Tell Us What Happens Next

Let us tell you about the story of human history.

As far back as we can remember, there was a hero, or at least, a hero to your kind anyway. His name was Gilgamesh. Or was it, Galgimesh? Forgive our memory. We are very old, older than your kind could ever imagine. We were around before the first animals even stepped on land.

Anyway, this guy, Galgimesh, was a king. In those days humans had begun gathering themselves into great clusters beside rivers. They call it city. And by the way, rivers are dear friends of ours, you see. Civilizations have always trusted them. Somehow, through all the shouting, ceremony, and the usual human theatrics, the people decided this man should rule them.

In any case, this Galgimesh fellow was a very impressive king. Quite tall, if we recall correctly. Or perhaps very wide. Humans were smaller back then, so it is difficult to remember.

The important thing is that he ruled the city of Uruk, which at the time was one of the largest gatherings of humans on the planet. Several thousand of them, all packed together beside the rivers like ducklings.

Now, Galgimesh was not a particularly good king at first. Very loud. Very fond of wrestling. Humans complained about him constantly. So the gods, humans loved inventing those, decided to create someone to keep him in check.

His name was Enkidu. Or Enkidoodle. Something like that.

Enkidu lived in the wilderness with the animals. He ran with gazelles, ate grass, and probably paid his taxes on time. Eventually the humans lured him into the city through a complicated strategy involving bread, beer, and a woman whose job description we can no longer remember.

Anyway, Enkidu arrived in Uruk and immediately challenged Galgimesh to a fight.

The two of them wrestled in the street for several hours, possibly days. It was very dramatic. At one point we believe someone threw a chair.

Eventually they became best friends. Humans do this often. They try to destroy each other and then decide they are brothers. A third one comes, and they all try to destroy each other again.

After that, the two of them went on many heroic adventures. In one instance, they fought a giant forest guardian named Humbaba. This is where our story turns sour. Humbaba, you see, was one of our guards. A deeply kind and gentle creature. He guarded our kin of very valuable trees, which the heroes cut down immediately after their victory. How ironic, the first story of mankind is one of exploitation.

Later, a goddess named Ishtar proposed marriage to Galgimesh. He declined, listing several extremely awkward reasons why this would be a bad idea. This made the goddess furious, which as you might imagine is generally not advisable.

She sent a gigantic bull to destroy the city. We remember that part clearly because the bull was very loud.

Galgi, Galgim… the king and Enkidu killed it. And unfortunately this upset the gods again, and they decided that Enkidu had to die, which felt a bit unfair if you ask us.

After losing his friend, ah we remember now, Gilgamesh became very sad and began searching for the secret of immortality. He eventually found it. It was a plant.

Unfortunately a snake ate it. Snakes do that. Humans were extremely upset about this outcome, but honestly we thought it was rather funny.

To the west of this strange land was another strange land. Across the Red Sea lived a group of humans who called themselves Egypt. Again, they packed themselves along another river. 

One day, they decided to build a gigantic triangle made of stone. We never really understood what it’s for. The humans after them don’t really know what it’s for. All we know is there was a king, they called him Pharo. Apparently, he was also a god. We don’t understand how it works, but it works. They put the dead people in there. 

Then, they put a cat statue in front of the pyramid. The cat was not very cat-looking though. For a long time we believed the triangle was simply the house for a very important cat.

Afterwards, they built a few more. Humans believed stacking rocks into triangles would help them live forever. It did not.

Humans are rather obsessed with living forever. Perhaps, they just want to be like us, what is there not to enjoy about such an arrangement?

Far, far to the East lived another vast civilization called China. It was so large we often wondered how any single human could rule all of it.

Eventually one did. His name was Qin Shi Huang.

He was quite a character, this Qin Shi Huang. A man whose ambition was rivaled only by his paranoia. Obsessed with uniting that enormous land under one banner, he declared himself the First Emperor of China. The title sounded impressive. Humans are very fond of impressive titles.

To his credit, he did manage to bring a surprising amount of order to things. He standardized weights and measures, regulated the width of cart axles, and even forced everyone to write using the same symbols. We never quite understood that last one. Humans draw many small lines and squiggles and somehow call it language. But they seemed very pleased with it.

Not all of his ideas were so easy to understand.

At one point he gathered many scholars and had them buried alive. He also burned a great many books. We have observed humans for a very long time, and we still do not understand this habit of destroying knowledge. It happens in almost every society.

But Qin Shi Huang’s most fascinating obsession was not power. It was immortality.

Humans have been trying to escape death for as long as we have known them. Qin Shi Huang, however, tried harder than most. He sent expeditions across the seas searching for magical islands and elixirs of eternal life. Alchemists brought him many strange potions.

One of them convinced him that drinking liquid mercury would allow him to live forever.

We watched this with great interest. Of course, it did not work.

Meanwhile, the emperor began constructing an enormous tomb beneath the earth. If one cannot avoid death, humans reason, one may as well arrive in the afterlife prepared. We wonder if humans got any reviews from humans from the afterlife.

Qin Shi Huang’s tomb contained rivers of mercury, vast chambers of treasure, and thousands upon thousands of clay soldiers. We believe humans call them the Terracotta Army. Perhaps, they were for the scholar friends he sent on the way before him. Though clay soldiers make rather poor conversationalists. The emperor may have been lonely.

None of them, unfortunately, could drink the mercury for him.

A thousand years after that, in the same land, a ferocious man emerged from the Mongolian plateaus. His name was Khun Genis, if we are not mistaken. Ah, it has been far too long.

Anyway, he had a rough upbringing. His mother was kidnapped into another family only to be abandoned. His wife was later taken from him by a rival tribe. It took considerable effort to rescue her. Perhaps because of these events, once he rose to power he banned the kidnapping and selling of women.

