30 Day Picture Prompt Challenge

Day 3 ~ Conundrum

Seth leaned back in the Adirondack chair. His long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. His arms rested limply on the arms of the chair. With startlingly blue eyes, he focused his gaze at the setting sun across the lake. The nightly chorus of tree frogs was deafening. Occasionally of late, he heard the flapping of wings, found a long, mottled grey feather he didn’t recognize, but then, other than nature sounds and his own breathing, there were no other sounds. No human sounds at any rate for he was the last one left.

It was a beautiful sunset, he mused. His last, he supposed. Long softly rippled streaks of high cirrus clouds were tinted red and pink, with their edges tinged golden. Appearing to streak out, radiating from the puddle of sun at the horizon’s edge, it seemed a fitting sunset for a final one. It was a stellar final eve. At least it wasn’t raining.

Seth, who, thanks to current technological advances, looked no older than twenty-five, swiped his hand across his forehead, pushing long, tawny gold hair back and out of his eyes. But he wasn’t twenty-five, rather so for beyond a hundred that he didn’t care to reflect on his exact age. Didn’t much matter, at any rate. Sure, they’d replaced pretty much all of his body at one time or another. His titanium knees and hips would last forever, his kidneys, lungs and liver were good to go. His heart was the issue and there was nothing he could do to fix the aging muscle, the dying batteries in the pacemaker, or the valves that had worth thin over time. There were many things he could do, but replacing his own heart was not one of them.

As the pandemic spread, taking with it virtually everyone, the priorities of the remaining few had shifted. His being an ‘off the charts’ genius was what had (theoretically) saved him once the powers that used to be had realized he was immune. When his blood didn’t help create a cure, they chose their one last option. He’d become the last great hope for humankind. Seth had been linked with the best and brightest of the computer banks and fitted with micro-receptors in his brain. That massive operation allowed him to store (cognitively) all the history of the world, the images of all the great documents, art, scientific works and writings of the past thirty-five hundred years. As the people died, there was no one left to fix the robots who could fix him. The power grid had been down for years and his supply of batteries had dwindled down until he’d inserted the last one. That was over a year ago now, and it was beyond recharging.

It wasn’t the fact that he was dying that bothered him. It was what would be lost when he died.

Tapping his forefinger in midair, he brought up the holo-screen and checked the latest readouts. For years the government had been broadcasting to the heavens in the hopes that on at least one of the hundred thousand or so planets that had been identified as life-supporting, that there would indeed, be life. Over the years, there had been a number of missions into the far flung realms of space, but not one single mission had ever successfully set up an outpost nor had they ever found a definitive pattern suggesting other life existed beyond earth. Everyone was certain that, logically, there had to be more planets sustaining life, but none had been found, or, as he liked to think, they’d successfully hidden themselves from the prying radio beams of earth.

The last tinge of the sun slipped below the horizon. The first stars peeked out of the indigo blanket overhead. The full moon rose behind him gilding the ripples in the lake silver.

“Oh God,” Seth spoke aloud for the first time in years. “Did you truly mean for all that the human race is or was to be lost? With one touch I can transfer all of it, all of what was to another, but there is no one.”

“Ah, but there is.” Settling gently to the ground in front of him was … was an angel? His brain receptors scanned, cataloged and rejected plausibilities. He? She? It was beautiful. Giving off the impression of the essence of grey, black, white and mottled feathers covered high arching wings. A face, intensely feminine and yet with a sense of masculine strength looked at him with eyes searingly silver in the moonlight. Long silver hair streamed down to its shoulders.

“Who…er…what are you?”

It smiled. “I am, shall we say for convenience sake, a greyangel. I am not male or female, I just am. You may call me Dawn. I came into being just before the sun rose, when the world is yet tinged with grey, when the shadows of night haven’t quite faded and the full light of day has yet to let color seep back into the world.”

“What is a greyangel?”

“We are not the white of the celestial hierarchy nor are we of the blackened fallen ones. We are of the middle realms where we can embrace the qualities, strengths and foibles of both, being neither all one thing or the other, we are the ones who have watched over the human race for the past millennia.”

“Are you the ones responsible for the pandemic that our scientists could find no cure for?”

Dawn smiled, or grimaced, he wasn’t sure which. “Is there a cure for stupid?” she asked, not exactly answering his question.

“So why then are you here, now when it is far too late to help?” Seth felt stirrings of anger, an emotion he long ago had consigned to the pit of useless things.

“Did I say I was here to help? I cannot fix your world. Even if I could, I am not sure that would be a viable option, considering…”

“Considering what?” he asked.

“Considering that the humans pretty well mucked up a good thing, didn’t appreciate what they had and most certainly didn’t take care of it.”

He nodded, because, in all honesty, he had to agree. “So what now?”

“That’s up to you. You can choose to share with me your knowledge.”

Her, he decided, was how he’d think of Dawn, fingers fluttered at her waist before spreading wide.

“What will you do with it?”

“We of the Grey may choose to share it with the next. Or not. We never shared the beforeone’s knowledge with humans. But we hold on to it.”

“The next.” Seth considered this idea. “So, there will be more humans? Humankind isn’t done with, after all?”

“I never said more humans, Seth. I said, ‘the next.’ I cannot tell you what they may be. That is not for you to know. It is up to you as to whether you want all the information, all the art, all the good that humans did lost forever or not. So too, it is up to you as to whether all the bad will go forward as well. We may choose to share the information with the next if we feel it can help them. If it will hinder them, then it shall stay with the Grey. The choice, Seth, is yours to make. You know that you have little time left, that you are dying.”

He sighed. “Yes, I know that. Can you tell me what comes next for me? After I die?”

Dawn shook her head. “You have your beliefs. You will have to trust in them, although, should your beliefs be merely the amalgamation of hopes and dreams and be false, once you are dead, you won’t even know it, will you?”

Seth looked down at his fingers fisted in his lap. “No, I guess I won’t. Funny how mankind could do so much and yet never prove definitively one way or the other about such things.” He looked up. “Were you sent by God?”

She halfway smiled, but said nothing as she floated a few feet off the ground, her wings seeming to quiver.

“So what do I have to do? Should I share this knowledge or let it remain with me? I don’t know. Maybe it should all just die with me. All we are, or were, is moot, is it not? Will any of it matter in the grand scheme of things? Are the inventions, the words, the art, the discoveries even meaningful if they who did them couldn’t keep the race alive? A conundrum, to be sure.”

“It is your choice, Seth. The eve is near finished and a new day shall shortly dawn. But you will not be here to see the sun rise. If you choose to share, then touch my hand. If not, then that is your choice. I cannot take it from you. Your life is at its end either way. I cannot change that fact.”

Seth inhaled deeply. He raised his hand to hers, his fingertips mere inches, surely less than a breath away. He reached out to her hand which moved not to his, it had to be all his decision. A heartbeat away, he paused.




1545 words