Neytopia › Part 3: Night › Chapter 3

Time

What do you think time and inactivity does to the mind, dear reader? For an experiment, just try doing nothing for a whole hour, then a whole day. Spoiler alert: you will probably be itchy, restless, annoyed, even hateful.

Well, he spent 1,024 years on a ship doing nothing, seeing noone, just waiting. He wasn’t just a little restless, he went completely batshit crazy. His hatred for his home planet fed on itself to grow beyond every other thought. He lost track of time, and life became a continuous stream of pure, undilluted hatred. But that hatred kept him away from despair: he vowed to return, to see his planet once again. He would sacrifice anything to destroy them all.

After all his suffering in isolation, the ship landed. He rushed down to the cargo bay and opened its gates, ready to welcome his new home.

Red.

The molten rock flooded his ship, bathing him in its fire. It was glorious, burning fire. He swam in it, delighted.

Red, red, red, red.

He wandered into the red abyss that stretched endlessly before him. He forgot where he had parked his ship but didn’t really care about it, he just kept walking. He walked for hundreds of years, then for thousands of years, and finally for millions of years as the molten rock slowly cooled off. Then one day he could walk no more: the red sea had hardened, and he was trapped inside.

I would like to say that he found some kind of rest, of dream. But no, dear reader, he didn’t. Just put yourself in his position, forced to think every second of every hour of every day for more than four billion years. That’s 4,000,000,000 years or 1,460,000,000,000 (1.46 trillion) days or 87,600,000,000,000 (87.6 trillion) minutes. Words fail miserably trying to describe the immensity of time and the horror of living for so long.

He witnessed the coming of the seas and then the start of life. His pain was so great that his senses transcended the rock where he was encased. He could feel everything that happened in the world. Finally there was something new: life paraded before him in all its possible forms and shapes. Some failed immediately, some failed after a while. Other shapes continued for a long time.

It was the best spectacle in the whole universe, and it was for him alone. But he didn’t just remain a spectator: he participated in the show. At will, he made the ground shake violently, wiping whole species while favoring others. And when the planet froze completely, threatening all life, he summoned all his strength to burst through the thick icy surface and thus bring back warmth.

Life resurfaced, as it had before, as it always would. No matter what challenges it faced, some form or other of life survived the inclement conditions and prevailed, sometimes with his help. Come what may, whether meteorites, frost and poison, scorching heat and piercing hail, life found a way.

Then one day, he felt something new. A monkey had produced fire… on purpose. The other monkeys went bananas over the fire.

What do you mean you can create fire? That is MY right as your master!

The ground shook violently, but the monkeys found shelter, defying him. They multiplied and infested the territory around them. They hunted beasts and gathered fruit. They were a threat, they would end up taking over his precious planet. “I must kill them, kill them”, he kept thinking. Then, for the first time since launch, he received an answer in the form of an unshaped growl. One of the monkeys had heard him.

He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t alone anymore.

Only a few could hear him, but that was enough. He imposed his will on them, announcing himself as a god that should be feared and respected. He gathered those who could listen to him in a single place to build him a city, the first city. For centuries they lived in peace. If others tried to attack his city, the ground swallowed them.

But his people eventually wanted more, and he let them have it. His city subjugated every other state, tribe and village they could reach. They praised life and strength above all, always rejecting pity and mercy. His citizens were mostly soldiers or rich landlords, while the slaves they took from vanquished states worked as peasants, servants and craftsmen.

Then one day came the raven. The traveler understood who he was, and that he was a bad omen. A few months after the raven had come, the skies clouded, the moon turned red, the sun turned black as night. Hundreds of watchers descended from the skies and wiped his people from the face of the Earth, as you, dear reader, hopefuly remember. The traveler watched impotently as the watchers tore down the walls and buildings, reducing his city to dust, to little more than a memory in his mind.

He knew where those watchers had come from. The System hadn’t collapsed in those four billion years, no. It had sent an expedition to his planet and now watched it from above, from a ship hidden in the sky which sent all the data back to It. When the watchers had destroyed everything, they returned to their ship, and he peered into the ship above. Inside the ship there was an endless library filled with information about all the different tribes on Earth. Except from his people.

Everything about his people had been erased, wiped, cleansed off the face of the planet like a dove’s turd staining a cathedral.