April 22, 2210. Onboard the Golden Lance, in the Southern Ocean on final approach to Perseverance on Campbell Island.
They would not even give me what they left of my son's body, these things we once called our leaders. They laughed and chortled how they'd not felt their thirst so sated in months. Sweet water, that one had, they joked.
And I just took it, though were it in my power I would descend to the engine room and find some way to overheat the reactor and end them all.
But, no. I must face Em, and my other son, if they remain alive at all. Even this I do not know.
For on top of all the other evils that this human-cursed world has borne, we have handed over the future to self-designed monsters.
You of the future, or some other universe, reading these words may wonder: When exactly did Humanity die?
It does not matter. Through madness or corruption, hunger or fear, or all four, our humanity died long before the last of our natural genome was cut and pasted into something useful or obscene.
This is how first humanity, then Humanity, perished.
It was obvious two centuries ago; all the elements of the Ecological Holocaust were in place and gathering speed. But the human population was still growing, capital to finance technological innovations remained abundant, the then-extant water limits on growth had yet to be struck in the countries that directed the course of politics and economics. In any event, the fluidity of power in that era meant that if one continent failed, there were six other to choose from.
That was the thought process of that foolish age. Mass exinctions? Heh, they happen all the time. Acid rain? Plant more trees. Global warming? Get more air conditioning. Rising sea levels? Move uphill. Pollution worries? Dump it in the deep oceans.
Perhaps if there had been one less challenge to combat all at once, we might have made it. Alas we did not have this luxury.
By 2050 human population peaked. How it peaked and began to decline was the Great Dieback. Over the course of four years in the late 2040s, 736 million people through the world died not only of war, famine and disease but of thirst. Children were disproportionately stricken by diarrhea and far more deadly cholera. Why? Because the monsoons in the subtropical regions of the planet stopped. All of them.
The humans of that era worried overmuch about super-typhoons, never thinking that one day they'd pray for their return. It would be the first unquestionable sign that the Earth's climate was altering, not just altering but changing to a mode that was hostile to all extant life in the land, sea and air.
What weather there would be rose into the stratosphere. There was rain, in abundance. It just never touched the surface of the planet in many latitudes...and the scope of that change extended inexorably toward both poles.
Without precipitation, the plants - all of them - suffered. There were geochemical models that predicted the demise of fleshy-leaved species several hundred million to several billion years in the future.
It only took several decades, with a desperate Humanity's enthusiastic selfishness, to eradicate the rain forests, the marshes, the coral reefs and turn the productive arable regions of most of the planet into salt deserts.
In the year 2050 there were 8.8 billion human inhabitants on the Earth.
This number was less than a billion three short brutal generations later.
Three more saw the human population diminished to under 10 million.
There are perhaps 14 thousand inhabitants in the refuge habitat of Perseverance...or there were when the Golden Lance set out to circumnavigate the planet nine months ago. To the best of our knowledge there are no others.
Why has as much to do with our ancestors' cure for their own damage as anything else.
The early 22nd century presented Humanity with a dreadful situation. Very few natural biomes left anywhere on the earth. And there were now very few viable domesticated species...and they were now going extinct as well, crops as well as livestock. Groundwater was the sole water source.. and much of it was contaminated by industrial and war pollution - chemical, biological and nuclear. This might have been challenging but workable given the then-current state of biotech and nanotech. However, both of these wonders had been used vigorously during the Dieback Wars to afflict enemies and innocents alike. After all, as it was clear that an excess of demographics was problematic even to the victors.
Humanity's leaders of a century ago did not especially concern themselves with collateral casualties, save to consider ways to maximize them.
It was clear we had to reconstitute the ecology somehow, or die trying.
But where to get the material to do so? There was no seed corn of genetics left in abundance save for one source.
Humanity itself.
So we began the strange recreation of the Earth, taking our own DNA, doping it with characteristics from the archived genomes of other species, plant and animal alike. The idea was rather unsettling to contemporaries of the 2130s, a meeting of Dr. Moreau and Soylent Green.
It was also absolutely unavoidable; the means to mass manufacture artificial food were failing; the support industries for both biotech and nanotech were failing. We would have to turn our own bodies into the capital to support this change; our numbers were failing. Fertility was collapsing. The pieces of the global civilization were failing. We had this one chance to save ourselves and incidentally the world.
