The Young Man's Last Tale

"In my world," the Young Man began.

He opened his mouth to say more, but when he looked at those gathered at the vast round table, he found himself unable to speak. He blinked back tears and studied their faces. They waited patiently for him to continue. He felt truly young for the first time among them. In the past, he'd sometimes behaved arrogantly and rude towards them, not respecting the wisdom they had gathered through their many millenia of experience. Now, he was humbled.

Most of them had seen so much more than he. Their experiences had shaped them so that they never seemed too high or too low. But he had never felt lower than he did now. He felt it to his core. He wondered if he'd ever find the neutral place of most of his elders, and even if he really wanted to. He'd always taken pride in his passion, and felt that to abandon it for stability would be to lose himself completely. But perhaps that was how they survived.

They met like this every million years or so although none of them knew exactly why, and the meetings were never planned in advance. But the time would come, and they would find themselves here again, seated at the round table, speaking or not speaking as they chose. In the past, he had crackled with an energy that was the envy of everyone. They were drawn to his boldness, his imagination, and the sheer vision he'd created for his world. He'd shown them the life he'd made there--the way his plan had allowed it to thrive in such abundance across his world, the endless variety of his creations and how they multiplied until they covered nearly every inch of it. Even in the deepest caverns below the darkest oceans, life flourished. Even in the highest peaks of the coldest mountains, it persisted.

From the beginning, he'd had a grand vision for his world and patiently waited for it to evolve into his expectations. At first, it had been little more than a seething, boiling, freezing rock where cataclysmic collisions with celestial objects were a constant occurrence. But in time, it cooled. The collisions slowed to a rate that allowed his world to achieve the stability it needed to flourish.

He remembered how he'd watched so breathlessly when the first vestiges of life formed deep within a hypothermic vent of that prehistoric ocean. He'd held his breath watching that single cell replicate into another. He'd known it wasn't much compared to the awesome abundance of advanced life created by many of his peers, but this was his world. This was life on his world! He'd set it all up so meticulously in anticipation of this event, and yet still when it happened...it seemed like a miracle.

From that single cell, life spread not like wildfire, but like a swarm of wildfires. It was the most ambitious, single-minded, tenacious thing he had ever witnessed. He knew he had been the one to set the variables in place, but had not anticipated its power. In a few thousand years, that single replicated cell had changed the landscape of his world from a drab, dusty place into one of a maelstrom of colors, where creatures of all shapes and sizes flew, ran, slithered, crawled, and swam across its surface.

The Young Man had been content and satisfied with his world for billions of years before something happened that attracted his attention like nothing else before it. He watched as a new kind of life took hold of his world. This too had been part of the vision of his original design, but like life itself, it seemed a miracle to witness it taking shape. From furry creatures that swung from the trees of thick jungles, they changed into hairless beasts that walked the land on two feet. They had hands able to manipulate their environment, and brains with the ability to adapt and thrive in the harshest of climates. In time, these creatures developed the quality he had been waiting for.

Consciousness--the ability to be aware of themselves as nothing else on his world had before. They used this talent to master their environment to a level that no other creature before them had ever approached. In time, they emerged from the shelter of caves to form villages and later towns and cities. As they progressed, they accomplished amazing things the Young Man had not foreseen. They were creatures of unparalleled productivity, but at once, even from the beginning, he saw their powers of destruction were at least as great.

As the technologies they invented became more and more powerful, as their tools evolved from stone axes into telescopes capable of seeing half the Universe and flying machines that could take them around the world in a few hours, the Young Man was at once amazed and terrified by this creature he had, by his own hand, set into motion. He wanted to warn them to slow down. There was no need to hurry. They could be the masters of this world forever. There was no need to destroy one another over petty differences. He wished they would follow the examples of some of his other creatures. They were content to be where they were. They simply took life as it came with no worries for the future and no particular dissatisfaction with their lives.

But he also knew these "humans" as they called themselves were simply following the blueprint that made them great to begin with. He was often tempted to help them get along with one another more harmoniously, to try to convince them of the foolishness of many of their actions. But he could not. It was understood that none of his kind ever interfered after they had set their world in motion. They were watchers, and most watched their creations with detached interest. But the Young Man was different. He loved his creations. He felt they were extensions of himself, and he experienced their joys and sorrows as intensely as his own.

His humans soon became so numerous they could barely sustain themselves. The gases released from  many of their production plants clogged the atmosphere in a blanket so thick, the world began to suffocate beneath its own stored heat. At the same time, numerous bloody wars broke out between the humans' nations as the resources needed to sustain them dwindled because of their sheer numbers. There were those among the humans who stepped forward to try to end the violence and to suggest ways they might share their resources without fighting or killing. These were wise men and women whom The Young Man applauded, but they were inevitably shouted down by the rabble who only wanted things to return to how they used to be, and believed they were entitled to it because their race, religion, or nationality was superior.

In spite of everything, The Young Man believed until the end that his humans would adapt. They always had before. When problems arose, they found solutions. That had been the human way from the beginning. When the melting Arctic glaciers caused flooding in a place called New York City that drowned nearly a million people, and when one of the most powerful typhoons in all the worlds' history, fueled by the overly warm Pacific Ocean, destroyed Tokyo, and when the countries called Pakistan and India were annihilated by nuclear bombs, he thought they would cease the violence. Rationality would prevail and mankind would rise above its violent nature once again in order that it might survive and continue to prosper. And for a time,  it did.

