In 2031 the polar bear became extinct. A year later, so did the tiger. Humanity will be next, we thought at the time.
Oh, how I wish we had been right!
It is 2120, and mankind hasn't yet died out. The opposite, in fact. What became extinct, instead, was our death.
We used to live like kings, until we stopped, and merely survived. However, what is living worth, if survivors cease to feel alive?
The clocks stopped ticking. For decades they haven't moved their hands, and years don't even matter any more; they only really would, if we kept on counting. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, we stopped. Because, in the face of eternity, aside from life, what could be meaning less than time?
Nobody needs to measure it, once the own on earth has broken from its grip. Despite it, some of us continued, people like me. Without meaning and purpose, we keep on counting the years, in the silent hope that it will help them pass faster. It makes no difference, however, because nothing will ever get to pass in the space of the eternal.
Since 2034, the years haven't been going by, but writhing. They have been suffering, like an injured animal, by the side of the road, and we cannot redeem them, no matter how hard we try.
When I was growing up, time still mattered. Every single minute of it used to have a worth. I am one of the last generations with an understanding for ticking seconds, passing years, the inexorably emptying hourglass that used to be a life. They say, for people like me, the existence we are doomed to lead today is hardest. Because we remember. A time when life barely had time, and wanted to be lived, given it didn't last forever.
Nowadays barely anyone still knows what it feels like to live for only limited days. That is, barely anyone still knows what it feels like to be alive. Never did we, who remember, expect the life we had known to get out-dated like horse-drawn carriages, telephone boxes, relationships, cars... Either way, we had to watch it happening.
Convinced that time wasn't timely any more, most applauded those who redeemed us from it. They worshipped them like Gods, but where there is a God, the Devil must be close.
Some said, without time we won't ever again have to repent, have to fear, have to desire. Without ticking seconds, they assured, we would be spared the dark sides which are inherent in an existence. Perhaps, they were right. What we have, however, been spared, as well, is life.
Explosions woke me up this morning. In the past, it used to be the voices of roosters at dawn. Today, milliseconds of incomprehensible energy, shadowing the eternal, when it breaks upon the temporal.
Alongside bodies, geysirs of earth and concrete were shooting towards the sky. The dark horizon, scorched by orange flames, and below it, screaming and roaring. On a ground that was trembling more violently than in a century quake.
Two hours have passed since I last looked out the tarnished windows. A veil of dust and smoke over shattered towns, and on earth, craters as deep as a giant's mouth. As if they belonged to ghosts, arms stretched out of the debris to plead, suffering, for a death that will never come.
How many is it this time, was my first thought today. How many might be buried alive under tons of rubble this time, doomed to wait - perhaps forever - until a bigger power finds a heart to redeem them?
The quakes are approaching. All neighbourhoods have long been destroyed. Soon the one where I am sitting and writing this will crumble to ashes, as well, but I won't stay. I am a nomad who moves from place to place, from town to town, from one ruin to the next. Fugitives from life, they call us, even though it has never been life that we have been fleeing from. Instead, we are looking for its remnants. For decades we have been doing so, determined to continue for the rest of forever. Unless somewhere along the way, we'll find the death that was violently torn from our hands.
They extinguished it just like the polar bear, just like the tiger, when I was still a child. In 2020 what was to happen to us became first foreseeable. It was a pandemic that sealed our gruesome fate, and, shortly afterwards, a number.
250 million.
Numerics are funny, complicated and simple all the same. They say, numbers are the easiest way to express the world and everything in it. However, once they exceed a certain realm, no one can picture what they really mean.
How much is 250 million?
Can anyone picture 250 million lives?
Unlikely, most do hard enough to picture one of their own. Despite it, about 200 million people are born each year and around 60 million used to die. It was more than that when I was 23 years and 234 days old.
250 million people died on March, the 6th, 2034, a single monday.
Back to work again. Another week that feels the same.
No one really likes mondays.
I'd rather sleep in, keep my eyes closed, and stop moving for another while. Typical monday morning thoughts. That monday morning, however, was to forever change their meaning.
That day, 250 million people decided to keep their eyes closed, stop moving, give up breathing. Forever. Up to now, I can see them in front of me. Clearly, not like in a movie or picture. It is more as if it were happening at this very moment right before my eyes.
Bodies. They were dangling from tree tops, dropping off bridges, jumping off cliffs, and colliding with trains, trucks, or trams. All of them, male, aged 20 to 40. Millions over millions who tried to die through their own hands on a murderous monday morning.
I saw it accidentally. On the TV-news, a steaming coffee in my hand, and the cup trembled in my cramping grip.
When a single person dies, you relate to them. Yet again numerics are funny, and once the number of those who die exceeds a certain realm, you're barely relating. That's why the thought of a single death would get to you. That of 250 million, however, would barely touch you, as it exceeds what you can conceive.