Thus we created our many cousin species, first the analogues of livestock and guard animals. There were immediately concerns about matters of sentience and souls, the ethics of what was one stepped removed from cannibalism; had there still been great apes we would have gladly harvested them instead. There just weren't any other alternatives. We had killed them off to the last.
And first one generation, then another, grew up accompanied by animals - and plants - that were all close genetic relations. It became comfortable, then a matter of sanity, to focus on superficial somatic distinctions. Everything in sight was people. Were we cannibals now? Vampires all? Just how smart was a newcow, anyway? Or newcorn, for that matter?
And it worked for a while. Long ago our ancestors fretted over transgenics, worried that nonhuman DNA would sneak into the food chain.
They would be aghast, no doubt, that it ultimately was the opposite outcome - human DNA had expanded to occupy every link. Yummy.
However, our population continued to fall. And the ecology continued to worsen. Later generations of newlife were developed with even higher levels of intelligence to cope with the worsening circumstances. Much of the planet was abandoned by Humanity anyway, as well congregated in the shrinking number of areas habitable to our kind.
Even this was not enough. We were losing the effort, and knew it. It was obvious to all, only there came a time when it was essential to say this openly and officially: that Humanity as currently designed was no longer just endangered but on its way toward extincted.
All that remained was writing our last will and testament into the genomes of our successors...and join them.
by the 2170s, the means to transform living humans into newlife were developed in full. The manner of how these processes were tested were never discussed openly; there was no shortage of wretches, refugees fleeing human and post-human predators alike, both equally horrifying.
For some, it was a chance to buy access to the refuge islands for their families. For others, it was just their bad luck to be conveniently available for the collection teams.
And by the hundreds, later by the hundreds of thousands, the human population of the planet Earth was deliberately reduced much further - to seed the newlife niches with a surplus stock of much more intelligent members.
Officially - and it seemed to actually be so - those transmuted to analogues of lions, tigers and bears (oh my), or variations on birds and bees (or flowering plants and trees) had no memory of what they once were. It was akin to some ancient notions of the Rapture - they would have no tears, they would not even remember or recognize their lost horrible state of being as humans.
We onboard the Golden Lance learned the hard way this was simply not so.
A landing party that set ashore in what had once been Tanzania; we saw for the first time semiphants, superlatively intelligent analogues of the great elephants that reigned here. Like the Fipth of the classic Niven novel, they could wield tools - and weapons - with their trunks. We saw semiphant females apply their dexterity to fashion spearheads and use them accordingly...their children engaged diligently in weapons practice. The instructor was a bull whose visits to teach were tolerated.. and escorted by two armed cows at all times. We witnessed this bull throw a spear a full kilometer with deadly accuracy...and took a body back to the ship as proof of this.
In revenge the ship leaders eliminated the local herd by calling down a kinetic weapons barrage from a robot platform in high Earth orbit. It would not do for the semiphants to spread the word throughout Africa that the humans could be so easily killed.
Later, we set shore near the ruins of Cape Town, as it was still a good harbor. There were plentiful human remains; so many had attempted the crossing to Antarctica from here, wave after wave of victimized peoples from as far north as Egypt.
Cape Town had been one of the most productive collection points for the transformation teams. It had been akin to the Children's Crusade; promise safe passage.. honored by turning the refugees into the very creatures they were fleeing... then setting them loose in transformed regions of Africa.
We were genociding ourselves, and thinking ourselves very clever and virtuous in doing so. Officially, of course, those turned into new forms of life never remembered a thing.
Tell that to the trees.
Much of southern Africa was once peppered with baobab trees, very hardy, bottle-shaped plants that could live for centuries and longer and grow t
o impressive sizes given time and access to water, which the trunks would store. Entire ecologies grew around these little islands of life in the arid and semi-arid regions of the southern part of the continent.
The boabab was an easy selection for the Newlife Program...as a natural water bank.
We were in Angola, seeking replenishment for water stocks which had run low. It seemed good to Captain Jahenna to seek out one or more baobab analogues. None of us had even seen footage of such things, or knew much of them past that the seeder teams had planted thousands of them and that they were purportedly pretty much what you expect of trees - things that were big and stood still while you poked into their spongy bark to collect water, and collected useful fruit.
All we knew that gave us pause was that the colloquial name for these plants was 'bowler trees'.
