Golden Touch

An eye blinks. A small crow rustles its feathers. A nearby screen flickers with a recent entry. The words focus themselves, and the machine adjusts the words. Semantic dilation adjusted to 3.26poV. The machine hums, and bright symbols flash for a near empty room to witness the ancient electronic recording…

 

…I am one of the few remaining who are old enough to remember life before the collapse. I am making this entry for those in the future, and if there no future, then it is for myself. I am occupied by a great terror, a fear. To understand my concern, please understand the world I live in.

 

Civilization collapsed with less bloodshed than expected. The weather forced humanity from the cities and towns.

 

I live in a world of gigantic gray clouds. Weather systems encircle the world in a tyranny of erratic storms.  I am not from anywhere, I do not live within the boundaries of a nation, nor does any national origin matter like it did before the great storms. Governments fell apart and were unable to contain their boundaries from global immigration. The lack of geographic identity has changed many things. We are no longer bound by the chains of tradition. Cycles of ethnic vengeance perished, interrupted. Cultures meshed and blurred their lines, and in the wake of climate immigration our cultures decayed together.

 

Rains and hurricanes poured rivers from the sky. The mountains slouched with muddy faces. Cities emptied, and flood of human beings washed over everything. We fled into the cracks of other cities until the boundaries could not contain us. Sometimes the hurricanes brought garbage from other parts of the world, sometimes toxic, sometimes radioactive. Last year a typhoon rained oil on old Vietnam for weeks.

Luckily, the South Himalayan human-horde was traveling, and avoided the area. Something which would have been devastating in a stationary society.

 

Military weapons were useless against the weather, economies unpredictable, and power fell from one hand to the next. Nothing could contain the flood of immigrants and refugees. We swirled around until we formed hordes; a swarm in transition, capable of sustaining the needs of the horde.

 

In our world, movement is key. The weather demands everyone be prepared to evacuate their temporary housing. Technology is used to accommodate the great migrations. Survival requires constant perception and awareness. Within moments a storm could move into an area and demolish every structure.

 

The collapse of stationary civilization is complete. We are resigned to a nomadic and mobile life. We have adapted our culture to the environment. Our response to crisis has connected us across the planet. We have learned from watching each other face different trials. Whether it be wildfires, floods, hurricanes, or lethal heatwaves. This adaptation is source of my great concern.

 

My fear is that our monstrous intelligence is inheritable through observation.

 

I have only my witness for such a thing. After surviving the collapse of stationary society, I can see the increasing danger of other creatures following in our footsteps

 

The first experience was when the Cascadia horde I lived with scouted the daily migration of millions of crows. We followed them and discovered they had gained entrance to a shipping warehouse.

 

The place contained innumerable black birds, occupying every corner of a sprawling pallet city. They had developed distinct pathways and grids, echoing the rows of pallets and steel beams. The items on the pallets were consumed or dismantled and placed into smaller piles.

 

We found bird-sized shopping carts made of plastic scavenged wheels. I saw crows pushing these makeshift carts around, pecking at the ground, and clearing it of any garbage.

 

The nests were also made of plastic, multicolored nests lined the tops of high walls and the hanging steel. Their order was remarkable. They made all sorts of patterns, some of which looked like corporate logos. There are no mistaking certain trademarks. The thick curtain of crows tolerated us inspecting them until someone tried to take something from a pallet. Agitation from the birds was felt and seen.

 

They voiced their awareness with threatening cries. They swooped us all, treating us as one flock. Their harassment and angry screeches left us no other choice but to flee or drown in black feathers.

 

There were more crows in that warehouse then I have ever seen. They were thriving, a fountain of growing crow society.

 

However, when we returned to the warehouse with more people, the place was empty of any sign of the crows. I was dumbfounded. There were no signs of plastic pallet wrapping, no synthetic nests or makeshift crow-carts. Nothing of their numerous shopping carts remained for us to show the others. Of our original 8 us, only 3 of are still alive who witnessed the crow metropolis.

 

Years later I was able to find some clarity in the occurrence when I witnessed another strange demonstration of animal development.

We were scavenging a shopping mall, a large complex which mostly endured the storms.

 

Again, I was lucky enough to have seen it with my own eyes. We discovered many of the shops within the mall were converted to specialized areas for the rodents.

 

I was amazed at their number, again millions of them traveled the floor in an orderly pattern. Some carried small bags, and calmly walked from one store to the next, exchanging objects with an almost ritualized method to it. I even saw rats playing small drums and shaking little plastic tambourines.

 

I was not immediately worried; they seem untroubled by our presence as well. We took nothing and made sure not to hurt any of the creatures.

 

Rat Town still exists, and you can go see the society for yourself. Coordinates are provided as part of this entry. 

 

To all the humans out there, watch what you do in front of animals, they are watching us, mimicking us, and if we don’t finish the complete destruction of our cities, I fear the surviving creatures will follow us down this destructive path of intelligence…

 

Solar batteries flicker and fade, and the entry dissolves before ending. Nearby a crow caws into the sky, and with a flap of wings covered in small strands of neon polyester, merges into a wind current freeway of an incoming storm. 