Back then, at my age, I couldn't conceive much. Nevertheless, one out of 250 million has burnt his mark into my brain. A policeman, maybe 30 years old. He had shot himself in the head. There wasn't much of him left. Half his face, dispersed, and the brain, scattered across his dark blue uniform. The other half of him, covered in gunshot residue, he pierced me with that look. Upon the remnants of a dead man's face, I saw the look of freedom.
I wasn't prepared for it. I guess, no one really was. What I had been so far was a child of what they would call the abandoned generation. A lost boy. A Peter Pan. We´ve never had a chance. Childhood was withheld from us, as if it were a knife, predetermined to do only harm to ourselves and others. Our lives got sterilised, until we were isolated and lacked every experience that could have helped us to grow up, so growing up, we would never get to become adults.
It was meant to teach us respect for life, but what we learned, instead, was fear of death. It would threaten us and everyone we loved, they told us, if we ever started living our lives. Day after day, and hour by hour, this was what we were told. By teachers, who, all at once, refused to teach us. By radio voices, who, all at once, talked down to us, and by leaders,, who led us down the road of misery.
No one recalls much from times, when they could not yet speak. What I, however, do remember about the first years of my life is, how lucky I was. Barely anyone knew that I existed. I was undocumented and raised in the clouds, somewhere high above, in the mountains.
My mother gave birth to me on a rocky ledge, groundhogs around her. Eagles and fragrant pine trees above her head. She had planned it exactly this way. It took her 17 hours to bring me to life, and 17 years it took me to fully understand the favour she has done me.
If she had gone to the hospital, had told anyone of the child she was carrying, had been amongst people at all, I would have been documented. I would have had an identity, traceable and trackable: undeniable. It was without it that I got a chance to have a life.
Everything she has ever done was for me, which is why I have no choice, but to make it up to her. She killed herself before death died out. Perhaps she felt it coming and chose to go, as long as she still could. I might be a child of the abandoned generation, but she would never have abandoned me. She tried to take me with her.
She used to love nature, with all the elements, and dying, she was going to cuddle up to them. I think I was crying when she took me out of my cradle that morning. She did her hair and put her makeup on. Thereafter she opened her wardrobe, slipped on her shiniest dress, and went to get the galvanised rope that my parents used to tie up our horses.
My mother didn't tie up horses that day. Instead, she tied a rock to her feet. Me between her arms, she had, smiling, one last glance around, and pushed the rock off the landing stage into the mountain lake behind our house.
I remember the splashes it caused when it hit the freezing cold water. The sounds that we caused when we were dragged along with it, I remember just as well. It was peaceful, once we had left the surface. The sounds slipped away from us, and eventually,our consciousness did just the same.
That was on February, the 5th, 2014, around 20 years before 250 million people tried to take their lives. Out of 250 million, barely anyone succeeded in the long run. Only at first they did. They were dead for a little while, and still didn't get to stay this way. Their cells regenerated and brought them back to life. No matter what condition they were in, they rose again.
On March 30, 2034 it was loud in the cemeteries, loud in the morgues, loud in the crematoria, and in the churches. They pounded against their coffins from the inside. Dead when burried, yet now alive again, they tried to attract attention. Those who were not yet underground rose from their deathbed, incredulous. They looked confused and disappointed that they were still amongst the living, and it didn't just happen in our region, but all over the world.
At first, no one understood how. Now we know what has happened then, and ever since I realized why 250 million suicides did not permanently die, I have been grateful that my mother got to leave the world early enough. Thank god, she met death that February! I'm relieved that she is dead! Even though I know that she would never have left, if she had known tnat I would survive.
By chance my heart kept on beating that day. I should have drowned with her, fragrant lake water in my lungs. It did, however, not succeed to wash them clean from the last breath. If my father had not been sitting in his hideaway that day - if he had not seen my mother and hadn't jumped off the landing stage to dive down for us - I could have joined her.
Would I have wanted to drown, knowing everything I know today? To be truthful. I'm not quite sure. What I'm, however, certain about is that, if I had met death with her, I wouldn't have had to witness how 250 million males, aged 20 to 40, resurrected from the dead, a decade later. I wouldn't have had to spend my life hidden away on trees and rooftops, wouldn't have had to move around in the shadows above town, and wouldn't have to do what I will do, as soon as the sun will rise in seven days and weave the earth into its brittle net of gentle rays.
Eleven trillion. Can anyone picture even one? I cannot, and still it will be eleven who will see the sun rise for the last time in around seven days.
We think tnat we have found a way.
We have to end it, once and for all. In the hope that the end will give way to new beginnings.
Everything that has happened is in this case. All the things that have brought us here. These are the bottled up notes of a century, and while I am writing these last lines, I'm trying to picture who you are, the person who will find this message in a bottle in hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of years.
I'm trying to picture how you are living, and wonder if you are feeling alive. I ask myself if you will ever die and what scares you more, death or being alive.
To tell you the truth, I hope you will die some day. Because, in that case, our plan is working.
Good luck to you, whoever you might be, and let me ask one thing of you. Let me beg you to take these notes seriously, and when you meet your death, don't fight it. Hug it gently, instead, and tell it from me, "You are welcome!"