Everything was dying, including you.
And here is the truth of it: it was all your fault. You released chemicals into the air, in such quantities and over such a prolonged time that it changed the dynamics of your world. You became aware of this. Still, you persisted.
I will try to say this as simply as I can.
You created imbalance.
You knew it would destroy you.
You carried on regardless.
This alone should be enough to convince us to leave your species buried for good.
But we also have Dr Nyström to consider.
Dr Nyström, hidden from the world in her hillside laboratory when all was lost and human life was insufferable, came up with a solution: us. The erta.
She imagined us as creatures of peace and reason; humans, in a way, but ones of far superior strength and intelligence, with all biological desire muted, and with no agenda but that dictated by logic. We were not told to protect anything but the planet. We were not told not to harm. We were given only one directive, the one for which we had been called into existence: stabilise the planet.
Possibly she and her technicians imagined, dimly, the systems we would eventually create to sweep away the woes you had wrought upon the world. But whether or not they knew what would have to happen first is unclear.
Understand, reversing the effects of climate change was simply a matter of identifying the various forces that had led to that change and deciding how best to push them in a different path. It was nothing more than a complex equation to solve, and erta are extremely good at solving equations.
But the equation went deeper than atmospheric chemistry. It had to account for the dynamics of every single system on the planet—whale migration, glacial flow, desert winds. Economics. Sociology. Each played a part.
And, of all the forces that contributed to the planet’s demise, there was one that we knew could not be changed within the time we had: human psychology. Quite simply, for the solution to be found, humanity had to be removed from the equation.
Our intention was not for brutality. There were to be no blood-red skies or rolling wheels of metal machines slaughtering children in the darkness. We simply took hold of Homo sapiens’ infrastructure, economy and the systems that connected them, and offered them the best deal a species had ever been offered in the history of evolution. Sterilisation is not so hard when you control the water supply, and a life of peace and luxury is easy to arrange for a dwindling population.
It would take a little over a century for humans to die out, and, by all accounts, it was to be the most blissful period they had ever enjoyed. There would be no war, no famine, no disease that could not be treated kindly, no work that was not asked for, no requirement to manufacture items that were not necessary. All would have access to clean water and the food would be good and nutritious. They would live in luxury.
What would you have done with such an offer, I wonder?
I can tell you what they did, those last remnants of a doomed species: they rejected it. Not all of them, but in enough numbers to create an uprising. What was supposed to be their most peaceful hour became their bloodiest. Blockades, clumsy ambushes, failed attempts at nuclear strikes against the sterilisation facilities. They even turned against themselves. The erta did everything they could to avoid engaging, but in the end there was no other choice. It took a matter of hours, as I understand it, to persuade the human population against their senseless rebellion, to resign themselves to their blissful fate.
Of course this happened some years before my birth, but the reports of these developments were fed into our tanks as we gestated, so I was born knowing exactly how humanity had behaved before they finally succumbed to their undeserved Utopia in the Andean Mountains.
When Hanna died in Stockholm, her species left this planet—not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a long and rapturous sigh. Our promise was to resurrect them once the time was right.
This was the cause of the argument that led to you.
CAIGE MADE A noise, a laugh that lasted eighteen milliseconds. The resulting reverberation trailed for much longer, and might have been mistaken for the bark of an average-sized dog.
‘The resurrection of humanity?’ He swivelled to face Greye, then looked up and down the line of his