A single governing body was formed to guide mankind through its greatest crisis. A brilliant, wise, and kind man was named President of this government, and he began to take authoritative steps to put the world back on the right direction. People heralded him as the Great Peacemaker, and after all the warfare and man-created natural disasters, it appeared that all the nations of the world were finally ready to come together to solve their problems. But the tenuous hopes of mankind were so fragile that when the President was assassinated by a mentally unstable zealot, everything he had built fell apart like a house of cards. The wars began anew, and soon the entire world became enveloped in conflict. Nuclear detonations and deaths on a scale never before witnessed in human history became a daily occurrence.

When the violence finally spent itself, the human population was drastically reduced, and many of those that were left died slowly of radiation poisoning, epidemics of every description, and starvation. The few million who were left eventually fled underground. All the technology they had gathered for centuries was lost. All the art and beauty created by human imagination was destroyed. The ruins of their cities were poisonous, smoking wastelands where nothing stirred in the day, and only the heartiest predators emerged at night. The civilization mankind had taken thousands of years to build was obliterated in less than a decade. Those humans who were left were forced to burrow underground to survive.

Watching them, the Young Man knew he had been finally right after all. His humans, the creatures of whom he was the most proud, whom he loved like himself, had survived in spite of everything--even in the face of their own penchant for self-destruction. He watched his survivors grow in strength and numbers as the years passed. A century went by before they dared to live on the Earth's surface again. They formed colonies and their numbers began to grow once more, slowly at first and then exponentially faster.

New cities began to appear in the world. They lacked the grandeur of their predecessors--humble buildings made of stone and hardened dirt--but cities just the same. The sight of them filled the Young Man's heart with more hope than he'd felt in a very long time. Perhaps the violence of their past was only a stage--like a tumultuous adolescence followed by a responsible adulthood.

But then the new human colonies began to feud over the boundaries of their land and who should control the still meager resources of their scorched world. The feuds erupted into wars, and before the Young Man's disbelieving eyes, his humans were killing themselves again. It was then that he finally understood that these people would never learn. They were eternally flawed, and he could really blame no one but himself. If he'd only set those initial variables up a little differently, then surely the outcome would have been different. If they could have only retained the tenacious, ingenious qualities that had made them masters of their world without the selfish, entitled, self-destructive streak that was their undoing.

For centuries, he'd watched them destroy themselves again and again, and every war was like a fresh barb to his soul. Even after they'd reduced their world to rubble and poisoned it nearly beyond repair in the process, they still could not move past their impulse to fight and murder one another. The Young Man felt rage building within him and was overcome by a desire to punish his creations--to do more than punish them--to annihilate them so thoroughly he would never have to watch them repeat their pathetic pattern of self destruction again. In his rage, he found a very large asteroid floating harmlessly in the reaches of space, and he flung it with all his strength at the world he loved.

The asteroid struck somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean with the force of a million atom bombs. A shock wave flowed from the impact, destroying everything in its path for thousands of miles in every direction. The most powerful earthquakes and tidal waves the world had ever experienced rocked the land in the aftermath of the explosion. Great clouds of dust and ash rose into the sky, blocking the light from the sun so thickly that the Earth became a frigid, icy place where only the most few organisms could possibly survive. Humans were not one of them. Their revived civilization was utterly destroyed, and as the new ice age persisted, they went from an endangered species to becoming completely extinct.

As the Young Man watched the last human on his world die, he grieved as he had never grieved before. Why had he let his anger get the best of him? he asked himself. He'd broken his vow to never interfere with his world, and in the process, he'd destroyed the beings he'd come to love. He tried to tell himself it was for the best. They were impetuous, impulsive creatures who could never get out of their own way. They were doomed to doing nothing but destroying themselves over and over again. He had only put them out of their misery. But he knew he was fooling himself. He couldn't reconcile his actions. How could he have done such a thing? Why had he let them anger him so much that he'd broken a sacred vow to punish them?

*******************

He gathered himself, blinking away his tears and prepared to address the round table again. But the expressions on their faces told him they'd already seen everything that had happened in his mind. Some regarded him with pity while others stared at him with accusing faces. But the faces of the oldest were inscrutable.

The eldest of them, the one they called The Old Man, pronounced his punishment in two terse sentences. "You have broken the vow," he said. "You will no longer sit among us." He rose to leave, and was quickly joined by many others. To the Young Man,  they all looked so bored. It was their boredom and not the pronouncement of his exile that angered him.

He stood and yelled at them "What would any of you have done?" he said.

"Nothing, of course," one of them answered. "That is what we do. We set a world in motion and then we let it go." Bewildered by the question, the man shook his head and left.

"But it's not enough!" the Young Man roared. "Can't any of you see? It's not enough!"

A very old, but still beautiful woman sitting next to him placed her hand on his shoulders.

"Can't you see, Young Man?" she said. "The fact that you destroyed your humans only proves you share their nature. You loved them so much that you became just like them--full of energy and passion, but also with anger and the capacity for self-destruction."

The Young Man opened his mouth to protest. But then he knew she spoke the truth. It was so obvious. How could he have not seen it before? But the insight offered him no comfort. He began to weep, and the old, beautiful woman held him against her chest.

"Don't despair, Young Man," she said. "We've all made mistakes. You will learn from this, and in time you will become the Man you aspire to be. "Go back to your world. Start over. But this time, let your passion guide you, but not rule you. Do you understand?"

"I think I do."

She held him until he'd cried himself out, and the round table emptied until only the two of them were left.