At the Fall of Night

A prequel to the recent Destiny's Path short story. 

The creature had died on a rocky outcropping next the cliff. Its remains looked human but Jacob could see the rainbow hue of the nanites embedded in the bones. He wondered if the creature had been one of the fanatical followers of the Teachings of Parr, or a poor soul that had been forcibly exposed to the corrupted nanotechnology. Not that it mattered, either way once the nanites invaded living tissue the infected person became a nightmarish creature that was anything but human.

Surrounded on two sides by boulders and large rocks, the remains had been sheltered from wind and rain for decades leaving the bones largely in the same place the creature had died. Jacob could even see small strips of cloth tangled among the bones and what looked like hair attached to the skull. In the back of Jacob's mind, he could almost imagine the creature had willfully chosen this spot to die. As if some shred of sentience had returned after all the humans it could hunt down had either been converted or torn to bloody shreds.

Jacob stood more than a meter away from the remains trying to dredge up some sort of emotions. He thought of his lost wife and daughter, the former having been forcibly exposed to the nanites while the latter had been killed as the two fled from their home. That had been more than sixty years ago and Jacob hated himself for his inability to picture his wife's face or the sound of his daughter's voice.

Jacob was pulled back to the present to find the young man, Stephen, standing beside him. “Mr. Jacob,” Stephen said, “are the tiny machines still active?”

“Probably not,” Jacob responded, “but it still wouldn't be a good idea to touch anything.” Jacob noticed how the nanites had leached out of the bones and into the rocky surface looking for another host to infect. That had to have occurred right after the creature had died. But there was no reason to leave it to chance.

“Stephen,” Jacob said, “go find Iliza or Michelle and get one of the bottles of stove fuel. We need to sterilize the area just to be safe.”

Stephen ran off to find the fuel leaving Jacob again with his thoughts. Both of Brigham's moons were visible in the afternoon sky and as Jacob looked down to the valley below he could almost imagine the last sixty years hadn't occurred.

The city of Sego looked just like it did right after he graduated from university. He was twenty-three years old and ready to start his life. He married Emma the following year and they had Madison two years later. A month after turning thirty-one was when it all fell apart.

***

From the moment the Senior Council of Brigham was established four-hundred, fifty years before the Fall, the leaders had kept the artificial wombs brought from Earth on the seedship pumping out babies. The goal being a human population on Brigham that could support a technological civilization equal to Earth, Mars, or Titan. The Senior Council talked of colonizing the other planets of the Brigham system and even building seedships and sending them out to other nearby star systems.

So even after the optimal population of sixty-thousand souls had been reached, the Senior Council expanded the number of producing artificial wombs. These children were raised by robot caregivers, as the first colonists, and upon reaching maturity were sent out into the wilderness areas of the planet to push the boundaries of settlement.

The plan worked fine until being raised in the creche became a social stigma. “Creche-born” became a slur among the human-born population that translated into a form of discrimination back in the developed areas. Creche-born children disproportionately suffered emotional and psychological trauma from being raised by robots. This promoted a certain percentage to adopt destructive behaviors and substance addictions to compensate for the lack of human contact in their early years.

Where the human-born people of the developed areas truly failed the creche-born brothers and sisters was understanding the stress and dangers of being pushed into the frontiers regions. The human-born were raised on stories of their courageous ancestors who turned a barren rock into a living world. They didn't realize that the early colonists suffered greatly with many utterly failing to live up to the standards demanded of the creche-born.

As the decades passed, creche-born people began illegally returning to the developed areas becoming an underclass without access to the services the human-born took for granted. Supremely organized and clean cities across Brigham sprouted slums and even homeless folks living wherever they could. Urban crime penetrated deep into the cities with the human-born beginning to fear and then hate the men or women they saw lurking in the shadows.

There were attempts at societal reform but the underlying problems of the system were always ignored. The poor and under-educated creche-born were cheap labor easy to exploit. For the human-born, life was good and Brigham had a Manifest Destiny to take their branch of human civilization back out to the stars. That's when Thaddeus Parr appeared and started his movement.

***

Stephen eventually returned carrying a squeeze bottle of cook stove fuel. Jacob took the container from the young man trying not to think about how Stephen looked. Jacob was ninety-one but appeared to be in his early forties. The benefit of being born when medical technology guaranteed every baby a long healthy life. Stephen was in his twenties but would have been confused with a much older person before the Fall. With technology corrupted and people living only slightly above a Stone Age technology, Stephen probably wouldn't make it much beyond fifty years old.

Jacob sprayed the liquid over the bones and the areas where the nanites had leeched into the rock. He used a pocket igniter to start the fire. As the bones turned black from the flames, the rest of his small group gathered around without saying a word.

“Alright people,” Bruce Carter called out as the fire began to die. “We need to get down this mountain to the refuge and we're losing daylight.”

Bruce, the de facto leader of the group and the one man beside Jacob who understood the dangers they faced leaving the protection offered by the high mountains. A child when Parr's Plague swept the colony, Bruce's family already lived in one of the villages established on a plateau nearly unassailable by anything except aircraft and heavy-duty, off-road vehicles.

As the nanite infected roamed the planet someone realized that they never went up into the high mountain settlements. Even with all forms of communication down, word got around to the few survivors that it was safe up in the mountains. While some survivors from the lower altitudes eventually reached these settlements, their numbers were exceedingly small.

