The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

CHAPTER 1 Return

The Forerunner now knew that he was the only person left in the universe. He knew that when he crossed the orbit of Pluto. From here the Sun was but a dim star, no different from when he had left the Solar System 30 years ago.

The divergence analysis the computer had just performed, however, told him that Pluto’s orbit had significantly shifted outward. Using this data, he could calculate that the Sun had lost 4.74 percent of its mass since he had left. And that left only one conclusion, sending shivers straight through his heart, chilling his soul.

It had already happened.

In fact, humanity had long known that it would happen when he had embarked on his journey. They had learned that after thousands upon thousands of probes had been shot into the Sun. The probes’ findings allowed astrophysicists to determine that a short-lived energy flash would erupt from the star, reducing its mass by about five percent.

If the Sun could think and could remember, it would have almost certainly been untroubled. In the billion-long years of its life, it had already undergone much greater upheavals than this. When it was born from the turbulence of a spiraling stellar nebula, greater changes had been measured in milliseconds. In those brilliant and glorious moments, its gravitational collapse ignited the fires of nuclear fusion, illuminating the grim, dark chaos of stellar dust.

It knew that its life was a process, and even though it was currently in the most stable phase of this process, occasional minor, yet sudden, changes were inevitable. The Sun was much like the calm surface of water; perfectly still for the most part, but every so often broken by the bursting of a rising bubble. The loss of energy and mass meant very little to it. The Sun would remain the Sun, a medium-sized star with an apparent visual magnitude of -26.8.

The flash would not even have that great of an effect on the rest of the Solar System. Mercury would probably dissolve, while the dense atmosphere of Venus would likely be stripped to nothing. The effect on the more distant planets would be even less severe. It could be expected that the surface of Mars would melt, likely scorching its color from red to black. As for Earth, its surface would only be heated to 7,000 degrees, probably for no longer than 100 hours or so. The planet’s oceans would certainly evaporate. On dry land, strata of continental rock would liquefy, but that would be that.

The Sun would then quickly revert to its erstwhile state, albeit with reduced mass. This reduction would cause the orbits of all the planets to shift outward, but that would hardly be consequential. Earth, for example, would only experience a slight drop of temperature, on average falling to about -80 degrees. In fact, the cold would advance the re-solidification of the melted surface and it would ensure that some of Earth’s water and atmosphere would be preserved.

There was a joke that became popular in those days. It was a conversation with God and it went like this:

“Oh, God, for you thousands of years are just a brief moment!”

God answered, “Indeed, they are just a second to me.”

“Oh, God, for you hundreds of millions are just small change!”

God answered, “Just a nickel.”

“Oh, God, please spare me a nickel!”

Upon which God then answered, “Certainly. Just give me a second. ”

Now, it was the Sun that was asking humanity for “just a second”. It had been calculated that the energy flash would at the earliest occur in 18,000 years.

For the Sun, this certainly was no more than a second, but in humanity◦— faced with an entire ‘second’ of waiting◦— it engendered an attitude of apathy. “Apathism” was even elevated to a kind of philosophy. It was all not without its repercussions; with every passing day humanity grew more cynical.

Then again, there were at least four- or five-hundred generations in which humankind could leisurely find a way out.

After two centuries, humanity took the first step: A spaceship was launched into interstellar space, taxed with the mission of finding a habitable planet within 100 light-years to which humanity could migrate. This spaceship was called the UNS Ark and its crew became known as the Forerunners.

The Ark swept past 60 stars, and so past 60 infernos. Only one was accompanied by a satellite. This satellite was a 5,000-mile-wide drop of incandescent, molten metal, its liquid form in constant flux as it orbited.

It was the Ark’s only achievement; further proof of humanity’s loneliness.

The UNS Ark sailed for 23 years. However, as she traveled close to light-speed, this “Ark Time” equated to 25,000 years on Earth. Had it followed its mission plan, the UNS Ark should have long returned to Earth.

Flying close to the speed of light made communication with Earth impossible. Only by reducing its velocity to less than half the speed of light could the Ark be contacted by Earth. This maneuver, however, cost significant amounts of time and energy, and therefore the Ark would usually only perform it once a month to receive a dispatch from Earth. When it slowed down, the Ark would pick up Earth’s newest message, sent more than 100 years after the last. The relative time between the Ark and Earth made communication much like targeting a high-powered scope; if the scope was budged by even the slightest degree, its aim would jump a vast distance off-target.

The UNS Ark had received its last message from Earth 13 “Ark years” after it was first set out. On Earth, 17,000 years had passed since its departure. One month after that message, the Ark had again slowed, but it had received only silence. The predictions made many millennia ago could certainly have been off. One month on the Ark was more than a 100 years on Earth. In that time it must have happened.

UNS Ark had truly become an actual ark◦— an ark with a lone Noah. Of the other seven Forerunners, four had been killed by radiation when a star exploded in a nova four light-years from the Ark. Two others had succumbed to illness; one man had, in the silence of that fateful slow-down, shot himself.

The last Forerunner had kept the Ark at communication-speed for a long stretch. Finally, he had accelerated the Ark back to near light-speed, but a tiny flame of hope burning within him had soon tempted him to again reduce the ship’s speed. Again he had listened anxiously, but all he heard was silence; and so it went on. His frequent cycles of acceleration and deceleration prolonged the return journey multi-fold.

And through it all, the silence remained.

The Ark returned to the solar system 25,000 years after its departure from Earth, 9,000 years later than had at first been planned.

CHAPTER 2 The Monument

Passing the orbit of Pluto, the Ark continued its flight deep into the Solar System. For an interstellar vessel such as the UNS Ark, traveling in the solar system was like sailing in the calm of a harbor. Soon the Sun grew brighter. As its light began to bathe the Ark, the Forerunner caught his first glimpse of Jupiter. Through his telescope he could see that the huge planet had changed almost beyond recognition. Its red spot was nowhere to be seen and its tempestuous bands appeared more chaotic than ever. He paid no heed to the other planets and continued the tranquil flight at the end of his journey, straight on to Earth.

The Forerunner’s hand trembled as he pushed the button. The massive metal shield covering the porthole slowly crept open.

