Legends of the Fall

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The Legend of the Fall At times I wonder if men really built them. Holy Flame City could build one, maybe, if Exeter was whipping their backs. But not hundreds. They alone are a testament to what we have lost. They were called skyscrapers. That’s what we did then: touching the sky, as if it was the easiest thing to do. I saw films of flying machines taking people up into the sky. Not heroes, not some LAW specialists. Normal people like you and me, going on an everyday trip to the next settlement. This is what we were. The shimmering rivers of steel. The bright nights, where we walked fearless under our own stars. We talked to each other, from different ends of the earth. The juicebrains and their strange, inexplicable domains and their mighty hosts. All we have left is the ruins and the legends: In the ruins, we scrape for artifacts. The legends, we try to understand. We attempt to make head or tails of stories which are far too outlandish, far too weird and fantastic to be true. And yet, there are the skyscrapers, telling us that everything might be true, and that, to them, everything was possible. One of these legends is the legend of the Fall: – how the present came to pass. This is the basic fallacy when we look at our past: People who would not trust their own brother to tell them the truth about the weather outside their window believe anything that comes from a rotten page printed in the Long Ago. It’s the unique appeal of the single book saved from the soggy ruins, the hard drive that is coaxed to life after weeks of effort, the handwritten diary hidden in a buried strongbox. God or fate would never allow a falsehood to survive, if so many other books and hard drives and disks were lost, if the reader staked his wealth, sometimes even his life, on obtaining the text. But fate does not mind if the account which was unearthed with so much care is full of nonsense and willful falsehoods. Additionally, many have a decidedly naive attitude towards our forebears. In their guts, they believe that the great people living in the glass palaces would never commit an untruth to a medium that would outlast them. They would have known that we depend on their accounts, that these are our only means to understand the past. They would know and care about this responsibility. They would not lie to us. But the sources themselves paint these people as liars. They call each other crooks, criminals and K-Street whores. Whatever their accomplishments, whatever divides them from us: Lies, denials, blind spots and utter bullshit inform their testimonials as often as they inform ours. But it’s simply not in our hearts to be more critical. And even if we could separate the truth from the lies, we would still be unable to understand the Long Ago. We try to make sense of things which are incommensurable with our own experience. And thus we hammer square pegs

into round holes and create a world full of flying cars, of souls in boxes and men on the moon, when we know deep inside that the past is infinitely more strange and, ultimately, completely unknowable. And thus, all our knowledge of the past is built on sand. Especially our knowledge of the last days of man’s empire is tainted by this. I have heard many varied versions of the legend of the Fall. I believe none of them. Men struggled hard to achieve the paradise that was the Long Ago. Many were the tribulations, and the works describing the path to the a-pax are full of war, of misery and death uncounted. There were tyrants and warlords, cruel and insidious, the kind which piled corpses to the sky, monsters in human form defiling the earth. Their names, names like Stalin and Darth Sidious, echo through the ages. But they were defeated, driven out, and a-pax was achieved, a long peace, a dominance of the good and righteous. Mankind lived in comfort and created all the wondrous things now crumbling around us. Sickness, want and war troubled them no more. The wealth grew in every quarter of the earth, and long term forecasts were very encouraging. The land was green and silver, blue and gold, and the common man touched the sky and shouted: “This is the end of all struggles and woes; this surely is the end of history.” That shout rung around the earth, loud and clear, and the earth was ours. The Long Ago had experts for everything. They also had experts for the past called historians. They made a past, a “lie agreed upon”, as the great philosopher Bonaparte acknowledged. We do not differ too much. We, too, agree upon the Long Ago as an age of miracles, of harmony and plenty. The Long Ago abolished conflict! The Long Ago defeated death itself! What blindness! For every record speaking of perfect healthcare solutions, good living, state of the art technology and true love for all there are ten painting a picture of a world at war against itself, of exploitation and crime, vicious little conflicts and creeping despair. And between the lines, you will find pointers to the origin of the delirium. But we shove these ten aside and turn to the one speaking of perpetual happiness. We seem to need our legend of a perfect past. But this legend breaks our spirit: If the gods themselves failed, how do we measure our chances? A happy people ruled the globe. But it was not to last. We fell. A sickness came over the world, and it put out our light. It happened in the space of a year. 2026. That was the year history truly ended. 2026. The last time all mankind shared a calendar. From then on, our account becomes a bit hazy, to say the least. I know smart, literate people who have no clue of the year we are in. About four to three generations have passed since

