Manifesto

THE MAN WHO KILLED THE WORLD It was there, then it was gone. A swirling mass of white and topaz rotating in an inky expanse gone. Vanished, right before my eyes. My home my family my country my planet no more. I say out loud to myself that it must be a dream, a hallucination. Three hundred twenty-three solitary days in space. Have I finally lost my mind? A ping. Faint but discernible. Like a magnet making contact with metal. I gaze through the porthole what is it? Tubular, possibly titanium. Only one way to find out. I don my spacesuit, attach the safety cord and venture into space. Once more I glance at where earth used to be. Nothing there but the cold blackness of I feel a tear trickle down my left cheek. Safely back inside the space station I remove my helmet to better examine the anomaly. A bottle of sorts? I remove the twist cap and find, to my utter surprise, a note. No, too long for a note, more like a letter. Or a manifesto! It reads: To the sole survivor of planet earth Greetings! As you read this I am already halfway home. Home? you ask. Well, that's a bit complicated. Suffice it to say I am not of your world, or shall I say, former world. We live just beyond your galaxy and exist in an alternate dimension. Like I said, complicated. I was sent to your world some five thousand years ago, from the time of your earliest written records. We became aware that sentient, intelligent life had at last come to exist on your planet. You then became of interest to us a fascination. However, it quickly became evident you were a species unworthy of continuation. You called yourselves the Human Race, yet you were hardly humane. You raped and plundered, thieved and cheated, conquered and destroyed. You were capable of such beautiful dreams, yet you indulged in horrific nightmares. You showed little regard for what you considered to be lesser life forms. Blind ones! They had so much to teach you. To our great consternation, some of these disappeared over the centuries. Your greed and lust resulted in their everlasting extinction. And now, your turn has come. Judgment has been pronounced. Oblivion is the sentence that was determined upon you. It causes us great pain to know that all life on earth will now cease to exist. It will be an issue for debate on my world for many years to come. A moral dilemma such as we have never known. For the past fifty years we have worked on a mathematical equation that would allow us to produce enough anti-matter in this dimension to annihilate your home world. No easy task, let me tell you. And no way to test, since the introduction of anti-matter into your space must ultimately result in immediate and complete annihilation. As you saw with your own eyes, the experiment was a success. Now you are wondering what about me? We will permit you to live out the remainder of your natural life aboard the space station. Artificial. Sterile. Cold. Your thoughts and memories will torment you as you contemplate a world you once knew, a people who once occupied space and existed in the time continuum. You are the last of your kind, a remnant from the past, all alone in the universe without hope. One last thing. On our world, in our dimension, we have peace. No one gets sick. No one dies. We understand The Creator of your world offered you this prospect, but you rejected it in order to pursue independence and freedom from the moral laws that govern life on all worlds, in every dimension. How sad. How terribly, terribly sad. Adieu MY GOD. WHAT HAVE WE DONE? what have they * For the manifesto contest 12/28/24