“Oh, my blue sphere, blue eye of the universe, my blue angel,” the Forerunner prayed, his eyelids closed firmly.

A long time later, he finally forced his eyes open.

The planet he saw was black and white.

The black was rock, melted and re-hardened; tombstone black. The white was seawater, vaporized and refrozen; corpse shroud white.

As the Ark entered low Earth orbit, slowly passing over the black land and white oceans, the Forerunner spotted no vestiges of humanity; all had been melted to nothing. Civilization was gone, lost in a wisp of smoke.

But at least there should have been some kind of monument, some memorial capable of withstanding the 7,000 degrees that had destroyed all else.

Just as these thoughts crossed the Forerunner’s mind, the monument appeared. It was a video signal, originating from the surface and being sent to his spaceship. The computer streamed the signal’s contents onto his screen. It was a video, millennia old. Obviously shot by extremely heat-resistant cameras, it revealed the catastrophe that had befallen Earth. The moment the energy flash hit was very different from what he had imagined so many times in the past years. The Sun did not suddenly grow brighter; most of the cataclysmic radiation it blasted forth remained well outside the visible spectrum. What he could see, however, was the end of the blue sky. It suddenly turned inferno-red, only to change again to a nightmarish purple.

He saw the cities of that era, the so familiar forms of skyscrapers, oozing with thick black smoke as the temperature surged by thousands of degrees. Soon they began to glow in the dim red of kindled charcoal; but they could not last, finally melting like countless sticks of wax.

Scorching red magma streamed from the mountain tops, forming countless cascading waterfalls of molten rock. These incandescent rapids converged to form a massive crimson river of lava that buried the earth below under its pyroclastic floods. And where there had been ocean waters, now stood only giant mushroom clouds of steam. The belly of these ferociously billowing mountains shone with the red glow of the molten world beneath. Their crests were permeated with the sky’s cruel purple. The endless ranges of steam clouds expanded with relentless speed and abandon. Soon they swallowed all of the Earth…

Years passed before this haze finally dispersed, revealing that there still was a planet beneath. The burned and melted world below had begun to cool, leaving all of it covered in rippling, black rock. In some parts, magma still flowed, forming intricate webs of fire that spanned the Earth. All traces of humanity had disappeared. Civilization had vanished, forgotten like a dream from which the Earth had awoken.

A few years later, the Earth’s water, having been dissociated to oxyhydrogen under the incredible heat, began to recombine. It fell as great torrents, again covering the burning world in steam. It was as if the Earth had been trapped in a titanic steamer; dark, moist and stiflingly hot. The deluge lasted for dozens of years as the Earth continued to cool. Slowly, the oceans began to fill again.

Centuries passed. The dark clouds of evaporated seawater had finally fully dispersed and the sky was returned to blue. In the heavens the Sun reappeared. Earth’s new, more distant orbit forced a sharp decline in temperatures, freezing the oceans. Now the sky was without clouds and the long-dead world below froze in complete silence.

Again the picture changed, this time revealing a city: First a forest of tall and slender buildings came into view. As the camera slowly descended from some unseen place above their highest tops, a plaza began to come into view. Its spacious extents were filled with a sea of people. The camera descended further, allowing the Forerunner to discern that all of the faces in the forum were turned up, appearing to look right at him. The camera finally stopped, hovering above a platform in the middle of the plaza.

A beautiful girl, probably in her teens, stood on this platform. Through the screen she waved right at the Forerunner, and as she waved, she shouted, “Hey, we can see you! You came to us like a streaking star!” Her voice was delicate and fair. “Are you the UNS Ark One?”

In the final years of his journey the Forerunner had spent most of his time playing a virtual reality game. To run this game, the computer directly interfaced with the player’s brain signals, using his thoughts to generate three-dimensional images. The people and objects in these images were obviously restricted in many ways, bound by the limits of the player’s imagination. In his loneliness, the Forerunner had created one virtual world after another, everything from single households to entire realms.

Having spent so much time in unreal realities, he almost immediately recognized the city on his screen for what it was: just another virtual world. It was of inferior quality, at that, most likely the product of a flighty mind. Virtual images such as this one, having been born from the imagination, were always prone to errors. The pictures he saw now, however, seemed to get more wrong than right.

First and worst, when the camera passed those skyscrapers the Forerunner had seen many people leave the buildings through windows on the top floors. These people had jumped straight out, leaping hundreds of feet down to the ground below. After falling from such dizzying heights they would land without a scratch, apparently completely unharmed. Furthermore, he could see people leap off the ground only to rise, as if they were being pulled by invisible wires. These strange jumps could carry them several stories up a skyscraper’s side. They could ascend even higher, pushing off foot-holds that ran up the side of all buildings, almost as if they had been put there for just the purpose. In this manner they could reach the top of any building or enter it through any of the many windows. It seemed as if these skyscrapers had neither elevators nor doors. At least, the Forerunner never saw them use anything except a window to enter or leave a building.

When the virtual camera moved above that plaza, the Forerunner could see another error: Amongst the sea of people hung crystal balls suspended by strings. These balls were about three feet in diameter. Occasionally people would reach into these balls, pulling out a part of the crystal substance with great ease. As they removed a piece, the ball would immediately recover its spherical shape. The extracted part would do the same; but even as the small piece rounded itself again, the person who had extracted it would put it into his mouth and swallow it…

In addition to these obvious mistakes, the confusion and derangement of the image’s creator could best be captured by something else entirely. Bizarre objects were floating through the city’s sky and air. Some were large ones, ranging from five to ten feet, while others were smaller, only a foot or so long. Some looked like pieces of broken sponge, others like the crooked branches of some giant tree, all slowly floating through the air.

The Forerunner saw one large branch drifting toward the girl on the platform. She simply gave it a light push, sending it spiraling into the distance. The Forerunner understood then. In a world on the brink of destruction, it must have been impossible to remain of sound mind and thought.

The image was most likely being sent out by an automated installation. It had probably been buried deep beneath the surface before the catastrophe struck. Shielded from the radiation and heat, it must have lain hidden and waited, automatically rising to the surface once it was safe. This installation then probably kept an unending vigil, monitoring space, projecting these images to any of the scattered remnants of humanity returning to Earth. Chances were that these comical and jumbled images had been created with goodwill, intended to comfort the survivors.

