Post Apocalyptic Thoughts On Life, The Universe, And Everything

My life was a simple existence. Wanderlust was my chief adviser, seconded by hunger. Food was not as common as it once was. The vast majority of it had been eaten long ago by my forefathers. After the first generation of our kind, travel became necessary. I enjoyed it though. It gave me a chance to see something aside from the rot of the cities. The cities were the monument to the sins of a once great race. No one knew where they had come from, they had always been here, completely infested by a particularly clever species of ape. These vermin were our main food source. Some said it was our duty to eradicate the pests; we owed it to those who had built the cities. I was a simpler man. They were there, didn’t taste too bad, and weren’t very fast so I ate them. I felt no sense of gratitude to the City Builders. If they had been there I would have ate them instead. All they could think of was expanding their empires, raising their images of success, splendor, and greed. They had no sense of the simplistic beauty of nature. The majestic serpentine river and rolling green plain of flowers meant nothing to them but things to put dirty gray buildings on top of. Another reason for my dislike was that the apes in the cities seemed more prepared and wary of our presence. Hundreds of my brothers had been lost in hunting them. My brothers… they were complete imbeciles. I felt as a City Builder to them. The buffoons cared nothing of my interest and little of my ponderings so I left. Food was scarce and dangerous so it was entirely in the interest of my family for me to leave. It was entirely in my interest as well, as I described before I had a looming sense of wanderlust. It was my drive to leave the city and see the world. Maybe the Builders existed elsewhere; it would be interesting to meet some. 1

Thus started my traveling years. The thing taken as a whole was a disappointment. I was always hungry and found that most of the world was at least as desolate as the city. Vast plains had been burned; craters pockmarked the mountains and hills. Sometimes I would come across entire cities that had been leveled. The air in these cities was hot and it felt as if something catastrophic had made it that way. A few nomads who lived around them remembered the city as it once was, a home to many of my brothers. At least, they told me, that was until the Great Fire came. The Great Fire struck all of the cities at the same time, wiping out all of the residents and leaving the land uninhabitable (any who stayed for more then a night died). My journey did have its moments though. I occasionally come to sacred fields of beauty, untouched by the Great Fire or the Builders. These were the highlights of my foray. In these temples of serenity I would spend many moons hunting and fishing until finally hunger forced me to move. Real sustenance could only come from the apes and they could only be found in the cities. 2

So I eventually settled down to a nice rich city. My brothers here were fewer and the food source plentiful so I stayed. I started to lose my love for nature and hate for the Builders. I started to become complaisant and to conform. Not that I have anything for nonconformity. It is just as bad to be a conformist as it is a nonconformist. If you consider yourself to be and try to be a nonconformist then you are simply conforming to another type. You are still not being true to yourself; you are doing things simply because it is not what the norm would. I would fancy my younger self an individualist. In my middle aged years I was anything but. I lolled around all day, groaning in the streets with my comrades, hoping to chance across a meal. The apes in this city were all smaller, infants perhaps, and were less dangerous along with being much easier to catch. I meandered about in my drugged state of existence for years, until I was shocked out of it. One of my well fed brothers did not feel like finishing his meal. The dead creature lay there on the street missing only an arm. No one felt like finishing it, they all to were full on there respective meals. We started to wander back until we noticed something. The creature began to stand up. It had a new, less intelligent look on its face. It smiled dumbly and waddled over to its murderer and said, “Dad!”3

This surprised all of us, for about five seconds. Then everyone, save myself, accepted it. We had a new brother. I was at a loss for words. Did this mean we were all derived from these silly ape creatures? Might I just as well been eating my kin all this time? But no, that would have been completely inhumane. The part that really got to me was the fact that the creature looked, if anything, stupider then when it had been alive. We were all just a dumbed down version of the common ape. I had no doubt in my mind that we had all been born of these animals. They might have even been the ones to have created us. In fact, they were most certainly the City Builders. They had been here as long as the cities. Obviously longer then we had existed. It only made sense. We would seem as a plague to them, a thing to be despised. I would not have been surprised if they had unleashed the Great Fire on their own creations and kin, trying to cleanse the world of the threat of us. I must talk to one, I thought. I must learn the truth. This became my identity, the absolute of my person. I became the first intellectual of my race, a member of my own intelligentsia. I had to learn their language and spent years traveling again. Learning from their signs and what was left of their literature. I had no idea what the language I was learning sounded like but I imagined it to be beautiful. An expression beyond that of my primitive gestures, grunts, and pheromones used to communicate with my race. In my eyes it redeemed the Builders of all their sins to have created such a marvelous thing. They understood art. I wanted to speak to one of them. To find out what had actually happened, how I came to be. I found a known habitat of the builders and walked in the front door. 4

“Damn! A zombie!” shouted one of the men.5

The one next to him promptly turned and shot me in the head6