For decades the uninfected hid in the high mountains never considering going down to the lower levels. Cut off from one another, these isolated pockets of humanity looked down from their hideouts and watched as bands of the infected moved across the valleys and coastal regions. Eventually though as the years passed the infected, unable to have children, began to die off allowing the mountain peoples to come down for limited periods.

The next day the group entered the dead city of Sego. While the infected no longer moved in large groups, smaller clusters and the stray individual was still a possibility. Even worse, the corrupted nanites that turned humans into ravaging monsters were ubiquitous to Brigham technology. Any computer-based item almost certainly carried infected nanites, which if touched could enter a person and begin building copies of itself. After entering the human body, it took a little under 48 hours before the person went insane.

Bruce Carter walked point going down the deserted streets with Michelle and Iliza pulling rear guard. All three armed with projectile assault rifles that worked without the aid of any computer assistance. The stated reason for the expedition, a search for needed non-perishable items such as low-level medical kits, hydroponic supplies, and anything else that might aid survival up in the mountains. However, the expedition was also meant to see how much of the nanites remained active after six decades.

The city of Sego didn't look abandoned except for all the computer tech laying in the streets and the occasional human remains. When people realized it was the tech spreading Parr's Plague, everything based on nanite computing was throw away in a panic. By that time it was too late, infected humans were already forming groups with the sole purpose to convert or kill everyone else.

Jacob cringed passing a reading tablet laying in the street, probably dropped there in the opening moments of Parr's Plague. It was the exact model like the one he stored his personal library on before the Fall. Like the remains of the creature they saw up in the mountains, the nanites from the reader had leached out into the substance of the street itself. What made this instance worse though was that Jacob could see the rainbow-hued nanites pulsing confirming they were still active. The pulsing, active nanties confirmed the group's worst fears, that it would still be many years if not decades before they could safely leave their mountain refuge. This information made their true mission even more important.

Barely two hours later the group leaves Sego behind having found all the items they needed to survive just a little longer. More importantly, both Jacob and Bruce retrieved what they needed to implement their personal project, a sort of gift to the future.

***

Their refuge didn't have a name, it was just a collection of cabins made of wood, stone, and metal storage containers. For people who had grown up around holographic entertainment systems, semi-sentient personal computers, limb and organ regeneration hospitals, and nanotechnology that could fabricate just about any item the refuge was tantamount to a Neolithic existence. Even such mundane services as running water and working toilets were the stuff of fantasy to the small collection of children born since the Fall.

But to the ones like Jacob and Bruce, who had seen everything fall apart and be replaced with death and chaos, the refuge was a chance to carry on and maybe rebuild one day.

“Jacob,” Bruce Carter began while taking a seat in his friend's small hut made of piled stone and particle board, “how will we organize this project?”

On Jacob's table, which had once been a packing crate, were eight items that any human would have recognized whether they had been born in ancient Rome to the late twenty-first century. The eight items were thick, unused leather bound journals. The unused journals were the result of a colony-wide fad of people wanting to leave some physical mark that didn't involve computers. The producers of the journals went as far to make them with paper and fake leather covers that were supposed to last centuries.

“I figure the first volume will be a basic history of humanity,” Jacob said feeling the weight of the task and its importance. “We won't have room for much detail and in-depth analysis, but enough for our descendants to understand where they came from. The other volumes will deal with science and engineering, enough to help whoever comes after us to leap frog the barriers that held Earth back for so long.”

“What troubles me, Jacob is that do we really need to do any of this?” Bruce asked.

“Bruce, all of our records and information is either lost or stored in systems that would turn us into monsters if we tried to access it. Our civilization, hell our entire existence was made possible by the computing power and storage capacity that damn nanotechnology made possible.”

“Thinking more to the long-term,” Jacob said after a long silent pause, “without some form of written record it won't take long before our civilization and its accomplishments become like the myths of ancient Earth. I can imagine a few hundred years from now people coming to believe humans originated from this planet.”

“Goddamn Thaddeus Parr and his terrorists,” was all Bruce could say.

“I knew Thaddeus Parr,” Bruce said in way that conveyed both a sense of sadness and anger. “Parr was truly insane and his corrupted nanites killed millions, but we created him. We built a society that thrived on the suffering of a people us human-born didn't really believe were on our level. Now like many times before back on Earth, we'll have to start over. Hopefully, our descendants won't repeat the same mistakes.”

Bruce wanted to believe his friend, that another, wiser civilization would rise in the place of the dead and decaying one down in the valleys and coasts. While Bruce didn't have the education of Jacob, he knew enough of Earth's history to have a cold chill of dread run down his spine. 

 Author's Notes:

One of the periods of human history that fascinates me the most involves the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations around 1200 BCE. With the exception of Egypt, which was greatly weakened and never recovered, most of the empires and kingdoms during that time utterly collapsed. The best examples being Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite Empire.

The crash was caused by several factors but the most mysterious in a historical sense were the ravaging "Sea Peoples" that attacked both coastal cities and those far inland. Much debate and head scratching by academics has gone to determining where the Sea People originated. 

I had always wanted to incorporate the concept of a Sea Peoples into a futuristic setting. 

I also wanted to create a setting where the bizarre human need to create an underclass raised its ugly head again. And yes, I touched on certain social issues that really piss me off.