“Did you say that other Arks were launched?” the Forerunner asked, hoping to get something from this bizarre display.

“Of course. There were twelve others!” the girl answered with enthusiasm. The absurdity of the other parts of the image notwithstanding, this girl was not half-bad at all. Her beautiful face combined the best features typical of East and West peoples. She beamed with utmost naivety. To her the entire cosmos seemed a great, big playground. Her large, round eyes seemed to sing with every flutter, while her long hair floated and unfurled in the air, appearing completely weightless. She reminded the Forerunner of a mermaid swimming in an unseen ocean.

“So, is anyone still alive?” the Forerunner asked, his final hope flaring like a wildfire.

“Aren’t you?” the girl innocently returned the question.

“Of course. I am a real human. Not like you, a computer-generated virtual person,” the Forerunner replied, slightly exasperated.

“The last Ark arrived seven-hundred-thirty years ago. You are the last Ark to return, but please tell us, do you have any women aboard?” the girl queried with great interest.

“It is only me,” the Forerunner replied, his head drooping with the memories.

“So you say that there are no women with you?” the girl asked again, her eyes widening in genuine shock.

“As I said, I am the only one. Are there no other spaceships out there that have yet to return?” the Forerunner inquired in return, desperate to keep the fire of hope alive.

The girl wrung her delicate, elfin hands before her chest. “There are none! It’s so sad, so very terribly sad! You are the last of them, if… oh…” She could barely contain her sobs. “If not by cloning…” The girl was now crying uncontrollably. “Oh,” she finished, her beautiful face now covered in tears. Around her the people in the plaza were a sea of tears.

While he did not cry, the Forerunner, too, felt his breaking heart sink into new depths. Humanity’s destruction had become fact beyond denial.

“Why do you not ask me who I am?” the girl asked, raising her face again. She had reclaimed her innocent demeanor, her recent sorrow, merely seconds past, apparently forgotten.

“I could not care less,” the Forerunner answered flatly.

With tears in her eyes again, the girl shouted, “But I am Earth’s Leader!”

“Yes! She is the High Counselor of Earth’s Unity Government!” the people in the plaza shouted in unison, darting from sorrow to excitement. They truly were a deficient product.

The Forerunner felt himself growing tired of this senseless game and he rose to turn away.

“How can you not care? All the capital has gathered here to welcome you, forefather! Do not ignore us!” the girl cried, raising a tearful wail.

Remembering his original, still unresolved question, the Forerunner turned and inquired, “What has humanity left behind?”

“Follow our landing beacon; then you can learn for yourself!” came the happy reply.

CHAPTER 3 The Capital

The Forerunner climbed into his landing module. Leaving the UNS Ark to orbit, he began his descent to Earth, following the landing beacon’s directions. He wore a pair of video specs, their lenses displaying the images being broadcast from the planet below.

“Forefather, you must immediately come to Earth’s capital. Even though it is not the planet’s biggest city, it is certainly the most beautiful,” the girl calling herself Earth’s Leader prattled on. “You will like it! Mind, though, that the landing coordinates we have given you will lead you to a spot a good distance from the city, as we wish to avoid possible damage…”

The Forerunner changed the image of his specs to show the area directly below his lander. Now, at only 30,000 feet in the air, he could still see nothing but black wasteland below.

As he descended, the virtual image grew even more confusing. Perhaps its creator, thousands of years ago, had been in the grips of an unimaginable depression; or, perhaps the computer projecting it, left to its own devices thousands upon thousands of years, was showing the signs of its age. In any case, for some unfathomable reason, the virtual girl had begun to sing:

As this beautiful singer began her hymn, she leapt into the air. She lifted off the platform, jumping a good 30 feet into the air. After falling back to the platform she sprang back up, this time clearing the plaza in a single bound. She landed on top of a building and from there she jumped again, this time across the entire width of the plaza. Landing at its other side, she looked like a charming little flea.

She leapt once more and in mid-jump she caught hold of one of the strange objects that floated through the air. The several-feet-long thing looked like the trunk of a weird tree and it carried her spiraling through the air, above the sea of people. Even as she rose, her svelte body continued to rhythmically writhe.

The sea of people below began to agitate with raw excitement. Soon it boiled over into song. “Oh, macro-age! Oh, macro-age!” As the song rose, they all began to jump. The crowd now looked like sand on a drum, rising in waves with every invisible beat.

The Forerunner simply refused to take any more of this and he killed both image and sound. He was certain now that it was even worse than he had first thought. Before the catastrophe had struck, the people of Earth must have felt venomous envy toward the survivors who had slipped through time and space and so skipped their appointed destruction. Fueled by such emotions, they had created this gross perversion to torment those that returned.

As his descent continued, the annoyance the images had caused slowly began to ebb, but by the time he felt the shock of the landing, that annoyance had almost completely left him. For a moment he succumbed to fancy: Maybe he had truly landed near a city. Perhaps it was not visible from up high?

All illusion faded to nothing as he stepped out of the lander. Beyond laid only boundless, black desolation. Despair chilled his entire body.

The Forerunner carefully slid open his visor. Immediately he felt a surge of cold air against his face. The air was very thin, but it was enough for him to breathe. The temperature was somewhere around 40 degrees below freezing. The sky was a dark blue, as it had been at dawn and dusk in the age before the catastrophe. It was neither now, as the Sun hanging overhead clearly evidenced.

The Forerunner removed his gloves, but he could not feel the Sun’s warmth. In the thin air the sunlight was scattered and weak. In the sky above he could see some stars twinkle brightly.

The ground beneath his feet had solidified about 2,000 years ago. All around he could see the ripples of hardened magma. Even though the first signs of weathering were visible, it remained hard and jagged. No matter how closely he looked, he could only make out the barest traces of soil. Before him the rippling land stretched to the horizon, punctuated only by small hills. Behind him lay the frozen ocean, gleaming white against the sky line.

