Rose Blumen ~

(Aïsshean)

In the very beginning there was nothing. In the first moment in time, in the start of all things, was the word.

From the word grew undivisive and sharable harvest, bridging the lands and people to each other into forming new entities.

The aptitude to communicate in growing complexity turned us from all other branches of life into humanity.

The ability to transmit, share and transfer more, more than just ourselves as bodies.

All our history and successes as a species, they sadly began to feel futile, when facing the eventuality ahead.

In the beginning, whether there was a previous world rich in culture and abundant in nature, or just darkness and void, no one would mind.

For then came the light.

Created by God or otherwise, came the light, wiping clean everything and otherwise.

Cities. Populations. Heritages from languages, cultures, and a billion year from our tree of life.

All equally worthless and futile.

The sights of biological and cultural desolation as we ventured through the openly eroding ruins of our past, it was painful.

We felt insecure. We were afraid. We felt abandoned in an unfair new time of history.

No one else appeared to have survived at first sight. The early screams of torment we heard across the first nights, they had long become silent and slipped away of our mind for the longest of times.

But now that we were outside, now that we saw how everything else and everyone but us had fared so far...

We discovered not a wounded city after a skirmish of war, with signs of survivals and evacuation, or even massacres, remaining stragglers, looters and fighters.

What we found and painfully slowly ventured through, was an open grave forgotten by word itself.

Nothing had been spared by the odd shockwave and tremor. Every building was stained unnaturally and damaged.

A silence and stillness in the air kept colourful dusts and fumes hovering like mist everywhere. They also kept in that unusually layer of air a stillness and silence now painfully oppressive on our ears.

This silence felt like lead or sick foreboding of our destiny.

Sure we were alive and free...

But no matter what we did, we would vanish in the aftermath of this white wake as well.

That's what this uneasy silence seemed to be telling us.

It was a stress on us, but we pushed forward nonetheless.

The younger sister was admiring of me, as I incited all of us to move further.

I trembled and shivered constantly, trying to be a solidity for all of us, but deeper inside, I felt she was the one being the engine for us.

Aïssheas was giving it her all physically to bring us forward, even if I was opening the stage and filling her sight.

We were bubbling, trying to keep our current set of shapes, understandings and compositions as chemical organisations.

It was a continuous challenge to stay alive and stay arguably human.

And the endless desolation surrounding us, reminding us at every step that no one else but us made it this far, it was terrifying.

Aïssheat and I knew it was statistically impossible for us to be the absolutely last ones alive.

But the decline and unnatural selection had visibly been as brutal as an intended war.

We walked by ripped clothing and dry blood stains every other metre in the streets.

We found discarded weapons near the marks of rotting compost of weirder animals. We found crashed vehicles were even polymers sometimes had grown bad, bubbling and sporulating like mushrooms.

As we passed through parks now silent but calm, we noticed how plants however generally seemed alright.

Generally.

Ahhie was spooked by some twitching vines. Some raspberry bush near the fountain had overgrown as if centuries had passed. Its vines were spreading around, covering every nearby streets and walls up to second floors sometimes.

And it was twitching as it grew on a visible rate to the naked eye.

It might be on course to be swallowing the city at this rate, in a matter of a year maybe.

The core of it in the distance looked like a baobab tree already.

I couldn't say what was so bountiful in the ground to absorb in minerals and phosphorus, for anything to grow that huge over a ground that poor.

Unless, I realised after a while, it found itself able to absorb and use different minerals through the proper mutations or transformations.

It was altogether terrifying for what it could mean of new species onward, and fascinating for what it could also mean of new species onward. Maybe there could be more biological complexity away from the cycles of phosphorus and carbon onward. That would be like an entire new world about to start already.

We didn't linger to investigate my theory. Our priority was to catch up with that drifting thing in the sky coming our way. I couldn't stop thinking about it however.

But if some plants in the same biological blender and renewal dice toss as us managed to change so much, they could replace phosphates and nitrates with aluminates, silicates and calcium carbonates...

We could see the apparition and rise of an entire new genre of particularly adapted flora.

The biologist I was wanted to study and examine that oddity beyond everything I had ever encountered before.

Just as much as Aïssheat was truly charmed and curious about how we continued to transform as animals. Medical science had become mostly obsolete for us, on the homo sapiens sapiens basis, but remained a ground of knowledge to look at us with a discerning mind.

We still were chemically powered things. Animals, I think. Eating less and less. Barely drinking. Losing shape, flesh and solidity or intelligence like sweat over time.

But we were still living things worth attempting to understand, at the very least by ourselves.

Unfortunately, Attie couldn't tell much more certainly what we were becoming or how long we would last.

So we dragged ourselves forward after that drifting hope in the sky.

Me looking up and behind our shoulders, guessing where to head to meet that hope in time when it would fly by.

Attie focused inside about the process and prospects of transformations now allowed under the stars.

Azzie eager to assist us, and poor younger Ahhie feeling the same, but losing himself faster than us. Aïssheah was fading the faster into this new chapter of our probably shortening lives.

At some point, we will lose balance.

We will have to do harsher compromises, if we have the chance. Between what we want to keep of the past, what we want to meet from the future, and what it means and takes to remain human today.

Until we find with some luck a competitive advantage, an ease to our subsistence, we will have to make sacrifices.

~