It was the last days of humanity’s twilight years. In these days of red skies and boring repetitiveness there were two frequent thoughts in the minds of man, the first was the imminent fear that humanity’s live ember in the universe will be stamped out and that they couldn’t do anything about it, the second was the existential dread that when they were inevitably snuffed out that their would be no evidence of their existence. Nothing that says “I was here, I lived” left. The desperation that the millions of years of human history will eventually disappear made them make “them”.
Them, (Over the millions of years their names have been lost, I can only assume it must have been an acronym of some sorts) kilometer long titans of steel and wires flying miles above the earthen ground. On the belly side of these old giants are apertures with great doors over them. These doors can open and out of the apertures will come out large appendages made of metal and gears, with claws at the end of these appendages.
When a piece of nature or a building comes out of sorts these colossal mammoths will fly over to these things and “fix” them. When I say “fix” I don’t mean to make working again, but to stop the evolution of all things, to force them to stay as the things where when humanity was still romping around the earth. All the trees, rocks, roads and buildings, when these things inevitably changed, they were forced to remain the same. Humans made dozens of these titans for the job of changing earth as if they were still around.
Of course the earth was still there when humanity died out. The birds still flew, the trees still bent in the wind, the animals still humped in the undergrowth but humans weren’t there. But now due to the foolishness and shortsightedness of humanity nature now wasn’t able to evolve to survive, it wasn’t “alive” or anyway that we’d call “alive”.
They could originally speak and think, the titans of wires and steel. Unfortunately times don’t favor a conscious. They soon spoke less and less and eventually it was a rarity for them to even say a word. Until one day they all cried out at once for the last time and after that the concept of a “word” never grasped the earth’s land again. It was an electrictro magnetic pulse that killed off the humans you know? They had combined themselves with machines year by year, a liver for a filter, a new posotronic heart until eventually they needed these machines just to simply survive, so when an electromagnetic pulse came from a burst from the sun and hit the earth and all electronics were knocked out for a week. All the machines eventually booted up again but the humans weren’t so lucky. It wasn’t a war that killed humanity or a disease or nature reclaiming them but their idea that their inventions could replace what nature already had for them, that…….that is what killed off all the humans. O I weep for these titans, their masters death constantly preying on mind at first but now unable to comprehend what has happened to them.
At first they just wept, their cries of mourning echoing through the valleys and plains of the earth, for years they did this until eventually they collectively decided that they should do the work that they were made for, to repair. At first their task was easy. If moss started growing they would rip it off the side of a building if a tree fell they would find every splinter and put it back together. But soon it became inconceivably more difficult entirely cities collapsing, nuclear reactors without anyone to operate them soon went critical and melted down or exploded sending huge amounts of radiation careening away from the reactor and irradiating miles, soon enough they were trying to stop the continents fusing together a dozen of them putting in a colossal effort to stop Australia fusing with India.
Then the sun started growing. The first thing to go were the animals, their brains exploding in their heads and their organs boiled inside of them, the titans didn’t fret though they just cleaned up the mess and propped the carcasses back up. The second were the plants and trees dying from the heat but once again the titans didn’t fear they just replaced the leaves with metal ones. Eventually even the titans themselves were casualties of the sun, falling out of the sky, their circuits overwhelmed by the heat of the sun.
At first there were thirty than twenty six than eighteen than eleven than eight than six, now only five remain. Just now,with the sky being half filled with a deep crimson from the sun. At what remains of the Gulf of Mexico which is now a lake (I don’t even think it counts as a lake anymore sense all the water dried up and the titans replaced it with a shiny silver liquid. (The entire ocean is filled up with it) a horse skeleton falls apart and breaks a fence at a seaside farm in Campeche, the one of the five titans left on earth sighs and gets to putting it back together.
As I watch this through a telescope from a distant solar system I fear that our civilization will end the same as the humans. We have seen this type of thing before in our investigation of other worlds whether it be a machine with two legs or ninety six legs or flying in atmosphere or in orbit, we even once found one them the size of a large continent orbiting around a planet. All machines with the sole purpose of maintaining a planet. I shall reflect on this when the twin suns rise tomorrow. But for now this is all I found in my investigation.