3024

3024

The year is 3024, there are no more roads or buildings, there is no more concrete or steel. You wont find cables, wires or glass, nor plastic or rubber; it is a different world to the one you presently know.

By the time the war for resources had reached its peak, over 700 years ago, nuclear fallout had enshrouded the earth, and left this world inhabitable to all life forms.

The elite members of our race had left the planet years before, occupying a human engineered space station built within the moon. A reemergence calculation of 300 years was made, and until that day the earth was deemed a no go zone for the human being; or the ‘human going’ as we often called ourselves. The space station, which was little more than an intergalactic university, in which people crammed for upcoming tests and had frequent sex, had a population of 400 thousand people. Every one of the space stations original members would be dead before reemergence day, hence the need for education and fornication.

When reemergence day arrived, everything went according to plan, tests immediately began on the new atmosphere of the Earth, and revealed an incredibly hospitable environment.

The forests of the new world encompassed 75% of the Earths surface and the oceans had grown shallow and calm. The sun's penetration of the new atmosphere was little changed to the old, due to what was believed to be a nuclear cloud floating thousands of miles above the Earth. We, as instructed, began farming immediately, turning all arable land into food sources and sheltering ourselves within the forest. Amazed at the speed of maturation, we led a plentiful life, harvests were a monthly occurrence and the regenerative properties of the soil were to our upmost advantage.

We had what was once known as, a utopian society, but we were the offspring of a ruthless elite and our genes could still yield signs of our ancestry; something we were ever vigilant against. This wasn’t a problem for the first 50 years of our reemergence, as nothing came between us and our blissful existence; still, nothing lasts for ever.

They appeared in the distance to look like a shift in the tide, a mass of color on the horizon. As this picture morphed before us our interest grew pensive, a few hours later and we were surrounded by a curious race of beings, not too dissimilar from ourselves.

On the space station, it was unacceptable for any person not to a have complete grasp of every recorded human language ever spoken. We were an academic bunch, that is not in doubt, but we were politically naive, utopia had rendered us anarchistic. It was pure instinct that made me take the lead and approach what I thought to be the dominant presence in the pack of beings I saw before me.

I greeted him in every language that had ever been spoken and finally, after several awkward minutes, he spoke back. I only know in hindsight that he was a male, as it was not decipherable from his appearance. Their race looked something akin to a human being crossed with a walrus.

He greeted me warmly in a thick Australian accent that was regularly interspersed with beeps and grunts.

I was having trouble dealing with this realization internally; the greatest scientists on the space station had offered a 2.3% possibility of life on Earth, and they had in mind only insects, yet here in front of me was a race of amphibious Australians that had just come marauding out of the sea as if nothing untoward had happened at all.

Due to my training in human psychology, I was able to successfully ‘mirror’ my new acquaintance and set him at ease. We, two representatives of the same race, ripped apart by time and distance, sat down for a talk under the glowing sun, a catch up, so to speak.

They existed, he told me, solely on water, which corroborated our early scientific findings. The water's reaction to nuclear fallout had produced an enzyme which crystalized within the human body, once ingested it would vaporize and disperse, creating energy. This was a painful and unnecessary process for us, for the Australians however, who had evolved at a rapid rate, it was their life force.

I was informed that they had been aware of our existence on the moon and feared we were stranded there with no means of returning. The Australians, like us, had adopted no theological restraints, and were interested only in their environment.

As the meeting came to a head, we came to agree that the nature of our meeting left us with a very important decision to make: do we go to war or do we interbreed?

Foresight and experience had shown us a clear picture of where our instincts could, and undoubtedly would, lead us, this question had to be addressed immediately. I let the Australian decide. He proposed we enter into an ancient ritualistic decision making tradition, after a brief explanation of the rules, I promptly lost the first two games of rock, paper, scissors.

And so here we stand, on the precipice of a new dawn, two distant clans thought separated for eternity, were to reunite. The hairy Australian had offered his personal seed for our ten finest incubators, and I had returned the gesture.

As this cross species cloning orgy reached its zenith, I couldn’t help but laugh at it.....Australians, out of all the races on earth, Australians!

D.A.Cook