We soon found out why from the first tree we encountered.
I was on this tree-hunting expedition; we could see the bowler trees everywhere, situated every several hundred meters throughout a vast open field where once had stood the city of Luanda, once a key stronghold of the short-lived Second Empire of Brazil. Remnants of the ancient metropolis were few; girders, bricks, concrete, pavement were thoroughly broken up into an abundance of coarse gravel on the ground. Around the bowler trees were tufts of increasingly tall grass, a sign of water. A variety of furtive animals could be seen, darting to and fro to graze briefly, then scamper off to scout the location of one another, of predators, and then off to the next morsel.
It was a pattern we had seen before; the New Earth was a quick-paced, deadly place, and not just for us remaining humans.
The Captain, who was present for this landing party expressed concern about predators. She ordered weapons drawn, which mean weapons by the officer class. Crew like me did not have clearance to operate magnetic-core handguns.
Perhaps we should have paid more than casual interest to the radial track patterns around all of the bowler trees. Perhaps the four piles of large fragments of archaeological debris at the base of the nearest bowler should have made us more than curious.
The sudden movement of four large prehensile branches, first to pick up stones and then raise the stones and cast them our way - low and fast and underhand like a cricket bowler - did indeed catch our notice.
Only the Captain and myself survived that volley; the tree did not stop pitching missiles at us until it was done; the Captain's right forearm had been shattered by one of the first brickbats tossed our way; she had gone done from it. This had saved her life.
I, unarmed, and frozen standing. Had not been touched.
My youngest son, the one who I pray is yet alive in the last city on Earth, is deaf. There are means to fix this easily in Perseverance; our leaders will not waste the effort. They say he can hear fine once he is changed into newlife. I joined this voyage, agreeing to bring my now-dead firstborn, as the price of keeping my littlest one human for a while longer.
So, we in our little desperate household have learned sign language.
The bowler tree apparently knew sign language as well; it made two swift slashes together with two of its motile limbs... the right branch crossing low in front of an upraised left branch.
Then, with the right branch, pointed to its trunk.
This motion was repeated with increasing urgency.
Captain Jahenna clearly knew what the signs were as well. She turned to look around her, saw her weapon, raised it in her left hand at the tree. "Gladly, you monster," she cursed, and fired the railgun pistol's hyperkinetic rounds into the bowler tree until the heat of the gun was too much for her to hold. I know this because the grass smoked when she finally had to drop it and she would wear a bandage on her left hand for weeks after that incident.
"How did it know sign language? OUR sign language?" I asked the Captain.
She refused to answer, and called for reinforcements to arrive and help return the bodies to the ship before other predators arrived; the burning bowler tree would not deter curious animals for long.
I know why the tree could sign "KILL ME". Once it had learned sign language, a code designed for human hands not tree branches. There was a person there... it hated what it had become, and had some idea how long it was likely to stand there, frozen in place. Centuries. Perhaps millennia. Like the lowest circle of hell, only planted in dust instead of ice, with nothing but collecting and casting stones at passing creatures for distraction.
The Captain ordered the ship to depart the coast of Africa immediately. It was too dangerous here, perhaps better luck across the South Atlantic in Patagonia.
Who had designed this thing to have such limbs, though? And why? To protect itself from equally intelligent grazers? Perhaps.
Which left the other question - The bowler clearly had time to practice its throws. Why was I not struck.
Captain Jahenna asked it aloud. "You were spared. Why, I wonder?"
"Maybe it's kin?" I offered up, half-joking.
"Perhaps," she said no more after that, turning with a frown into her own thoughts on the skiff as it returned to the Lance.
Within hours of our return to the ship and being underway west-southwest to South America, the announced was passed down from Officer Country that we would all have blood draws, twice a day, and physicals once a week. Several crew had been stricken suddenly ill and perished on the recent expedition; for the safety of the entire ship's complement, persons identified as ill would be isolated.
The other consequence, more personal for myself - for his own safety, my son would be temporarily reassigned quarters near the officers.
I was isolated, being a prime candidate for falling ill to the announced sickness.
That, and I knew the announcement was a complete lie. It would not do to have me sharing this information with the others. And even if I could get word out to the others, the captain now held my son hostage.
We embraced, and I told my son it would fine. In other words, I lied same as the Captain.
I did not know it but that last hug would be the last time that I saw him.
