(Will mankind be able to survive here? The surrounding on Earth in thousands of years looked something like this but it was darker and more sinister. Image source: NeedPix)
From a dream…
I was part of an international team to be sent into the future to study how mankind will go extinct.
There were 5 of us – all males and all looked serious. None of them spoke anything about the mission or the objective of the study. We passed by a few grumpy looking Russians at the controls. We walked along a long, dark tunnel until the end where a big space ship was waiting for us. We boarded and I took my seat at the back of the huge cockpit.
The last thing I remembered before we were launched was the loud countdown which echoed in my spacesuit. Soon we went into hyper-drive and started to circle the Earth in a strange pattern several times. At the huge dashboard on top of the cockpit, we started to see the time was moving faster ahead. After several circles, the space ship started to slow down and we started to descend back to Earth surface. I was not sure about others but I had a terrible headache. An expressionless team member handed me a red pill and asked me to swallow it – it will reduce the after-effect, he said.
We had landed on the outskirts of a small town. A city in the sky looms far away in the distance. There were hardly people on the street which was sparkling clean and organised.
We have moved a few hundred years into the future and things have not really changed in the last few hundred years except that most of the works done by humans have been taken over by robots. They come in all kind of shapes and functionality. There was even a street food hawker but it was manned by a robot that had hands but no face. A few humans gathered around this robot waiting for their meal, ignoring a couple of strangers observing them.
I could not catch the price of the meal or the currency being used. One thing was clear, we have yet to reach the stage when the extinction will happen. We boarded our space ship and flew up and circled the Earth couple of rounds again (just to be sure) and flew down again.
The cities were gone and what left were small villages. The surrounding was pollution-free and males & females live in co-existence peacefully. We stopped by one of the houses which had a large farm beside the house. The residents were amazed by our sudden presence and thought that we were aliens. We explained that we are travellers from a distant village and we had stopped by for some rest.
We lived there for a couple of days, observing the future humans at work. There was some technology in use but most of the work done using muscle power and creativity. We soon left the house and flew up and circled the Earth couple of rounds and flew down again.
We were shocked – the Earth has truly changed. The landscape was similar to the one on Mars. What happened to peace-loving villages? We were speechless and as we flew down, we were attacked by a huge bird. Luckily one of the team members managed to kill it with the laser gun that we had.
We noted that it was a waste barren land without any signs of mankind. There were huge storms in the distance but not a soul to be found. We were still in the space ship when one of us detected movement underground. We flew down to a deep canyon and yes, we found the humans – all were naked and weak.
Seeing us, one of them tried to climb back to the surface and was immediately swept by an unknown force field, turning them into ash instantly. There – it was the end of the mankind as we know it.