A LASTING DARKNESS

[SA]

A LASTING DARKNESS
...has settled on us all. Our cousins came from a distant sun to lay their claim on the earth and were rebuked. Our weapons like the blossoming of stars were enough to kill us all, but they rose again and shook away the ash of the world and were whole. And the world was theirs.

We dreamed of them even before science made them possible, before the likes of Sagan and Fermi made them, at least in popular consciousness, probable. We guessed again and again at the shape they might take. What elements they might be made of. How they might think. How they might feel. Most importantly, we wondered what they might think of us. Love us? Loathe us? Could they even care at all?

-

I've got this cute comic from the early 90's, when Brody (my oldest) was still in junior school. On the cover is this dashing young alien with wild blue eyes and wavy tentacles instead of legs. He's looking toward the viewer, twisting at the waist like a cowboy gunning down the last bandit, and in the foreground a stark black creature with many more tentacles is writhing in white light, its strangely human bones comically exaggerated as though electrocuted. I'm not sure why I kept this of all his possessions, even out of all his space themed comics. Maybe I appreciated the irony. Maybe I'm a masochist.

We never found Brody. Like pretty much everyone else our families were immolated, evaporated, disappeared when we finally dropped the bombs. He could have survived, but I doubt it. Grant didn't. Radiation, out in atomic winderness, looking for my sister's kids like the hero he always was. Couldn't look for his own son, halfway around the world, so he salvaged that little... I don't want to call it victory. But before he stepped out into the burning dust he gave me this look of clarity, as if after all the impossibilities that had preceded this final monstrosity, at last there was a comprehensible terror. A madness humans had created, so a madness humans could fight.

For a few weeks we forgot about them. They might have never existed and the darkness that slowly gnawed at us was only the darkness we had promised ourselves since Trinity and through the long uncertain years of America's quiet war. Grant never came back, but after only a day there came the cold, bleak acceptance. The calmness. He couldn't have come back because there was nothing to come back to. I had already died.

When the aliens came back and their ghostly white gardens grew in the ruins and the bodies of the dead, we ran. That magnificent rolling cloud like the scattered holograph of some cosmic serpent or a resplendent solar wave, ever tumbling, loomed above the skeleton of the city and turned its terribly innocent face towards us... I remembered our smouldering driveway, the snaking footpath to our front door, and my own shadow, indelibly seared in its pale stone as though it had snatched away my very soul. I wondered then what had happened to me, the actual me, in that strange and impermanent end. But I did not wonder why I still lived.

Melanie Cruz, survivor

What Happens
Aliens come to earth. They are not what we expect, but we aren't entirely surprised. Speculations, after all, have run the gamut from the un-subtly anthropomorphic to the grandiose, terrifying and bizarre. In the end we can't quite tell what they are because what see of them, the precisely replicated human bodies, the exquisite geometries and implausible, frictionless machinery, is nothing more than their words, their language, a pattern of expression with the regularity of any grammar but the fluidity of the whole human expression.

They make their demands and are refused. Their vengeance is delicate but precise, and utterly merciless. We escalate and so do they, until the conflict is a summation of all the artistry, all the elegance which our race can make of war. Elegance is not enough. Our final solution scars the world, rids us of our enemies at the cost of almost all of human kind. And in the aftermath they come again. And we have delivered ourselves to them.

They are remaking themselves. Adapting their substance to the nuclear ruin we have left them. They are beautiful, and in their victory strangely kind. But we must not live in the shadow of their beauty, which transcends as it imitates, and re-imagines its own self. If the world must be changed, the place we find for ourselves must be truly our own.

What Comes Next
Imagine War of the Worlds if the martians had come better prepared, set against the ash-darkened skies and char-black landscape of Cormac McCarthy's the Road. Throw in a touch of China Mieville's the Tain and this might be what you'd get...

I am imagining gameplay as the journal of the human survivors in this future wasteland/Eden. Thus on one hand its about eking out a fragile existence in a dead world and contending with violent bandit-kings, cannibals, other survivors and the environment itself, while on the other it's the burgeoning new world the aliens are creating, and our place within it.

I suppose one way to look at it is that we are living at the beginning and the end of the world. The future is what we make of that dichotomy.

and that's all I've got at the moment...

[Kindling]

I like. More please!

[Steerpike]

As usual, this looks superb, and leaves so much achingly unsaid.  I like that the strange beauty of the aliens interrupts the otherwise bleak wasteland; I loved The Road but man it was relentless.  The idea of the aliens themselves is totally bizarre and unlike anything I would have thought of or know to have been done before; quite brilliant.  The counterpoint of the world winding down/the world starting up is excellent though it leaves me with a lot of questions about what the world sort of looks/feels like on a day-to-day basis... the tantalizing description of the rolling snake-holo-cloud is the closest you come to a concrete description.

Like most of your stuff this makes my brain feel inadequate.

[SA]

As usual, this looks superb, and leaves so much achingly unsaid.

unthought[/i]. What I posted was pretty much all I'd come up with thus far.

I like that the strange beauty of the aliens interrupts the otherwise bleak wasteland; I loved The Road but man it was relentless.  The idea of the aliens themselves is totally bizarre and unlike anything I would have thought of or know to have been done before; quite brilliant.

The counterpoint of the world winding down/the world starting up is excellent though it leaves me with a lot of questions about what the world sort of looks/feels like on a day-to-day basis... the tantalizing description of the rolling snake-holo-cloud is the closest you come to a concrete description.[/quote]CHAOS[/i].

The second era is post resurrection; the years in which the aliens are present but only slowly setting about their strange evolution, populating the world with flora but no fauna, and the world is grey and dead. This era is about small bands of survivors, perhaps families or strangers bound by common desperation. In later stages the first neo-native fauna begins to appear, and eventually the anthroids (humanlike simulacra created by the aliens) slither from the wastes. The second era is called DESPAIR.

The third era is the rise of alien civilisation, and at its heart are the curious beings born in the atomic cradle of a thousand ground zeros. Is there any world for humanity outside of this extraterrestrial Eden? And if we should choose the world which our invaders have designed, what fantasies and unnatural adventure will meet us beyond the dark? The third era is called PARADISE.

Like most of your stuff this makes my brain feel inadequate.

That's funny, because I felt really good about my February contest entry until your sand-rays came along and ate up all my winged folk. Dammit.

[Steerpike]

The third era sounds the most fascinating and the most difficult to conceive of (feels almost post-Singularity).  DESPAIR feels like the "default" setting somehow.

My sand-rays may be creepy but they don't have the eerie, uncanny shadowiness of the Gresol.