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Sunday, September 27, 2015

Prompt 5 - Gone

            The alarmists were right. The Earth is fine, it will go on, but it will do so without the human race. Long has it been predicted that a number of things would eliminate us from the face of the planet, either by our own hand or some global catastrophe. What happened was the latter, though it ended us only through indirect means.
            It was something the planet did, and it happened swiftly enough that for all that we studied it, we did not find out the truth in time. It begin with things like scores of fish washing up on shore dead, an earthquake here, a volcanic eruption there, a series of islands were lost beneath tidal waves made stronger by a percentage of lost glaciers and polar ice caps.
            It wasn’t one thing gone all wrong that did it – it was everything gone just enough.
            Only a few species of insect had been rendered extinct, and then one species of mammal, before it fell to us next. We were not wiped clean in one blow, and not every area of the world left as swiftly as the next.
            We attempted to prepare for everything, and while for the most part we could adjust to the climate, it was resources we could not get back. It was not a starvation through want of quantity, but rather we had underestimated the simplest aspects of nature for too long.
            It wasn’t starvation that destroyed us, but rather malnutrition. We had plenty of food, but it had grown deficient of that which we required. The animals had evolved their behavior, they knew what they needed, but we had grown lax. We searched for ways to fix what had been done, but we lost sight of the means with which we relied on nature.
            So we fell, all of us. We were not struck down, we did not starve, and even toward the end, through the warring against one another, we did not end ourselves. We merely wasted away, our bodies finally rotting away to match that deceleration that we had allowed to our minds for so long.
            And so help me, now that they are all gone, I’m the happier for it.

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Josh Sobek

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