Scanning his surrounding the Forerunner searched for the source of the transmission. What he finally spotted was a transparent shield dome, embedded in the rocky ground. This hemisphere was about three feet in diameter and it covered what appeared to be an array of highly complex structures.

The Forerunner soon was able to make out several similar domes scattered in the distance. They were spaced at distances of 50 to 100 feet. From where he stood they looked somewhat like bubbles, frozen as they burst through the Earth’s surface, now glinting under the Sun.

Reactivating the left lens of his video specs, the Forerunner again opened a virtual window into that strange imaginary world. That shameless impostor was still floating through the air, riding her bizarre branch, deliriously singing and writhing. As she flew, she blew kisses toward the camera. The masses below, even to the last man, cheered:

Numbed, the Forerunner stopped cold. Standing beneath the deep blue firmament in the light of the shining Sun under the sparkling stars, he felt the entire universe revolving around him◦— him. The last human.

He was engulfed by an avalanche of dank loneliness. Covering his face, he sank to his knees and he began to sob.

As he descended into despair, the singing ceased. Everyone in the virtual image stared straight toward him, their countless eyes filled with deep felt concern. The girl, still riding her branch through mid-air, beamed an almost infatuating smile right up at him.

“Do you have so little faith in humanity?” she asked, her eyes twinkling.

She continued speaking, and as she did, something that the Forerunner could not place sent a shiver across the Forerunner’s body, setting all his senses on edge. Disturbed, he slowly began to rise back to his feet. As he stood, he suddenly saw it: a shadow was falling over the city in his left lens. It was as if a dark cloud had appeared out of the blue, blackening the entire sky from one second to the next. He took a step to the side. Light was immediately restored to the city.

He slowly approached the dome, intrigued. Standing before it, he bent forward, carefully studying it. Inside he could indistinctly make out a dense array of tiny, yet incredibly detailed, structures. As he looked he immediately noticed that something magnificently strange had completely dominated the sky in his video specs:

That something was his face.

“We can see you! Can you see us? Use a magnifier!” the girl shouted as loud as she could as the sea of people below once more boiled over with exhilaration.

Now the Forerunner finally and truly understood it all: He pictured the people jumping out of tall buildings; that made sense because gravity could cause them no harm in their microscopic environment. And it explained their jumps, too. In such an environment, people would easily be able to leap up a thousand-foot-tall◦— or should that be thousand-microns-tall?◦— building. The large crystal balls must, in fact, be drops of water. In this tiny environment their form would be completely at the mercy of the water’s surface tension. And when these microscopic people wanted a drink, they could simply pull out an even smaller droplet. Finally, the strange, several-foot-long things that floated through the urban landscape◦— and that the girl was riding◦— these, too, made sense. They were nothing other than tiny particles of dust.

This city was not at all merely virtual. It was a city just as real as any city 25,000 years ago had been, only that it was covered by a three-foot, transparent dome.

Humanity still was. Civilization still was.

In this microscopic city floated a girl on a branch of dust◦— the High Counselor of Earth’s Unity Government◦— confidently stretching her open hand toward the man who, at the moment, filled almost her entire cosmos: The Forerunner.

“Forefather, the micro-age welcomes you!”

CHAPTER 4 Micro-Humanity

“In the seventeen-thousand years before the Catastrophe,” the girl told the Forerunner, “humanity left no rock unturned in its search for some way out. The easiest way out would have been migrating to another star. But no Ark, including yours, was able to locate even a single star with a habitable planet. And it did not truly matter; a mere century before the catastrophe, our spaceship technology was still not developed enough to migrate even a thousandth of humanity.

“Another plan,” she continued, “was to have humanity migrate deep underground, well-hidden from the Sun’s energy flash and ready to emerge once its effects subsided. That plan, however, would have done little else than drag out their inevitable death. After the Catastrophe, Earth’s ecosystem was completely destroyed. Humanity could not have survived.

“There was a time when humanity fell into almost total despair. It was in that darkest night that the spark of an idea flashed to life in the mind of a certain genetic engineer: What if humanity’s size could be reduced by nine orders of magnitude?” A pensive look crossed her face. “Everything about human society could also be scaled to that size, creating a microscopic ecosystem; and, such an ecosystem would only consume microscopic amounts of natural resources. It did not take long before all of humanity came to agree that this plan was the only way in which our species could be saved.”

The Forerunner listened intently, thoroughly considering this plan.

She continued. “The plan relied on two types of technology: The first was genetic engineering. By modifying the human genome, humans would be reduced to the height of about ten microns, no larger than a single body cell. Human anatomy, however, would remain completely unchanged. This was a completely plausible goal. In essence, there is very little difference between the genome of a bacterium and that of a human. The other piece of the puzzle was nanotechnology. This technology had been developed as far back as the twentieth century and even in those days people were able to assemble simple generators the size of bacteria. Based on these humble beginnings, humanity soon learned to build everything from nano-rockets to nano-microwave ovens; but the nano-engineers of ages past could have never imagined where their technologies would ultimately be put to use.

“Fostering the first batch of micro-humans was very similar to cloning: The complete genome was extracted from a human cell and then cultivated to form a micro-human that resembled the original in all ways except size. Later generations were born just like macro-humans. That, by the way,” she added, “is what we call you. And, you may have already guessed that we call your era the ‘macro-age’.

“The first group of micro-humans took to the world-stage in a rather dramatic fashion,” she told him. “One day, about 12,500 years after the departure of your Ark, a classroom was shown on all of Earth’s TV screens. Thirty students sat in this classroom. Everything seemed perfectly normal. The children were normal children and the classroom was a normal classroom. There was nothing at all that would have seemed out of the ordinary. But then, the camera drew back and humanity could see that this classroom in fact stood on the stage of a microscope.” The High Counselor would have continued her account had she not been interrupted by the Forerunner’s curiosity.

“I would like to ask,” he interjected, “if micro-humans, with their microscopic brains, can achieve the intelligence levels of macro-humans?”

The girl shook her head, more bemused than angry. “Do you take me for some kind of fool? Whales are no smarter than you are! Intelligence is not a matter of brain size. In regards to the number of atoms and quantum states in our brains, well, let us just say that our ability to process information is easily enough to match that of a macro-human brain.” She paused, then continued, curiosity ringing in her voice. “Ah, could you please show us to your spacecraft?”