The next day the entire ship was informed that water rations would be cut 20 percent for the duration of the crossing to Patagonia. A week on a modest cut in water stirred a few grumbles but it beat the alternative, and surely there was water there.
Of course there was water in abundance on the shores of Angola, receding quickly to the east off our stern. The problem was it was guarded by vengeful post-human trees that knew American Sign Language and pitched wicked googlies.
I wondered what monsters awaited us in the Western Hemisphere.
As it turned out, I did not have to wait so long to see my next monster.
The Captain visited me in my new suite, locked of course for the protection of the officers and crew. "Regrettably, the blood draws identified a few persons who had, while never coming ashore, had succumbed to the mystery ailment. We're going to have to continue the testing and quarantine for a while longer."
I nodded and looked away. The Captain did not. "I keep coming back to one question - why were you not killed with the others?" she asked at length.
"Perhaps it recognized ranks?"
She nodded. "I thought of that. Officer uniforms might resemble the dark red of Collector suits. Yet Pranh and Garan were crew." She motioned at my simpler blue uniform.
"I don't know, Captain. Perhaps the tree.. whoever the tree was..detected something about them that it did not like."
"Or something about YOU that it did like," Captain Jahenna quickly replied, then got up and left the room.. the brig..with no other word.
Ten days later it was clear we were not stopping over in Argentina. That was the day water rations were cut another 20%. As we would now be making for home at top speed across rough Southern seas, crew were confined to below decks.
The Captain came to share this news herself. She was flushed, agitated in a giddy way, and doing something that made my parched throat ache with envy - she was sweating. She was able to sweat!
"We make with all haste for home...unfortunately in ten days we have lost ten more crew."
"Any officers yet?" I croaked quietly.
"No, thank goodness," the Captain said quickly and laughed at a private joke. "The ailment... seems to strike down only lower forms.. um, has only stricken the lower ranks so far."
I look at her. "How is my son, Captain Jahenna?"
She bursts out laughing. "He's.. why, he's wonderful! All the officers loved him.. on meeting him."
I knew then he was dead. And misunderstanding my place in the universe, I lunged for the captain's throat with both hands.
She had both my wrists in a crushing grip before I was even up out off the edge of my bunk. I was forced on my back; she did not break my wrists but it was clear that somewhere in the past ten days Captain Jahenna had acquired the strength to do so without any effort at all. That, and incredible speed.
"We all ... must make.. sacrifices..." she whispered in a way that froze my blood. "You have made yours." Then she released my screaming wrists and seemingly teleported back to a comfortable stance. Her movements were that swift.
"Yes," she volunteered. "We officers have had to make our own sacrifices. We can't survive in this world.. and survival is not enough. We must dominate the Earth, or the newlife will end us."
"How..many...left?" I ask.
"Oh, the crew? About half. I don't think we need to harvest anymore for now. We will need some stock to make later upgrades.
"Of course it is not just us here on the Lance. We radioed ahead to home right away; we can't delay in improving ourselves to the level of strength, speed and aggression we need to compete."
I think of home. Of Em. Of our other son.
"By now I imagine all the Officer class in Perseverance is feeling as strong as I do right now."
The Captain made for the door. "We'll talk more. I still do not understand why that tree spared you."
"You too were spared." I am numb. My family is likely gone now. All of it. Still I spar with this demon that was once human.
She nods. "True. I have to wonder what we have in common, other than we both know ASL."
I shudder with futile rage. "I can thing of nothing at all." She makes to leave the room.
"Still, Captain.." I call out and she looks back. "How did would a... tree... know that about us, and know within a few moments?" I relish a crumb of satisfaction at her worried expression. "Perhaps you should save more of us livestock until you know what you are really dealing with."
She leaves, already imagining future ghastly uses for what's left of Homo sapiens. For Captain Jahenna is already on the way to being a creature of this new Hell on Earth.
And this world no longer has a place for the likes of humans or humanity.
Soon, my little ones. Soon, my dearest wife. They will come and end me too, render me down to a serum, turn my very genome into molecular machines that will further the rise of this new race of demons.
For a century we have taken our flesh and blood to repopulate the vacant niches of life on Earth.
It was only a matter of time before we replaced ourselves.
And this is how we end... not with a bang. Not with a whisper. Not even with tears.
We just... end.