Booly and the Wolf

Scene one: The Awe of Booly

“Squelch, glopsch, splish”, went the marsh as it sucked on the bare, brown feet of Booly Lidda. The boy peered forward intently, straining his moss-green eyes to gather any light rays that might puncture the vapor clouds coalesced around rows of dark, dripping bushes. His eyes, wide and round as teacups, were no less moist than his sopping surroundings: As thunder rumbled softly in the lightning-laced sky behind him, like sparks jumping from the rubbed underbelly of a purring lynx, his eyes shimmered with unshed tears of joie de vivre.

“Why?”, Booly croaked involuntarily, as if holding back sobs, “The world, why is it so beautiful? I c-can’t compreh-hend it.” Stammering as his overwhelming awe reverberated through every cell in his body, he began shaking with sheer excitement. A soft splash sounded as he fell to his knees, and finally flung open the floodgates of his emotional reservoir. Releasing a torrent of salty tears, his heart fluttered inside his bare, pulsing breast, pumping out pure waves of joy.

Just then the storm overtook and engulfed him in a torrent of its own, drowning out his melodious laughter. He fell forward onto the pale palms of his hands, momentarily choking on an inhaled drop of the fresh, fulsome rain.

“Crack! kaBOOM!”

Suddenly, electricity surged through Booly’s body, tensing his every muscle, as a brilliant stroke of green lightning shattered a nearby tree, sending burning splinters sizzling through the air. He sprang to his feet and sprinted away like a startled hare, fear and exhilaration coursing through his veins.

Booly’s ears had almost stopped ringing from the calamitous thunder clap by the time he hauled himself, sore and saturated, over the rim of his beloved cave home. He collapsed, like a heart-pierced deer in mid flight, landing in sound slumber against a solid wall, warmed by firelight. An old man sat tending the fire, a silver locket slung around his neck.

Scene Two: the ARK

Autonomous-orbital Repository of Knowledge [ARK]: General Daily Report:

Date= 2880/6/4.11

Time since launch (yr/mo/day)= 674/9/3.47

Battery charge level (% available capacity)= 100

Battery capacity, current/peak= 0.67

Solar charge system current/peak efficiency= 0.53

Thorium-232 fuel reserve= full

Ovum cryo-chamber temperature= stable

Seed preservation chamber moisture content %= 0

DNA hard drives= functional

ARK Topographic and Infrared Analysis of Active Supervolcanic Calderas [ASCs] (change in elevation [Δe (feet)] and temperature [Δt (*F)] since ARK launch)

Yellowstone

Δe= +30.23

Δt= +5.3

Long Valley

Δe= +29.87

Δt= +4.5

Valles

Δe= +23.92

Δt= +3.4

Toba

Δe= +33.5

Δt= +6.3

Taupo

Δe= +35.73

Δt= +9.8

Bennet Lake Complex

Δe= +4.67

Δt= +0.8

Pacana

Δe= +3.82

Δt= +1.1

Cerro Galan

Δe= +2.94

Δt= +0.76

Campi Flegrei

Δe= +2.99

Δt= +1.2

Mount Tambora

Δe= +4.1

Δt= +1.3

Kurile Lake

Δe= +3.29

Δt= +0.87

Kikai

Δe= +1.32

Δt= +0.23

Macauley Island

Δe= +2.58

Δt= +0.73

ARK Gravitational Wave Detector (GWD) Daily Near Earth Object (NEO) Scan:

Objects of Interest (Palermo Technical Hazard Index [PTHI] >0)= 1

Name= 29075 (1950 DA)

Equatorial coordinates (RA/Dec.)= 12h 26m 37.5s/ -01°40'06.9"

Velocity (km/s)= 10.36

Acceleration (mm/s^2)= 0.22

Diameter (km)= 1.2

ETA to Earth (within geocentric sphere of <0.005 AU radius)= 2880/12/5.67

Impact Probability= 1.2 e-4

PTHI= 2.36

Professor Gregorius’ Prognosis

I have no way of knowing whether human civilization has endured to this potentially epochal moment, given the state of humanity and the accelerating decay of planet Earth I witnessed before my soul fled to the stars.

Is, “humanity”, the accurate term anymore? No, certainly the cyborgs that dominated the workforce and political offices differed substantially from classical humanity. I thank God every day that the World Government Gifted Children Division (WGGCD) recognized that my cognitive development, and thus my potential social utility score (PSUS), could be impaired by the then routine neonatal artificial organ replacement therapy (NAORT). NAORT was the ostensible answer to the ongoing organ failure crisis precipitated by the years of environmental toxin exposure, inbreeding, and natural and artificial irradiation which fractured the human genome. I, thank God, won the genetic lottery and got to keep my organs, including my most precious heart.