Oversight

In the back yard of an abandoned house, another world spins on an altogether different orbit. The sun still rises and sets, except the plants have taken over the front porch. Blackberries were the first, throwing their bodies at the painted wood. Then after reinforced by continuous growth, they pushed in, spreading to every corner of the enclosed porch.

 

Next, or rather within a couple weeks, spiders set up their marketplace. Their webs spread over the thorns and the serrated leaves of the black berries. As the berries grew and rotted, small flies came to transact, and added their bodies to the spiders. The flies gained more from the rotting fruit than whatever the spiders took. The blackberries grew and the small ecosystem rolled into the house.

 

Dust creatures greeted the encroaching mass. Offerings of hair and skin gathered in particular corners and left to move of their volition. They circled around the door, waiting to be displaced, anticipating where the mass of vines would move. It moved into the kitchen, pulling the dishes from their racks, ripping the cabinets down, and crawling into the drains of the sink. Leaves sprouted towards the light, which bathed the kitchen in a light from the mouths of large windows; they twisted and bent themselves to soak the sunlight. Berries grew and fell on the floor where meals were once cooked by human hands.

 

Now mice and birds visited the new expansion.

 

They dined on berries as they cruised the domestic landscape. There were no cats or human beings, no traps or poison waiting for them. They organized the food, separated the packaging, and sampled everything. The mice were the most curious, testing every food thing. The wasps joined late, preferring the carrion of fly bodies. They casually chatted in a buzz of home invasion. They eyed the wood, which would be eaten for new nests, and the vines ripped a few good holes in the floorboards.

 

Then came the wait. A brief pause in the conquest of the human home. The floor gave way to mold and water damage. The supports beneath the floor sunk and disintegrated, leaving a meal for the vines and the creatures of decay to set up systems of chemical commerce. A pile of wet wood bloomed into a silver web of mold, then came the gnats and the ear wigs. Months went by and then finally a year, the house was ignored by a larger world, and the smaller world inched its way into the living room.

 

Birds and mice were regulars now, claiming rooms and hallways as their own. Nests grew in the corners, and the soft gnawing of wood was heard in the walls. Wasps were gathering in greater swarms. They enjoyed the shelter, and with the coming and goings of animals, meant there would be fertile slopes of the food chain. Winged moths also came to the home, a quick visit to try on forgotten clothing. Of course, the clothing fit, and warm closets became alive with the next generation of fashionable insects.

 

Another passed, and the windows relented. The wind joined the vines and spiders and flew into the rooms with a greeting. The wind filled every corner, rustled the webs, and brushed against the vines with a familiar handshake. The wind said hello many times a day, and sometimes at night. The vines continued into the house, wrapping their bodies around the staircases and rails and up the walls of bedrooms. Drinking deeply from their roots, which now stretched into the basement. Pipes leaked with eager moisture, ready to help any growth.

 

A few years passed and still nothing from the wider world intruded upon abandoned house. The water pipes were fully stuffed with roots. The walls turned into a crust as the inner walls were replaced with living plants. The staircase was now bound in the vines to such a degree the drywall and plywood was nearly gone. The support beams held up a couple wasp nests, a racoon nook, and 2 families of squirrels who turned the attic into their nut storage.

 

Latex paint and carpet were sparse by this point, having little defense from the rain. They melted away each month, like artificial glaciers left by an alien race. Their plastic fibers and multicolored skin were replaced by the magenta feathers of hummingbirds and blue jays, who used the staircases as nesting ledges.

 

The pipes were the last to go, rusted and cracked. When they crumbled, the vines of the black berries, trees, scrubs, grasses, molds, and slimes were ready to support the weight. Rooms devolved into vague areas. Without windows or walls, without floorboards or a roof, the shamble of plant life smeared the structure, and it was an indistinguishable mound.

 

Within a few more years, nothing remained of the once inhabited house. No interior paint, factory-built furniture, humming appliances, roof shingles, cotton candy insultation, or anything remaining of the once human occupied abode. The human inflicted order was gone, and the turbulence settled into a low hill, a ruin replaced to vague appear as the structure it once was, its distinction erased, its purpose reclaimed.

 

Elsewhere, human beings attended other houses, keeping them devoid of change, maintaining the Holy order of society. Their walls, which are made of slowly decaying trees, like food in a stomach, are waiting to be digested.

Junkyard Gods

Leftover jambalaya for days,

Hot sauce but no fire,

Thunder gust highway,

Over the tops of cloudy car lanes,

No ramps at 30,000 feet,

No hands in effortless flight,

Shrubs and spite,

All the way down,

Until the worms were made of plastic.

Digestible galaxy,

Shrunk down from inverted radiation.

Accepted evils,

No believers needled,

Tattoos, baboons growling from a cage,

Cheated, back into a burrito,

Drums in the deep house.

I packed my tuna fish before I saw the ocean,

Tremors and commotion,

Small shovels and a big mouse,

Spacious smoke between the dust motes,

Zipping around in anaphylactic pentameter,

Better dreams and a centipede,

No need, no greed,

Bound by rusted bones,

Moldy tomes of family trees,

Flower in fungal bloom,

Roasted on a sugar fire,

Oil, salt, and lime,

Simmer and prepare to dine,

On this sweet metallic meal.