“Of course, very gladly.” It was the Forerunner’s turn to pause. “How exactly will you go?”

“Please wait just a moment!” the girl exuberantly shouted.

After saying this, the High Counselor leapt into the air and onto a truly bizarre flying machine. The machine resembled a large, propeller-powered feather. Soon everyone on the plaza below was leaping into the air, competing for a spot on this “feather”. It was apparent that this society obviously had neither a sense nor notion of rank or status. The people indiscriminately jumping onto this strange vehicle were certainly ordinary citizens, both young and old. Regardless of their age, they all wore the childish demeanor that seemed so out of place with the High Counselor; the result was a noisy, excited, chaotic ruckus.

The “feather” was almost instantly jam-packed with people, but a continuous stream of new “feathers” was already coming into view. No sooner than one appeared, it would already be filled with excited micro-humans. In the end, the city’s sky was filled with several hundred feathers, each filled to capacity, or beyond, with people. They were all lead by the feather-flier of the High Counselor. The girl led this formidable flying armada to somewhere in the city.

The Forerunner again bent over the dome, carefully observing the microscopic city within. This time he was able to make out the skyscrapers. To him they looked like a dense forest of matchsticks. He strained his eyes and finally was able to spot the feather-like vehicles. They looked like tiny white grains of powder, floating on water. If it had not been for the hundreds of them, it would have been impossible to see them with the naked eye.

The picture in the left lens of the Forerunner’s video specs remained crisp as ever. The micro-camera-person and his unimaginably small camera had obviously also boarded a feather and from there continued to stream a live-feed. Through this feed, the Forerunner was able to catch a glimpse of traffic in the micro-city.

He was in for an immediate shock; it appeared that collisions were an almost constant occurrence. The fast flying feathers were continuously knocking into each other and into the dust particles floating through the air. They even regularly hit the sides of the towering skyscrapers! But the flying machines and their passengers were no worse for wear and no one seemed to pay any heed to these collisions.

Actually, this was a phenomenon that any junior high physics student could have explained: The smaller the scale of an object, the stronger its structural integrity: There is a vast difference between two bicycles colliding and two 10,000-ton ships ramming into each other. And, if two dust particles collide, they will suffer no harm whatsoever. Because of this, the people of the micro-world seemed to have bodies of steel and could live lives free from fear of injury.

As the feathers flew, people would occasionally jump out of the skyscraper windows, trying to board one of the machines in mid-air. They were, however, not always successful and so some would fall from what seemed like hundreds of meters. The sheer height left the watching Forerunner with a feeling of vertigo. The falling micro-humans on the other hand plummeted with perfect grace and composure, even taking the time to greet acquaintances through skyscraper windows as they rushed toward the ground!

“Oh, your eyes are black as the ocean, so very, very deep,” the High Counselor noted of the Forerunner. “So deep with melancholy! Your melancholy shrouds our city. You should make them a museum! Oh, oh, oh…” She began to cry, clearly aggrieved.

The others, too, began to cry and their feather-fliers began bouncing between the skyscrapers, smashing into buildings left, right, front, and center.

The Forerunner could see his own huge eyes in the image on his left video spec. Their melancholy, magnified a million-fold, shocked even him. “Why a museum?” he asked, perplexed.

“Because melancholy is only for museums. The micro-age is an age without worries!” Earth’s Leader loudly acclaimed. Even though tears still clung to her tender face, there was no longer any trace of sorrow to be found behind them.

“We live in an age without worries!” the others excitedly joined, shouting in unison.

It seemed to the Forerunner that in the micro-age moods shifted hundreds of times faster than they had ever done in the macro-age. These shifts seemed particularly pronounced when it came to negative emotions, such as sadness and melancholy. They could bounce back from such feelings in the blink of an eye.

However, there was another aspect of this discovery that was even harder for the Forerunner to truly fathom. Apparently, all negative emotions were incredibly rare in this era; so rare, in fact, that they were like fascinating artifacts to the people of the micro-age. When they saw them, they grasped at the opportunity to experience them.

“Don’t be depressed like a child! You will quickly see that there is nothing to worry about in the micro-age!” the High Counselor shouted, now full of joy.

Hearing her words, the Forerunner could not help but do a double-take. He had previously observed that the general mental state of the micro-humans seemed much like that of macro-age children, but he had just assumed that their children would simply be even more, well, childish. “Are you saying,” he asked in astonishment, “that in this era, as people age, they grow…?” He almost couldn’t believe what he was asking. “Grow more childish?”

“We grow happier with age!” the High Counselor giggled.

“Yes! In the micro-age we grow happier with age!” the crowd echoed loudly.

“But melancholy can be very beautiful,” the girl continued. “Like the moon’s reflection on a lake; it reflects the romanticism of the macro-age. Oh, oh, oh…” The Earth’s Leader fell into plaintive cries at the imagery.

“Yes! What a beautiful age it was!” the others chimed in, their eyes brimming with tears.

The Forerunner could not help but laugh. “You little people really don’t understand melancholy. Real melancholy spills no tears.”

“You can show us!” the High Counselor shouted, returning to her exuberant state.

“I hope not,” the Forerunner said, gently sighing.

“Look, this is our monument to the macro-age!” the High Counselor announced as the feathers flew over another square in the city.

The Forerunner saw the monument. It was a massive black pillar, vaguely reminding him of a giant broadcast tower. Its rough outside was covered with countless tiles, each about the size of a wheel. It almost looked as if it had been covered in fish-scales.

Staring at the towering structure, it took the Forerunner a long while to understand: It was a strand of macro-human hair.

CHAPTER 5 The Banquet

Flying upwards, the feather-fliers emerged from the transparent hemisphere, passing through some unseen hole. As they left their city’s cover behind, the High Counselor turned to the Forerunner through the video screen in his specs.

“We are now a hundred miles or so from your spacecraft. If we can land on your fingers, you can carry us. It would greatly speed our journey.”

