I, Karina Echebe, write this as my final duty, in the hope that its knowledge may save our devastated people from such horrors in the future.
Whoever oversees our fates blessed me with a hundred summers. Or cursed me. The things I have seen, the events I have survived, are beyond what anyone should endure. I am, as far as I know, the last person living who saw the world break.
Even before it broke, things were not well with us. There were so many people then, like countless clouds of the midges that harass us after the spring rains, and just as troublesome. The people gathered into vast cities, so many times larger than our villages now that no one now can conceive of them. Even the numbers we used to count are beyond the comprehension of our people now, more than the stars in the sky. As many as the stars in the sky were the cities that formed countries, and so many countries I can’t remember all their names.
Country argued with country, city argued with city, and man argued with man over the smallest things: dress, customs, beliefs. Some had more of everything than they could use in a dozen lifetimes, and some had nothing. Some grew fat and some starved. Some did nothing and some worked to scrape a living any way they could. Some were masters and some little more than slaves.
You won’t understand those terms. A master was someone who as much as owned other people. A slave was the one owned. I can imagine your disbelief when you read these words. When everyone needs to cooperate and share for anyone to survive, it’s incomprehensible that anyone could be lazy or greedy. But if you are old enough, you may remember fighting others to keep what little you had, in the early days. In my youth, it was like that, magnified a hundred times, but the fighting was covert.
I must explain these things so you understand how the world-breaking came to be. I don’t know who will read this, or when, or whether anyone ever will. I am both afraid and hopeful of what the future may bring. Perhaps all knowledge will be lost and this book will be a curiosity no one understands the use of. But my heart tells me I must tell what I know, in case it makes a difference some day.
Before the earth broke, everyone wanted more, no matter how much they had. They took by force what they couldn’t get by friendship. They harnessed the very earth to make more, and the earth revolted. There were droughts and floods, famines and disease. All these things fuelled hatred and dissension among the peoples. Every country blamed another for its problems.
Scientists (another word you won’t understand. A scientist is someone who learns the natural laws governing the world and the things it’s made of) predicted humans and in fact all life forms would cease to exist if things didn’t change. They said the underlying cause was too many people, as unbelievable as that is to you.
The world’s leaders, or at least most of them, tried to convince people to have fewer children. But it seemed that it was the poor, underprivileged people and countries that had the highest birthrate. The woes of the world were blamed on them.
In those days, people could travel very far very fast. They had machines that could fly through the air, swim through the water, and race across the land. You’ve probably marvelled at some of the wreckage that still litters the world here and there. People would travel to visit each other, to conduct business (a complicated sort of trading), or just to see what was there in some distant place. When they did, they carried with them diseases that spread from place to place. Most diseases were like sparks, flaring into tiny fires, then dying away. Almost no one worried about them. There was medicine to cure and even prevent them, if you had the means.
When a mysterious disease came out of nowhere, it spread like locusts and was even more virulent. The death toll wiped out thousands every day. In an effort to stop it, the governments of the world imposed ever more stringent controls on the people’s day-to-day lives. After years of being restricted in all the things they used to take for granted, the people rebelled. Cities burned, governments toppled.
Then the unbelievable truth came to light. The virus that caused the disease had been engineered. Its creators had intended it to sterilize women of certain “undesirable” races. Unfortunately, the disease didn’t respect the intentions with which it had been created. It made no distinction between one race and another, one individual and another. World-wide, the birth-rate plummeted. And instead of just sterilizing, it killed.
At the time, we didn’t realize the long-term effects, that humanity was on the verge of being wiped out by something we’d engineered ourselves. All we knew was that some people in the richest parts of the world were trying to exterminate the people in the poorest through attrition. War was inevitable.
The day the world broke, I was awakened by thunder, a rumbling so deep and loud the earth seemed to shake. Befuddled by sleep, I didn’t remember at first that this wasn’t the rainy season. By the time I collected my wits, fire was falling from the sky, unleashed by the machines flying overhead, so many their engines made a noise like thunder.
