The Longest Night

She tried to pick up her pace, but she knew it wouldn’t make the least bit of difference. The sun started to dip down below the horizon again. She would have to stop for the night. In her childhood, she couldn’t go anywhere without a lamp lighting the way. Now she was left in complete darkness. She didn’t know things could get that dark.

She could see The Cliff through the thick of trees, and she sighed in relief. It was a natural buffer between her and anything that could possibly harm her, real or otherwise.

But getting to the bottom was another issue altogether. The memory of her first fall was as vivid as if it had happened a day ago. She had a permanent limp now, and whenever seasons changed, her knee ached and demanded rest. She was keen not to make the same mistake again, or she was sure to die this time.

She slipped the doe off her shoulder and let it drop down the slope. The limbs flopped where the bones had snapped while the rest of the corpse remained stiff. Finally the doe connected with the bottom in a pulp, and Catherine situated her pack and shotgun properly, preparing to climb down.

At the base, she found a suitable space for her camp. Within minutes she had collected enough twigs to make a fire pit. She pulled a sheet of newspaper from her sack for kindling. One article remained visible. It read:

Prime Minister to Meet With International Environmental Ministers Regarding Virus

She crumpled the paper into a ball and stuck it underneath her pyramid of sticks. Next she retrieved one of the lighters to start a fire. It was gaudy, an unnatural sort of purple with an unnatural sort of flower plastered on it. For how precious it was, it may as well have been encrusted with diamonds.

Night was so dark that it was pitch black not five feet away from the fire, even once it started to burn brightly. Too dark to treat the doe. For how chilly it was outside, she was sure the meat would be preserved another night, and took to her rations instead. Huddled close to the flames, she ate slowly, trying to make it last. Her stomach was a neglectful master and her mouth a dog on a long leash; within minutes her dinner was gone. Finding food was becoming harder and harder, and she had to travel out farther from the cabin each time to find more. She knew she would have to relocate soon, and she worried over it.

She unrolled her blanket and lay back by her tent and the fire, watching the stars flicker. The world had eradicated its infestation of higher-thinking organisms, and most of the stars in the sky had also long been extinguished like Earth, yet light continued to travel to her distant planet, with so few to witness it. Did life exist on planets near those faraway stars? Would they ever know of what happened here? No. If she would never know what happened to her own world, no one ever would.

The universe was so huge that it became insignificant, so expansive that the amount of space and time became incomprehensible and meaningless. A few streaks darted across the pitch black sky; it was the last of the meteor shower that had been going on for the past few nights. She watched as the meteorites made small scratches on the heavens, only to be swallowed whole by the sky. She fell asleep watching each shooting star, thinking of how beautiful they once were.

“Humans were designed to destroy themselves,” Catherine’s mentor, Professor Verity declared in a firm and honest voice in front of the lecture hall. “It’s a simple fact that has perpetuated itself in cycles throughout history. Like a forest was designed to burn to the ground, so that its seeds might grow something new.”

She was watching his every move, as if she would garner more knowledge from him that way. Doctor Verity was a very interesting man, who had an insight that went further than facts. Unlike some instructors, he didn’t just aim to teach what would be on the tests (which aggravated more students than intrigued them); rather he taught in order to educate, in order to spark interest and understanding about the world. Which usually involved his subjective theories and errant anecdotes about his experience, but Catherine still found herself looking up to him, despite his predisposition to conjecture. The class was supposed to be on Humanistic Psychology; the content he presented was anything but optimistic, and he usually diverted from the syllabus, changing to seemingly unrelated topics on history.

“The Mongols were one civilization to recognize this trait,” he said as he strolled across the room, looking across the many faces that sat before him. “It usually took form in the cycles of their dynasties; when a new kingdom was established, they rose in power until they claimed the mandate of heaven, but eventually their power declined, and a new band of barbarians would take over and form a new dynasty. Then the cycle would start again.