The Forerunner turned his head to his lander, which was right behind him. There was no conclusion to her reference, other than that units of measurement had also shrunk in the micro-age. He stretched out his hand and the feather-fliers landed. They looked like a fine white powder, drifting onto his fingers.

In the video lens he could now see his fingerprints. They looked like massive, semi-translucent ranges of mountains that seemed to swallow these feathers as they floated into their great canyons. The High Counselor was the first to leap from a feather. Immediately she fell, sprawling prone on the Forerunner’s finger.

“Your oily skin is far too slippery!” she loudly complained, taking off her shoes. In frustration she tossed them into the distance. Now barefoot, she curiously turned, looking around as the others, too, leapt onto his skin. A sea of people soon gathered between the semi-opaque cliffs of his fingers. By the Forerunner’s best guess, there were now more than 10,000 micro-humans gathered on his hand!

The Forerunner raised himself and very, very carefully walked toward his lander, keeping his hand stretched out and steady before him.

He had not even fully entered the lander when the crowd of micro-humans began to shout. “Wow! Just look; a metal sky! An artificial Sun!”

“Don’t be so dramatic; you’re being silly! This is just a small shuttle. The ship above is much larger!” the High Counselor chastened her people. But she, too, was staring in wonder, turning her head in all directions, and as she turned, the crowd again began singing their strange song:

As the lander took off, setting out on its flight to the UNS Ark, the High Counselor finally continued her account of the history of the micro-age,

“For a time, mirco- and macro-society co-existed. During this period the early micro-humans came to fully absorb the knowledge of the macro-world and so we inherited macro-human culture,” she told the Forerunner. “At the same time, the micro-humanity began developing its own extremely technologically advanced society. It was a society based on nano-technology. This transitional era, in-between the macro-age and micro-age, lasted for about… hmm…” the High Counselor’s tiny mouth twisted ever so slightly as she recalled. “About twenty generations or so.

“Then, as the Catastrophe approached, the macro-humans ceased bearing children and their numbers dwindled by the day. At the same time, the micro-human population skyrocketed and the scope of our society expanded along with it. Soon it exceeded that of macro-human society. It was at this point that the micro-humans requested that they be handed the reins of global governance. This demand shook macro-society to its core and lead to a powerful backlash. Some diehards refused to surrender political power. They claimed it would have been like a batch of bacteria ruling mankind. It ended with a global war between macro- and micro-humanity!”

“How horrible for your people!” The Forerunner gasped in sympathy.

“Horrible for the macro-humans; they were quickly defeated,” the High Counselor replied.

“However did that happen? A single macro-human with a sledgehammer could obliterate a micro-city of millions,” the perplexed Forerunner objected.

“But micro-humanity did not fight them in its cities, and macro-humanity’s arsenal was utterly unsuitable for fighting an unseen enemy,” she told him. “The only real weapon at their disposal was disinfectant. Throughout the history of their civilization they had used it to battle micro-organisms, yet it had never yielded a decisive victory. Now that they were seeking to vanquish micro-humans, an enemy equal to them in intelligence, their chances of victory was even slimmer. They could not track the movements of the micro-armies and so we could corrupt their computer chips right under their eyes. And what could they do without their computers? Power does not come from size,” the High Counselor explained.

The Forerunner nodded in agreement. “Now that I think about it…”

The High Counselor continued, a fierce fire now burning brightly in her eyes. “Those war criminals met their just fate. Several thousand micro-human special forces armed with laser drills parachuted onto their retinas…” She let the Forerunner’s imagination do the rest before continuing more calmly. “After the war, the micro-humans had claimed control of Earth. As the macro-age ended, the micro-age began!”

“Very interesting!” the Forerunner exclaimed.

The lander docked with the Ark in low Earth orbit. The micro-humans immediately boarded their feathers-fliers again and began exploring their new surroundings. The enormous size of the spacecraft left them dumbstruck. The Forerunner at first considered their utterances an indication of their admiration, but the High Counselor soon explained her feelings about all this.

“Now we understand; even without the Sun’s energy flash, the macro-age could not have endured,” she said. “You consume billions of times more resources than we do!”

“But consider that this spaceship is capable of traveling at near light-speed. It can reach stars hundreds of light-years away. This is something, small people, which could only be produced in the great macro-age,” the Forerunner countered.

“We at the moment certainly cannot create its equal. As of now, our spaceships can only reach one-tenth of the speed of light,” the High Counselor conceded.

“You are capable of space travel?” the Forerunner almost stammered. The sheer surprise was enough to knock the color out of his face.

“Certainly not as capable as you were. The spaceships of the micro-age can reach no further than Venus. In fact, we have just heard back from them and they tell us that as things stand, it seems far more habitable than Earth,” the High Counselor answered, paying no mind to his shock.

“How big are your ships?” the Forerunner asked as he regained his composure.

“The big ones are the size of your age’s… hmm…” She paused, searching for the right analogy. “Soccer ball,” she finally said. “They can carry hundreds of thousands of passengers. The small ones, on the other hand, are only the size of a golf ball; a macro-age golf-ball, of course.”

These words shattered the last slivers of the Forerunner’s feelings of superiority.^.

“Forefather, would you please offer us something to eat? We are starving!” the High Counselor asked, speaking for her people as the feather-fliers gathered on the Ark’s control console.

The Forerunner could see ten-thousands of micro-humans on his command console, looking at him eagerly.

“I never expected that I would be asked to invite so many to lunch,” he answered with a smile.

“We would certainly not want to ask too much of you!” the girl said, bristling with anger.

The Forerunner retrieved a tin of canned meat from storage. Opening it, he used a small knife to carefully scoop out a tiny piece. He then cautiously placed it to one side of the ten-thousands standing on the command console. The Forerunner could make out their position with his naked eye. It was a tiny, circular area on the console, about the size of a coin. This area was just a bit less smooth than the surrounding surface, just as if someone’s breath had smudged it.

“Why did you take so much? That is very wasteful!” the Earth’s Leader scolded.

Now using a large monitor, the Forerunner could see her; and behind her stood a towering mountain of meat toward which her people were swarming. As they reached the pink massif, they extracted small pieces and ate them.

