A Voice In The Dark

How do you do. I’m a ghost. I was once alive and now I’m dead. I’m a voice in the dark. I’m speaking to you from the void. From oblivion.

I was a human being, a weird animal with a large head and brain and amazingly supple appendages and a bizarre organ for reproduction which came in two essential forms, one a dangling tube-like thing and a sack laden with two oval organs that produced little wiggly creatures called sperm and the other a membranous cavity at the mouth of which were several inner lips and a small erectile organ called a clitoris and these two articulations, male and female, became the focus of much of our attention.

I use the past tense because our species has since gone extinct. We reproduced ourselves to death. We sucked black gooey oil from the ground and burned it in our cars and filled the atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide and the surface became too hot to grow anything and we lost our food and died of starvation. Some of us died because we had cans of soup that others wanted and shot us with a gun or hit us over the head with a stone or a tree limb. Life as a human being was often quite brutal. We had laws but the laws were eventually and inevitably ignored and people became brutish and ugly and killed one another.

This will mean nothing to anyone because we are all gone. If there are intelligences elsewhere in the universe that use language and can decipher this it is possible these words may mean something. But how will they be discovered? They will not be in a book. They will not be in a recording. They will not be in a spaceship. They will not be in a TV transmission floating forever in the cold darkness of space.

Perhaps they will continue to exist as pixels, a cloud of binary digits in some sort of cybersphere.

Our planet was once teeming with life. Microbes, snakes, frogs, butterflies, elk, elephants, bears, deer and trees. Trees were fantastic. Trees reached deep into the ground with roots and grew to remarkable heights and extended everywhere into space with limbs. The limbs were adorned with leaves, beautiful thin green membranous shapes, lacy and indented and oval and spatulate and oblong and obovate. The leaves absorbed sunlight and converted it to food. They did this with a pigment called chlorophyll.

And there were flowers. Flowers galore: amaranths, lilies of the Nile, chrysanthemums, tulips, hyacinths, marigolds and lavender.

Rivers that meandered lazily but inexorably to the ocean. Mountains that rose so high the air thinned to nothing and all that existed was snow and rock and the vapors of nothingness.

It was the cities that killed us. Living in larger and larger groups. We were forced into social units and yet became increasingly isolated and cut off from reality. Our lives became robotic and dead. We praised and feared artificial intelligence because it was so abstract and complicated and hidden. There were towers and wires everywhere. Plugs. Knobs. Levers.

Life became absurd. It lost all meaning. People worked jobs that murdered their spirit and suffocated their minds.

And so it came to an end. The temperatures rose and the crust hardened and the water dried up and the fields that we protected with poisons killed the very insects the plants needed to pollinate them and the poisons found their way into our blood and organs and destroyed us. Many men became rich producing these poisons. But they perished, too.

We all perished. And so this rock on which you now visit is uninhabitable by anything but these words, these derelict pixels adrift in ghostly algorithms.