I can’t begin to describe the chaos of that day. Before our communication systems went down, we witnessed the death of huge cities, turned to ash along with their inhabitants. Indiscriminate bombing turned vast areas into death zones no one could enter safely. But that was just the beginning.
Some of the bombs fell where the earth’s crust was least stable. Volcanoes pushed upward, making mountains where there had been flat plain. Earthquakes shook the world, opening chasms that swallowed everything that had been standing there previously. Tidal waves a mile high tore across the land, taking out anything in their path. From these catastrophes, millions more people died. But that still wasn’t the end of the destruction.
The face of the earth had changed. There were mountains where once were plains, plains where once were mountains, seas where once were deserts, deserts where once were farmlands. And across them all rolled the death clouds, bringing a slow, agonizing end to anyone they touched. There was no safety anywhere for the few people who remained. And that still wasn’t the end of the horror.
It wasn’t just people who died in the holocaust. No life form escaped unscathed. Crops, animals, wildlife — all were destroyed. People starved to death or killed each other for a bit of food, and when the last scrap was gone, they preyed on each other.
Of course, I can only tell you what I know of, what I witnessed or was told by someone who witnessed it. Possibly other parts of the world didn’t suffer in the same way. But if not, wouldn’t they have stretched out a helping hand? I’m forced to conclude that in just a handful of years, the world’s population had gone from billions to a few thousand, and those few were sick and suffering.
To add to the torment, most people had never acquired the skills to survive in any but an urban environment. When all the cities have been plundered, when anything salvageable has been taken, how will they survive? How will they grow food? How will they build shelters? The probable answer is: they won’t, or if they do, it will be in a state much reduced from what we used to know.
Ironically, the “primitive” peoples that had been the target of the infertility virus were the ones best equipped to survive the disaster. They had long been subsistence farmers, knowing how to wrest a living from a land that wasn’t always cooperative. They had some knowledge of healing, though it didn’t help with the epidemic. Perhaps most important, they knew their survival depended on cooperation with their neighbours, and didn’t expect some distant government to take care of them. They took care of themselves or they died. So it had always been, and so it was now.
Little by little, the land recovered. Plants and animals regenerated. The people who had survived began having children. But the virus had done its job. So few women conceived, and the children were often born deformed or didn’t live long enough to be born. The world was still sick. Its life forms were sick. They all suffered as people suffered, but at least they weren’t infertile.
What will become of us? Since that evil day, people have at last banded into villages for mutual aid, but life is so hard. All our energy has to be put into basic survival. There is none to spend on things like learning to read or write, or the entertainments of an affluent society, like music or art. The human soul yearns for beauty and won’t be denied, but that beauty must be in service to basic survival.
I grieve for the loss of thousands of years of culture. So much beauty, destroyed. So much knowledge, vanished. Good and bad, all has disappeared. No one but me is alive to tell about the day the world broke. People only know about it from stories told by their parents or grandparents. Already the truth of it has been altered. It is said the day of breaking was punishment by a god or gods that had been forsaken. No one believes it could have been men who did this. Who could hate another so much as to cause him such agony, such difficulty?
And if they don’t know the truth, how can they guard against another such day in the future? That is why, despite the crippling pain in my hand and eyes that have all but lost their sight, I have scratched these words on a bit of paper hoarded from before the breaking. My pen is but a sharpened stick, my ink a bit of charcoal mixed with water. Look how easily it smudges. If, by some miracle, this page isn’t used to light a fire, it will mildew in the dampness of the rainy season or become brittle in the warmth of summer. The ink will fade and blur, becoming nothing more than spots of black on a discoloured page.
But I have to try. People have to know, or the past may become the future.
If anyone reads this, please, please tell the people the truth.
This is a perfect addition to the post I shared on Wednesday. So many of the points I talked about are reflected here too but, crucially, I sense more hope in these words. I suspect there are many of us who are thinking thoughts like this. What will happen to us? The world will move on without us, I'm sure, but us? Hmmm, I hope we're around for another chapter or two.
Thanks for sharing this Virginia!