I view the heart as the essential characteristic of an individual. As the inscription reads on my family heirloom, a heart-shaped silver locket, “Heart and Soul are one”. People have always known it was more than an atrioventricular pump. That is why “they” (I will get to “them” in a moment) literally excised it from the “proletarians”, completing their conversion to fully programmable automatons.

Though the Automated Global Industrial Complex (AGIC) depends on ten billion such cyborg-slaves, I would count the true human population in the hundreds. Most belong to an utterly avaricious and hedonistic cult, the last remnant of a “ruling class”, known commonly in the previous century as, “the Illuminati”, that never had true subjects, and now rules no one including itself.

By the age of five, I recognized that these last remaining humans would soon destroy themselves with their dysfunctional debauchery. Somewhat later, I knew, the mindless maw of the AGIC would gnaw out the remaining substance of the Earth. I would have lost all hope if not for a particularly perplexing ritual that the cultists delighted in: the servant cyborgs were programmed to occasionally place a book entitled “Bible” on a serving dish to be presented to a cultist before a meal, whereupon the cultist would do all in its power to destroy and defile the book, often working up an appetite for subsequent dishes in this way. Naturally curious, I wanted to know what was in a “Bible”, the only book I had ever seen. When I finally managed to procure one, it answered many of my questions about life, and showed me the way to preserve life on Earth.

I would start by collecting eggs, seeds, sperm, spores, etc from the relatively few surviving species, preserving them in their smallest form. I would then design a container to keep them all viable for at least a millennium in outer space. I figured that Earth orbit would not only be the safest place for the seeds of life, considering the probability of asteroid impact and the growing concern of ASCs, but also necessary for widely dispersing the first wave of new life (grass seeds, spores, desiccated bateria, etc.) on a potentially sterilized planet several centuries thence.

Years into the project, which I nostalgically named the Autonomous-orbital Repository of Knowledge (ARK), I realized what a shame it would be to have humanity begin its new life as naive as Adam and Eve, and potentially repeat their mistakes, so I took a few years off biological preservation to focus on cultural preservation, amassing and distilling all human wisdom that had not been destroyed by that time.

As a prisoner of their system, I needed the cultists’ support to complete the ARK. Though their reasonless minds are more unpredictable than the exact date of an asteroid-Earth collision in the next million years, the preposterous proposition of building “biological amusement parks” on other planets, a grotesque caricature of the hunting preserves of ancient English nobility, appealed to them. It would have been no use explaining their imminent demise, which they were stupid enough to know would have been precluded by their immortality, a delusion baser than the statistical comfort ones slightly smarter may have sought.

Even then, did Noah calculate the probability of continuous downpour for forty days and forty nights (a one in three trillion chance) before building his Ark? Obviously not. Anyone with even half my IQ should be capable of realizing that laws beyond mere probability govern this universe.

Scene Three: The Yellowstone Wolf

A mournful howl haunted the sun-stricken waste of the Yellowstone Plateau, rasping from the parched jaws of a lone wolf as she limped lopsidedly between plumes of noxious gases spewing from jagged vents. Pausing again to howl, she released the putrescent piece of elk flesh she was hauling to her pups, and shook off some of the yellow dust caking her once luminous gray fur. No howls reciprocated her call; She limped on.

Progress was slow, but she had not had to go far to find the nearest carcass, and soon she stood before her den. Lowering her muzzle to sniff the air, she reeled back as brimstone vapors burned her nostrils; the deadly gas had breached her birthing chamber. Whimpering, with tail low between her legs, she limped on in search of water, and a new mate, too delirious to detect the faint human odor wafting from the den.

Her pups perished, water, beyond breathable air, was now her overwhelming need, and she had always known where it welled up from the ground to sate her thirst: the ancient Old Faithful geyser had remained true to its name long after the other geysers, not being connected to an independent water source, became too unreliable, or ceased altogether. The lakes gradually evaporated as the North American continent was deforested, severing the arboreal aquifer so vital to inland life. In the days when some still vaguely cared about “the environment”, a hot spring resort, styled like an Islamic hammam, was constructed around the geyser where the rich could bathe in bubbling pools of ever-replenished, mineral-rich water: why let it go to waste? As an afterthought, to improve the view from the resort, the constant runoff, often contaminated with expensive colognes and perfumes, was piped to earth ponds, providing a water source for what few fauna lingered on the desiccating landscape.

It was towards these watering holes that the she-wolf now dragged herself, desperately clinging to her last life-line of hope. She collapsed, entirely enervated, on the rim of what was now nothing more than a depression of hot mud.

With nothing left to thirst for, the she-wolf finally acquiesced to her dry doom. She lay still until starlight bathed the stark landscape about her, twinkling in her still watchful eyes. Her glazed eyes stared blankly up at the plume of steam pouring from the hammam above, the most the ancient geyser could muster after more than a millennium of reliable, abundant eruptions.

Two stars caught her fading attention; one, after a faint, ear-twitching rumble, was rising on top of the plume of steam; the other, was growing.