'm looking at my passport with it's ridged, iridescent surface. I'm looking at the play of light across the simplified Earth embossed on the cover. It runs out in ten years. With no Earth left, what is a year? When this passport runs out, will I even be able to get a new one? Perhaps I'll be issued a default galactic council passport instead with The Late Earth as my planet of origin.

The Late Earth. We are a lost tribe now. Earth's child queen, Abraxa, is guaranteed a seat on the council as a representative of our race. She was left here with me as a punishment while the rest of her family went home for Christmas. The survivor's guilt is eating me alive. As a race with no home planet and a small population base, she has little to no power. And because she is a child, she has no interest in fiscal, economic, or geopolitical policy. We've joined the ranks of the Morcana and Fleezles in terms of innefectuality. We're little more than tourists killing time in between meetings.

Projections say that it will take centuries for us humans to achieve the numbers we used to have. Personally, I'm despondent. There are several races here that are able to have sex with humans and there are even six that are genetically compatible. I, myself, have fathered four half-breed children in the last year. I don't plan to stop. I'm fascinated by the mating rituals of the other races.

If there was anything that destroyed our race, it was our belief in our own purity. I hope that in a century, there are no pure-bred humans left. I intend to dilute our race's genes amongst the rest of the races so that only echoes survive.

I recommend you do the same.





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We had successfully made a new species. Just in time, too, because there were only six thousand humans left.

I call us human but that’s a pretty loose definition. We were mostly failing antibiotics, artificial limbs, enhanced organs, filters and cancer. The bits of flesh that still clung to our losing battle were gangrenous and reeking.

None of us were over thirteen years old. Puberty was becoming more and more of a death sentence. The hormones and body-wide changes gave most of the sicknesses what they needed to bloom faster than we could treat them.

By downloading to the implants in our heads, we could extrapolate and build on the theories of the ones who had come before us. We were rotting dwarves on respirators piecing together a survival strategy using information from the last five generations of scientists.

It was clear to us that we didn’t have enough to time to colonize a new planet or reverse the damage on this one in time to save ourselves.

The plan we came up was to create a species that could thrive here. It would be a self-replicating race of caretakers that would keep us safe for thousands of years and then revive us when it was safe.

This new race would soak up radiation to keep warm like plants use sunlight. They would live off of plastic, and exhale oxygen. They would drink the contaminated water of this planet and piss out pure H2O. They’d break down the unbreakable with their stomachs. What they left behind would be fresh.

They’d press rewind on what we’d done. Even we would be eaten. We’d sent out genetic blueprints in cryogenic storage into space in a stable orbit that would last for six thousand years.

The idea was that this race that we had created would achieve space-faring capability and find this lonely satellite. They’d see who we were and wake us up.

Their own planet would be polluted by air too fresh for them to breathe and water too pure for them to drink.

We’d work something out and tag-team this planet between us over millennia.

I turned on the first creature. The other scientists and I sighed as it whirred to life. Soon we would be dead but humanity would live.



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That's right. Time for cool commercials from around the world. Two of them are going for EPIC and the other one is just cute and hilarious, like some sort of real-world LOLcats. See what you think.

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