Artefact 127-A-6-HP from the very brief human period.
Background: Transcripts of a salvaged audio log, found with the orbital craft ‘New Eden’ which had crashed 2.1 million years ago. It was discovered by the Olandy people at the bottom of the Creasis Sea (what would have been the Sahara desert region of Northern Africa). It’s thought, from analysis of the engine drive, that the craft had been sabotaged.
Entries from the personal logs of Dr. Janet Daniels, including her last.
Translated by Prof. Milla Tullo
Note: some words are unknown to us, i.e. goat, and phone, although we can surmise that goat is a species of animal and phone a communication device of some kind.
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I’m standing in my study staring into a shallow, mahogany, glass fronted case on the wall. Inside is a piece of artisan parchment attached to a piece of leather. Goat’s skin, I was told at the time. I remember still, even after 78 years, how soft it was. And now, when the muted sun occasionally shines into the room, just right, the gold medal stamp on the left radiates soft light, like a still candle in a darkened room. I can’t read the beautiful Swedish calligraphy on the diploma itself, but I can read the year; 2029.
[A sigh]
I wish that I’d never been awarded it. In fact, I wish that I’d never become a geneticist at all. There were food riots in London again this morning; martial law in sixteen countries; outright civil war in dozens more.
I can recall being interrogated on the BBC, mmm, late 2054, maybe ’55. I could look it up…, but anyway, at the interview I had made the self-defensive point that governments had left it too long to act. The church, all the churches — united — probably for the first time in human history, had fought hammer and nail against compulsory birth control.
And now? Well, nineteen billion people are hard to feed.
I’m fortunate, I have almost no family; by today’s standards. Henry and I only have the one child – Dorothy – a character in Henry’s favourite film. He even bought her a pair of little red shoes for her twelfth birthday. She married, and they have only the one child and then… I’m leaning forwards to pick up the photo frame from my desk. I’m scrolling through the continual gallery of holiday snaps and friends until I find… there, the latest family group, taken a couple of years ago. Arranged from left to right there’s Henry and I, Dorothy and Edward and then a further three generations, two of which chose to have only a single child. The latest generation, none.
Most of them agree with my experiment.
[A long, resigned exhale. A cough.]
But some don’t.
A few won’t talk to me.
Including Dorothy.
But I have to do this. I have to lead the way. Because there is no other way.
Six months ago I commissioned a statistician, a brilliant women, and one who thinks as I do. If the experiment works, and, and it’s a big and, if it is taken up by as many people as she has estimated, then the global population may plateau at 25 billion in 2150. I don’t think that will be enough to save us, but it is only an estimate. And it can only ever be voluntary. Compulsory birth control is one thing…
D’you know, I was about to pick up my phone, but I stopped myself. Dorothy has made her wishes known. And she’s aware that it’s tomorrow, 3rd August 2107. My birthday.
I’m allowing my mind to wander back to happier times.
The first twenty years after my breakthrough were amazing. It was, quite literally, a euphoric experience for almost the whole of humankind. There were a few doomsayers, of course, who protested that we were meddling with nature, going against God. But, what was there not be be elated about, I had rid the world of liver disease, diabetes, ulcers, cancer, STDs, etc., etc., etc. Everyone could do exactly what they wanted. For however long they wanted.
Governments called for moderation. But since when were human beings any good at moderation? Since when were human beings any good at seeing beyond their own myopic selfishness?
And, [a sigh], their egos?
And now, despite it all, despite having lived an extended lifespan; despite seeing the world crumble, whole ecosystems wiped out, most of the landmasses now suburb and ghetto, countryside only experienced in tiny reserves in just a dozen places in the world. Despite all that, what I’m about to do is still hard to face.
But there is nothing that I want to do anymore. Aside from this one goal tomorrow where are the challenges? When one is over a hundred and twenty years old then what is unfamiliar or unforeseen? Patterns in life appear. The senses dull. Emily Dickinson had it right; ‘that it will never come again is what makes life so sweet’.
Although, the irony has not escaped me that my first real sense of success in many, many decades is one that I will be unable to cherish.
Am I a coward, perhaps, in what I do? Is it cowardly to be afraid to watch my world die, to watch the human race destroy each other in a final, futile, frantic effort to attain the last of the dwindling resources. Not that it would have affected me directly, I’m being honoured by being one of the chosen that will orbit the Earth until, in a century or so, the planet rejuvenates itself.
[Snort]
Then what?
Ten fifty five. It’s time to go home. I stand and take in my office for the final time. And, with a quick glance at the Nobel, I turn out the lights.
End recording.
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Today is the 3rd August 2283, my 300th birthday. But I don’t care. I’ve long since stopped caring about anything. I cannot stop myself replaying the scene from another birthday, in another age, it’s embedded in my hippocampus, scored onto my dulling consciousness.
“Henry?” I’d said, groggy and confused.
“It didn’t work,” he’d replied, looking totally bereft.
“How? Why?” I remember trying to sit up, but he’d eased me back down.
“Your DNA rebuilt itself faster than the serum could destroy it all. All it needed was a single strand and away it went, regenerating you. No matter what dose we tried your body just kept repairing itself. ” I remember that he took my hand, his eyes sad and pitiful. “You did too good a job, all those years ago.”
Too good a job?
I slowly shake my head as I stare down through the glass at the scorched desert of Europe; cloudless, red, barren. There’s nothing left. Not a single shred of life*. No one planned, or even expected, that the last desperate attempt of humanity to survive would result in nuclear annihilation.
We, the last 50,000, would have been stranded in space, sentenced to view the folly of homo sapiens for all time.
Remember, if anyone ever hears this tale, that something learned cannot be unlearned.
May God forgive us. Especially me.
End recording.
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[* File note: We now know, of course, that bacteria survived around undersea thermal vents.]
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