“Other examples include the Greeks, the Romans, even all the way to the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans, to be more recent. They were all civilizations on the brink of greatness, each showing their advancement and domination over other civilizations. But obviously, as we’ve seen, they all fell apart. And the higher they went, the harder they fell.

“In the past few centuries, there hasn’t been such a firm example, other than the British Empire, but they certainly did not fall into oblivion. At least from an objective stand point. But if we approach it from a bird’s eye view over a time line, the world could be considered one large civilization, and we’re still climbing the cycle. Perhaps we are climbing the cycle towards the mandate still, or perhaps we have overstayed our welcome. The fact is, our civilization is continuing to be more and more advanced, and the more we climb, the greater the damage will be if we fall. When we fall.

“Perhaps I am far too pessimistic for my own good. But it is an inevitable pattern we have seen through history; great civilizations are made and have a great leader at their pinnacle. Then they decline, slowly but surely. What goes up must come down. Nature. Here is another interesting concept: Let us consider humans from the beginning of time. Their nature, their advancement and innovations. Tell me what you think that was like?”

Quite a few students stood and walked across the hall to the exit. Once the door shut behind them, the girl sitting next to Catherine stuck up her hand. Black clothes, baggy pants, chains, multicoloured hair. He motioned to her.

“Probably the same it is now.”

“Interesting,” he said, a tinge of scepticism in his voice. “Elaborate.”

“Well, a lot of people in this room would probably want to preach about peaceful tribal society, imagining that life in the past was so much better and free of social construct, but it wasn’t. It was probably like how it is now – like, typically, the man is the provider, the woman is the hearth keeper, and people gather together in communities to make things more comfortable so they don’t have to do so much work. They might not have had the same technology as we do now, but essentially our basic form of society hasn’t progressed very much since we started practising agriculture in 10000 BCE.”

“Does everyone agree?” he asked, looking up across the blank faces of the class. “Is that all to human history?”

“No,” a guy said from behind, quite adamantly. “You can’t make such a broad statement as that. You can’t say we haven’t progressed. Humans have changed considerably since then. Politics, ethics, medicine—”

“But have we?” the girl questioned. “I mean, no matter how much knowledge we gain about our world, all it’s done is increased our population and our uncanny ability to survive in great numbers when we shouldn’t. Think about it,” she said emphatically, turning her body towards him and motioning with her hands. “If the world ended right now, and only two people were left, they could try to change the development of human culture as much as possible, to something more – I dunno, error free, but it would probably end up the same, no matter what. Eventually we’d build civilizations again which would get our ‘mandate of heaven’ or whatever, and then we’d fall apart. It’s just hard-wired into humans to keep going further to destroy themselves, like he said.”

“You’re still making a pretty broad, ambiguous statement,” the other student countered, shaking his head. “Technology made a considerable change to how humans do live and operate. Health, fertility, nutrition. Lives across the world were altered considerably by the invention of the flushing toilet.” More laughter.

“Yeah, so, something like what I’m saying is poorly supported, toilets and TVs aside. I dunno. I’m thinking along the lines of Atlantis.”

“Atlantis,” Verity exclaimed, strolling across the floor to the board and sprawling the word over it. “Atlantis is my favourite story.”

He turned back to the class, shaking the whiteboard marker in his hand excitedly as he smiled to himself. “Atlantis was a place that was very advanced for its time, knowing more in medicine and technology than anyone would have ever hoped to know, but the gods were wary of their advances, and they finally decided to put an end to the civilization. Atlantis was essentially one giant volcano that it erupted.”

He returned to the board, scribbling a sloppy picture of a volcano with stick people standing atop it. “The sheer size of the volcano and its activity caused earthquakes to spread out far out into the ocean, which in turn sent tsunamis storming the island from every direction. So if the lava or the earthquakes didn’t kill them, the water would.”

The class continued to be silent as they watched him. “This story was purely allegorical on Plato’s part. In fact, Atlantis’s key message might have been that humans always strive to discover more, to advance higher and higher, but doing so will only result in our demise.

“And therefore, class, humans were designed to destroy themselves.”