TheExtinction

IKTR count: 2

“Now, I know what you’re going to say, Gertrude. Odd doors are a sign of the Spiral; empty worlds tend towards the Lonely; and eschatology is almost literally the study of the End.

But this is different. I feel it. This fear is new. This is a fear of extinction. Of change. It used to be part of the End, perhaps; when the end of humanity was to be the end of all things. But now – th-the fear is not of a rapture or a revelation. It is of catastrophic change. A change in our world that will wipe out what it means to be us, and leave something else in its place.

Mankind will warp the world so much it kills us all, and leaves only a thousand years of plastic behind. Technology will strip us of what it means to be human, and leave us something alien and cold. We will press a button that in a moment will destroy everything we have ever been. Animals are witnessing the end of their entire species within a single generation. These are new fears, Gertrude, and a new power is rising to consume them. The Extinction. The Terrible Change. The Future-Without-Us.”

- Adelard Dekker, The Magnus Archives episode #134, Time of Revelation

“Fauna: A mouldering seagull.

Larger than any related specimen to be found before the Anthropocene age, this bird has been rendered flightless by the tightly woven plastic netting that winds around and around its torso, digging into the skin beneath the feathers and bulging over the strange lumps and tumors that cover it.

Its feathers have turned an oily black, and its vestigial eyes are pale and sightless, relying instead on the sounds its prey makes as they traverse the noisy junkpiles of discarded landscape.

Its beak has become hard and its edges are serrated, allowing it to tear apart the tin cans and hard plastics that shield its food with ease.

Its legs are long and many-jointed, allowing it to move across the uneven ground, and its throat is blocked with concrete, preventing it from crying and letting it move among the ruins in complete silence.

It nests in the rusted-out hollows of fleeing cars, constructing intricate shelters for its young out of corpse-hair and wiring. Its eggs are rusty, covered in slime, and its chicks are born with plastic rings around their necks.

They smell like ammonia and salt, and their name is meaningless, as there is no longer such a thing as the sea.

Leah hides behind a cracked vending machine, waiting for the thing to pass. She knows it can hear the rapid scratch of her broken pencil, but it is all she can do to get it down, get it all down on paper – another futile warning of a future that is already here.”

- The Archivist, The Magnus Archives episode 145, “Epoch”


Stolen: 2