Looking back to the console before him the Forerunner could not make out even the slightest change in the size of that small piece of meat. On the screen he could see that the crowd had quickly dispersed, some discarding half-eaten pieces of meat on the way. The High Counselor picked a piece for herself and took a bite.

As she chewed she began shaking her head. “This is not very nice at all,” she commented as she finally finished.

“Of course, it was synthesized in the eco-cycler; it isn’t possible to taste any better. It has limited capacities for taste,” the Forerunner acknowledged apologetically.

“Give us some booze to wash it down!” The Earth’s Leader raised another request almost immediately. This demand caused a cheer to erupt among the gathered micro-humans. The Forerunner raised an eyebrow; after all, he knew that alcohol could kill micro-organisms!

“You drink beer?” he cautiously asked.

“No, we drink scotch or vodka!” the Earth’s Leader replied with gusto.

“Maotai would also do!” someone shouted.

In fact, the Forerunner still had a bottle of Maotai, a bottle he had kept on the Ark ever since its departure from Earth. He had intended it for the day that they found a colonizable world. He fetched it.

Wistfully holding the white porcelain bottle, he removed its cap. He then carefully poured some of the spirits into the cap, and then set it down next to the crowd.

On the screen he could see that the micro-humans had begun to scale the unassailable cliff-face that was the cap. On the micro-scale the seemingly smooth surface of the cap offered many holds. Using the climbing skills they had honed on their home’s skyscrapers, the micro-humans were quickly able to ascend to the cap’s rim.

“Wow, what a beautiful lake!” the chorus of micro-humans shouted in admiration.

On the screen, the Forerunner could see that the surface of that vast lake of alcohol bulge upward in a giant arc formed by the forces of its surface tension. The micro-human camera operator followed the High Counselor as she first tried to scoop out some of the liquid with her hand. This attempt failed, however, as her tiny arms could not reach. Instead, she then sat herself down on the edge of the cap. From there she let a slender foot scratch the surface of the alcohol. Her delicate foot was immediately encased in a clear bead of liquid. Lifting her leg she used her hands to extract a small drop of alcohol from the bead. She let the drop fall into her mouth.

“Wow!” she exclaimed, nodding in satisfaction. “Macro-age alcohol really is a lot better than our micro-age spirits.”

“I am very glad to hear that we still have something that is better. But, using your feet to drink like that, that’s very unhygienic,” the Forerunner noted.

“I don’t understand,” she replied, looking up at him in puzzlement.

“You walked around on your bare feet for quite a while; they will likely be covered in germs,” the Forerunner explained.

“Oh, now I see!” the Earth’s leader called out. She was handed a box that one of her attendants had been carrying. She opened the box and immediately a strange animal emerged. It was a football-sized round thing with countless tiny, chaotically twitching legs. The High Counselor lifted the creature by one of its small legs and explained. “Look, this is one of our city’s gifts to you! A lacto-chicken!”

The Forerunner strained his mind trying to recall his microbiology. “Are you saying that that is a…” He paused in disbelief. “A lactobacillus?”

“That is what it was called in the macro-age. It is a creature that gives yogurt its taste. A very useful animal indeed!” the High Councilor replied.

“A very useful bacterium,” the Forerunner corrected. “But I now understand that bacteria certainly cannot harm you. Our concept of hygiene has become meaningless in the micro-era.”

Earth’s Leader shook her head. “Not necessarily. Some animals, ah,” she caught herself, “some bacteria, can seriously hurt us. For example, there are the coli-wolves. Overpowering one of them is a great feat. But most animals, like the yeast-pigs, are quite lovable.” As she spoke, she took another drop from her foot and into her mouth. When she shook off the remains of the alcohol bead from her foot and stood, the High Councilor was already quite tipsy and her speech had begun to slur.

“I really never would have expected that alcohol would still be around!” The Forerunner frowned, genuinely astonished.

“We,” the Earth’s Leader said, her speech faltering, “we have inherited all that was beautiful about civilization. But those Macros thought that we had no right.” She stumbled a step. “The right to become the carriers of human civilization,” she slurred. Feeling a bit of vertigo, she plopped herself back down.

“We inherited all of humanity’s philosophy◦— Western, Eastern, Greek and Chinese!” the crowd shouted with one voice.

Sitting, the Earth’s leader stretched her hands toward heaven and intoned, “No man ever steps in the same river twice; the Tao gave birth to One. The One gave birth to Two. The Two gave birth to Three. The Three gave birth…” Her words faltered to nothing, but she immediately slurred on: “…Gave birth to all of creation! We appreciate the paintings of van Gogh. We listen to Beethoven’s music. We perform Shakespeare’s plays! To be or not to be; that is…” Again she slurred. “That is the question.” She again rose, tipsily stumbling as she gave her best Hamlet.

“In our era, a girl like you would have never even dreamt of becoming the world’s leader,” the Forerunner noted.

“The macro-age was a melancholic age with melancholic politics. The micro-age is a carefree age. We need happy leaders,” the High Councilor replied, already looking a good deal more sober.

“We have not finished our discussion.” She paused, gathering herself. “Our discussion of history. We had just talked about…” She halted again, thinking. “Ah, yes, war. After the war between macro- and micro-humanity, a world war broke out amongst micro-humanity.”

The Forerunner interrupted in shock. “What? Certainly not for territory?”

“Of course not,” the High Councilor answered. “If there is one thing that is truly inexhaustible in the micro-age, it is territory. It was because of some,” here she again paused, this time for more inscrutable reasons before continuing, “some reasons that a macro-human could not understand. But know that in one of our largest campaigns, the fronts were so large they covered…” She paused a final time. “Oh, in your units, more than three-hundred-feet. Imagine, the battlefield was that vast!”

“You inherited much more from the macro-age than I could have ever imagined,” the Forerunner stated soberly.

“Later, the micro-age focused all of its energies on preparing for the impending Catastrophe. In five centuries we built thousands of super-cities, deep within the Earth’s crust. These cities would have looked to you like six-foot-wide, stainless steel balls. Every one could house tens of millions. These cities were built 50,000 miles underground…”

“Wait just a second; the Earth’s radius is just less than four thousand miles,” the Forerunner interjected.