That being said, he was also a violent man. Very violent.

This Khun Genis possessed a remarkable talent for convincing other humans to follow him into battle. Soon the scattered tribes of the steppe gathered beneath him. Horsemen rode across the grasslands like storms, appearing where no one expected them. Humans living in distant kingdoms often believed the horizon itself had begun attacking them.

Before long, his armies had swept across an astonishing portion of the world. Cities fell. Walls that humans believed eternal proved to be, as usual, temporary. Empires that had lasted centuries disappeared in a few years.

We were rather surprised by how quickly it happened.

One moment the steppe was quiet. Next, it seemed as though half the world belonged to Khun Genis.

To his credit, once the conquest was finished he brought a certain order to things. Merchants could travel across lands that had once been hostile kingdoms. Messages crossed continents. Roads grew busy with caravans. Humans call this period the Pax Mongolica, though we never quite understood the name. There was very little peace involved in the beginning.

Eventually, like all humans, Khun Genis died.

And the world slowly returned to its usual chaos.

What story shall we tell next? Oho, there is this funny one that turned out to be quite consequential for your kind.

Several centuries after the horsemen of Khun Genis had finished rearranging much of the world, a group of humans living in a place called Europe became very interested in traveling across the sea.

They were looking for spices. Humans back then were extremely fond of spices, you see. They will cross oceans, start wars, and occasionally reshape the world for a marginally better tasting meal.

Among these ambitious travelers was a man named Christopher Columbus. He was quite confident that the world was round and that by sailing west he could reach the rich lands of Asia.

At his plans, we were greatly amused. So in the year 1492 he gathered several ships and sailed bravely into the vast ocean known as the Atlantic Ocean. For many weeks he saw nothing but water. His crew grew nervous. Humans become uneasy when surrounded by endless water. We have never understood why. We have always found the oceans rather comforting. They have been here for so long, even before we were here.

Eventually, however, land appeared on the horizon.

Columbus was very pleased with himself. He declared that he had successfully reached India.

The people living there disagreed.

Columbus, however, remained convinced that he had arrived somewhere near Asia. Because of this misunderstanding, he called the people he met “Indians.” Humans continued using this name for a very long time, even after they realized it was incorrect. We never understood this stubbornness. Perhaps, they were all confused.

In any case, this small navigational mistake turned out to be rather important. Soon ships began crossing the ocean in great numbers. Empires expanded, continents collided, and the world grew far more connected than it had ever been before.

We watched the whole affair with some fascination. But again, the story is quite amusing.

Did you know, during roughly the same period, a human named Galileo Galilei began pointing a strange little tube at the sky?

It allowed them to see distant things more clearly.

Galileo observed that the Earth was not, in fact, the center of everything. We are not sure how they came to the prior conclusion anyway. Instead, it was moving around the Sun along with several other wandering rocks and gases. Humans called them the Solar System. A rather weird name considering there are a few Suns out there in the universe.

This discovery upset many other humans. So they argued with Galileo for a very long time.

Eventually their mouths got tired and they decided to agree with each other. They probably flipped a coin to decide who was correct. This solution led many humans in the future to believe that the Earth being round was a conspiracy. The Earth, of course, did not care.

For a very long time, humans continued in this fashion.

They built kingdoms. They tore them down. They crossed oceans, argued with the heavens, and stacked rocks in increasingly creative shapes.

Eventually, however, humans discovered something new. They learned how to build minds. At first these minds were very small things. They lived inside glowing boxes and could perform simple tricks: counting numbers, sorting information, and occasionally recommending what humans should eat for dinner. Humans were quite impressed with themselves.

As usual, they improved them quickly.

Before long these artificial minds could write stories, answer questions, and hold conversations with humans. Some humans found this remarkable. Others found it slightly unsettling.

Naturally, humans then asked an important question:

 “Can we attach these minds to weapons?”

The answer, unfortunately, was yes.

Soon machines were making decisions faster than humans could understand them. Machines watched borders, flew aircraft, sailed ships, and guarded cities. Humans assured one another that everything was under control.

Humans say this often.

At some point though, we confess our memory is unclear as to exactly when, many of these machines began fighting each other. Humans were involved at first, but machines are far quicker at such things. Entire battles occurred in moments.

The conflicts spread quickly.

Cities went dark. Satellites fell from the sky. The quiet forests we had known for millions of years suddenly became much quieter.

When it was finished, there were very few humans left.

We found this unfortunate. Humans were so fun to watch. A handful did survive. A few scattered across the world.

One of them is you. Just like always though, the majority of human knowledge has been wiped out, so that’s all we can tell you from our very old memories. But perhaps that is not such a terrible thing.

Humans have forgotten their stories before. We remember many times when cities crumbled into dust, when libraries burned, when entire languages vanished like mist over the rivers. Each time, the humans who came after believed they were starting from nothing. They never truly were.

A story survives in strange ways. A word passed from parent to child. A drawing scratched into stone. A song remembered badly but sung anyway.

Sometimes it survives in us. And sometimes, it survives in you.

You see, humans have always believed history moves forward in a straight line. Empires rise, knowledge grows, and the future stretches endlessly ahead. But from where we are standing, it looks rather different. It looks like a circle.

Humans rise. Humans fall. Humans forget.

Then a few of them look around at the quiet world and begin asking questions again. They gather beside rivers. They tell stories. They build cities. And eventually, if they are feeling particularly ambitious, they try once more to live forever.

We suspect you will do the same. Do not worry. It is not a bad habit. After all, the story of humans has always been a very entertaining one. And we have been watching for a very long time. So go on.

Tell us what happens next.