Blackout

19

That’s all there is.

That’s really all there is.

I’m sitting on my porch now and looking out at the ruined houses across the street and the gargantuan shell of the crashed and disabled collector beyond. It took out eight square blocks. They were flattened beneath it. In the light of day, it still looks like a gigantic block of quartz, jagged and crystalline, completely lacking any earthly symmetry. It does not even look like a machine. It looks like some kind of crazy crashed asteroid. Even its surface is burnt in places, cracked and broken and punched in with what almost look like meteor impacts. Who sent it and from where it came and how long ago that might have been is anyone’s guess.

Its nature is obvious.

It was an automated factory ship, an extraterrestrial version of a long-liner, a deep-sea trawler. As our fleets go great distances to remote fishing grounds to harvest the depths of the ocean, the collector and its kind go unimaginable distances through the depths of interstellar space to remote worlds to harvest entire populations. The journeys might last a thousand years or ten thousand or ten million for that matter. And like our fleets, now and again a ship doesn’t make it back.

The one I’m looking at will be grounded here forever, I suppose.

As a science teacher, it makes me think. Not just about who might have built it and where it came from and what kind of propulsion might drive it or what sort of software package might do its thinking, but how long this has been going on. Maybe I’m reaching, but I keep thinking about the mass extinctions on our planet. There have been five major extinction events. The K-T extinction—Cretaceous-Tertiary—that everyone hears about was the last one. It took out the dinosaurs and the giant sea reptiles and flying reptiles 66,000,000 years ago, allowing for the mammals to rise and man to evolve. Before that, the Triassic-Jurassic event left dinosaurs as the dominant land animals. And before that, the Permian-Triassic event some 250,000,000 years ago closed the Paleozoic era and wiped out 95% of the species on the planet. Before these were the Devonian and Silurian events.

You get the picture.

Life forms disappear from the fossil record with unsettling regularity in the greater scheme of geologic time and I believe another has followed suit.

This has been going on as long as there has been life on the planet. I have to wonder if the fleets of collectors didn’t have something to do with it. I keep wondering what sort of creatures built these things and if they even exist anymore. They might have died out a long, long time ago. Their star system might not even exist anymore. But the machines exist. They keep doing what they’re programmed to do and will until another singularity like the Big Bang destroys time and space and matter as we know it.

Theoretical as all hell, I know. But I do wonder.

It would answer a lot of questions.

I’ve been broadcasting on a ham radio setup powered by my generator for six weeks now. I haven’t received a reply. I’m pretty sure no one is left to transmit. I think I witnessed what may some day be known as the Holocene extinction event, which closes out the Cenozoic era. I wonder what will fill the vacuum of man as mammals filled the vacuum of the dinosaurs. What evolved ancestors of creatures out there right now will rise up and dominate the world. Some day in the far distant future, they’ll study the rocks and put together the history of man and the extinction event that destroyed him. Maybe they’ll even be wise enough—unlike us—to know their turn is coming.

Regardless, I’ve lived through the Holocene extinction as I suppose some dinosaurs survived the K-T extinction. In their own simple way, they must have wondered what the hell had happened and where everyone had gone just as I’m wondering now.

Forget the Bible and the rest of that, this is the greatest story ever told.

I only wish there was someone left to tell it to.