“Oh, I again used our units,” the Earth’s leader apologized. “In your units it would be about…” She did the calculation in her head. “Yes, half a mile! When the first signs of the Sun’s energy flash were observed, the entire micro-world migrated beneath the Earth’s surface. Then, then, the Catastrophe struck.

“Four hundred years after the Catastrophe, the first group of micro-humans made their way up through a massive tunnel roughly the size of a macro-era water pipe. Boring their way through the solidified magma with a laser drill, they made it to the surface,” she explained. “It would, however, be another five centuries before micro-humanity could establish a new world for humanity on the surface. When we finally did, we built a world of tens of thousands of cities, a world of eighteen-billion inhabitants.

“We were full of optimism about humanity’s future then. It was an all-pervading, boundless optimism that would have been unimaginable in the macro-age. We were optimistic precisely because of our micro-society’s tiny scale. It meant that humanity’s ability to survive in this universe had been increased many million-fold. For example,” she said, “what was inside that can you just opened could feed our entire city for two years. And the can itself could supply our city with all the metal it needs for those two years.”

“As a macro-human, I now have a much better understanding of the enormous advantages of the micro-age. It’s all just mythic, so very epic!” the Forerunner wholeheartedly extolled.

The High Councilor smiled and continued. “Evolution trends toward the small. Size does not make great. Microscopic life has a much easier time co-existing with nature in harmony. When the giant dinosaurs died out, their contemporaries, the ants, persisted. Now, should another great disaster approach, a spaceship the size of your lander could evacuate all of humanity. Micro-humanity could rebuild its civilization on a smallish asteroid and live comfortably.”

A long silence followed.

Finally, the Forerunner, firmly focusing on that coin-sized sea of humanity before him, solemnly stated, “When I saw the Earth again, when I thought myself the last human in the universe, I was the most forlorn human. My heart was broken and I felt all hope die. No one had ever faced such heartrending straits. But now, now, I am the happiest person alive; at least, I am the happiest macro-human there is. I see that humanity’s civilization has persisted. In fact, civilization has achieved much more than just surviving; yours is the true sublimation of civilization! We are all human, hailing from the same strain. So now, I entreat micro-humanity to accept me as a citizen of your society.”

“We accepted you when we first detected the Ark. You can come live on Earth. It will be no problem for the micro-age to support one macro-human,” the Earth’s Leader replied in equally solemn tones.

“I will live on Earth, but all I need can come from the Ark. The ship’s life eco-cycler will be able to sustain me for the rest of my natural life. There is no reason for a macro-human to ever again consume Earth’s resources,” the Forerunner said, his face glowing with deep, silent joy.

“But our situation is improving. Not only has Venus’ climate become far more hospitable to human life, Earth’s temperature is also warming again. Maybe next year we will even have rainfall in many parts of the world. Then plants will be able to grow again,” the Earth’s Leader stated.

“Speaking of plants, have you ever seen any?” the Forerunner asked.

The High Councilor answered. “We grow lichen on the inside of our protective dome. They are huge plants, every filament as tall as a ten-story building! Then there’s also the chlorella in the water…”

The Forerunner interjected. “But have you ever heard of grass? Or trees?”

“Are you talking about the macro-era plants that grew tall as mountains? My, they are legends of ancient times,” she replied.

The Forerunner smiled faintly and said, “I just want to do something. When I return, I will show you the gifts I bring the micro-age. I think that you will greatly enjoy them!”

CHAPTER 6 Rebirth

Alone again, the Forerunner made his way to the Ark’s cold storage. The cold storage was filled with neatly arranged, tall racks. Thousands upon thousands of sealed tubes filled these racks. It was a seed bank, storing the seeds of millions of Earth’s plant species. The Ark had been meant to carry these seeds to the distant world that humanity would emigrate.

There were also a few rows that constituted the embryo storage. Here the embryonic cells of millions of Earth’s animal species were banked.

When the temperatures warmed next year, the Forerunner would plant grass on the Earth below. Amongst these millions of kinds of seeds, there were strains of grass hardy enough to grow in ice and snow. They would certainly be able to grow on the present day Earth.

If only a tenth of the planet’s ecosphere could be restored to what it had been in the macro-age, the micro-age would become a heaven on earth. In fact, much more could probably be restored. The Forerunner indulged in the warm bliss of imagination: He could picture the micro-humans’ wild joy when they would first see a colossal green blade of grass rising to the heavens. And what about a small meadow? What would a meadow mean to micro-humanity?

An entire grassland! What would a grassland mean? A green cosmos for micro-humanity! And a small brook in the grassland? What a majestic wonder would the sight of the brook’s clear waters◦— snaking through the grassland◦— be in the eyes of a micro-human? Earth’s Leader had said there could be rain. If rain fell, there could be a grassland and that brook could spring to life! Then there could certainly be trees! My God, trees!

The Forerunner envisioned a group of micro-human explorers setting out from the roots of a tree, beginning their epic and wondrous journey upward. Every leaf would be a green plain, stretching to the horizon.

There could be butterflies then. Their wings would be like bright clouds, covering the heavens. There could be birds. Their every call would be like the angelic trumpets, blaring from the heavens.

Indeed, one-trillionth of the Earth’s ecological resources could easily support a micro-human population of a trillion! Now the Forerunner finally understood the point that the micro-humans had so repeatedly emphasized.

The micro-age was an age without worries.

There was nothing that could threaten this new world, nothing but…

Shivers grasped the Forerunner’s mind and soul as he realized what he must do; and, it had to be done immediately. There was no time to delay. He went over to one of the racks and retrieved a hundred sealed tubes.

They contained the embryonic cells of his contemporaries, the embryonic cells of macro-humans.

The Forerunner took these tubes and he dropped them into the laser incinerator, normally used for waste removal. He then went back to cold storage, walking up and down the rows several times, carefully checking every nook and cranny. Only when he was absolutely certain that none of these tubes had been left behind did he return to the laser incinerator. He felt a sense of deep tranquility as he pushed the button.

The laser beam burned with tens of thousands of degrees. In its blazing light the tubes and the embryos they contained were vaporized in the wink of an eye.