2026, and that puts us at the threshold of the 22nd century. I’d put my bet on Fall 2098, but I wouldn’t wager my life on it. The fever struck everywhere. It struck everyone: the old, the young, the just and unjust alike. It struck you if you hid, it struck you if you ran. At first, the physicians struggled against it, took the measure of it and progressed upon it, but the disease was too powerful. Their arts were not able to stem the tide of the sick and dying. The fever jumped from city to city, from country to country. No border, no wall, no bunker could stop its advance. It was a terrible disease, like a flu that becomes worse and worse with every hour until the fever scorches the soul right out of the body. The infected dried out and burned up; in the space of a few days they became delirious, after a week, they died. Of a big city, only a handful would survive. And it burned its way through all of mankind. The fever is one of the great riddles of the Fall. Unlike others, we happy few have a solid working knowledge of diseases, viral infections and the like. The fever seems to have been atypical in many respects. All standard methods, the quarantines and hygienic measures, seemed to fail. Some people got sick, and then got better. Some were saved by standard flu treatments. The record is frustratingly sketchy. The scientist seemed to be at the brink of solving the riddle. But at the brink, the Fall overtook them: If someone found the cause behind the fever or even a way to stop it, his or her voice was lost. Today, most people don’t care to think about the fever: It is part of the legend of the Fall and up there with the white zones and the delirium. That is all they need to know. We see things differently. We look for any scrap of information, hospital ledgers, newspaper clippings, evacuation posters, e-mail printouts, and postcards, anything that might shed some further light on those weeks ruled by the fever. Before the Fall, we numbered in the thousands of thousands of thousands. In a few weeks, the fever reduced us to roaming handfuls. These were the darkest days. There were so many dead, their number ever-growing, and the living committed acts of utter desperation. Others became kill-mad with the fever. The sick slaughtered those still untouched by the disease, and the healthy damned the sick to slow deaths, uncared for and unmourned. Cities were turned to ash to cleanse them of the infection, ships were sunk and travelers shot to stop the fever’s advance for a day or an hour. Useless, all useless. The fever stopped when it had run its course. With the guardians of order and security gone, the wicked and depraved crawled from their hideouts. They did their part in ending humanity’s empire, and they are still with us today.

On another note: Our sources prove that many people faced their demise with dignity, that they did not turn into beasts, that their last deeds, thoughts and blessings went out to their fellow man. A common find is a house with most of the bones in the bedrooms, a single corpse somewhere in the kitchen or the bathroom: A family dying together. The last one to die cared for the others till the bitter end. I know not a few hard-bitten scavengers who take the time to bury at least the skulls when they find such houses. “It is bad luck to let the bodies of good men lie about in the open,” they say, and I concur with their judgment. If the fever was God’s wrath descending on a sinful earth, as the chanters claim, then it surely smote a lot of the virtuous. All this death, all this destruction changed the world, it crept into the land and the skies, turning them against us. The clouds and rains, the gentle winds so expertly handled by the people of the Long Ago grew moody and wrathful, as if the weather, too, had come down with the fever, and its heat lay heavy upon the land. Rich farmland turned into desolate wastes, rivers and lakes twisted, dried up and vanished, forests and fields melted away. Winter followed winter, summer followed summer. The white zones appeared and spread like shrouds across the fertile land, turning the blue and green into a sickly white, the gold and silver into rusty black. Where the white dust drifted, life itself fled, and something not quite unlike death took its place. As man’s dominion over the world ended, all the creatures rose up against him. Once his docile prey, his servants, pets and playthings, they became formidable enemies and constant threats to our survival. Horrors, chained up in the cities for the amusement of children, escaped their cages and eloped into the growing deserts. Dogs formed packs, hunting the survivors like hares. And some creatures changed in strange and unwholesome ways, to become better stalkers of men. In the myth, all the terrible things shaping our world happened in the space of one year. For sake of narrative, as I shall demonstrate. It seems more logical and believable, and it puts all these evils in one place, that cursed 2026, that blackest of years, that single year He took His eyes off us. It is more comforting this way, and even a tale as horrid as this is, in the end, about comfort. But we know that some things started much earlier than that, and some of the issues seem to have evolved in the decades after 2026. But for the sake of our peace of mind, we collect it all those aberrations and put them into one place, 2026, the year of the flies. And thus it came to pass. Some call it the Reduction, others call it the Just Wrath or the Year of the Flies or Year Zero. Or they might speak of the You See, the X-Threat, the Vortex or Hecate’s Touch. But everyone knows that it was the Fall of

mankind, the end of our empire and our command over the earth. We shall never return to this state of glory. Their wonders rot around us, and all we can do is to look up and marvel at their majesty. Of course, no legend of the Fall is complete without an ultimate meaning: Nothing of that scope could have happened without some valuable lesson to be learned. Seven billion dead. That surely puts some impetus behind the conclusion of the morality tale, whatever it might be. God’s will. The hubris of man. The revenge of mother earth. The march of folly. Our enemies did it. A woman did it. A child did it. Because nothing could be worse than the thought that the Fall was, at its core, meaningless. Not a punishment, not a test, not even a joke. That it just happened, because such things happen. Which probably is the case, even if the thought makes me question my faith.