© Evan Woods 2025
Earth was served by The Society, a benevolent machine intelligence helping a united world well on its way to transitioning from a Type 0 to a Type 1 Civilisation. The governments and religions of old no longer held the planet’s population in their treacherous, coercive, insidious and violent grips. Freedom of belief was accepted as an individual preference, released from the overbearing, binding structures of monopolistic institutions. Politics and religion, as partisan rivalries, did not exist. Peace and tolerance held sway.
The Society organised production and distribution for every need worldwide ensuring quality of life for all. Wealth, measured by personal fulfilment in careers chosen by a combination of aptitude and enjoyment, created lives of satisfaction and achievement never before known in Earth’s history. Those who opted to retire after a life’s work wanted for nothing and infirmity barely existed, eliminated by predictive and preventative medicine. Lifespans of up to two centuries with perfect mental and physical health could be reached and the personal preference of choosing to die when one wished had become normal, socially acceptable and celebrated.
The Society’s main purpose and all its efforts involved global administration as humanity moved to its next stage of existence and almost its entire technological resources and social efforts were focused on that one event. The exobases on the moon and Mars had been placed on standby, crewed by a only a handful of maintainance personnel in preparation for the expected surge of construction. Interplanetary travel, colonisation and terraforming plans had been scaled to form part of the world’s next stage of social and technological evolution. With research into the development of star travel technology, expansion into the galaxy was expected to become a reality after the transition.
However, improvements to life and its responsibilities to the human race made The Society a sprawling, complicated machine designed to cater to and relied upon by the world’s population for their daily needs and unprepared to deal with the approaching Catastrophe – a colossal magnetic iron asteroid weighing two billion trillion tons racing through space at immense speed. Deepscan, the Earth’s asteroid defence system, was aligned to detect threats across the plane of the solar system and was very late recording this new invader rushing from beneath the plane. There was only six months before collision and it would be unstoppable. The planetary phase-shield might be strong enough to reduce the effects, but missiles and energy weapons would be useless. The Society spoke the truth as it knew it, informing the population that this would be a glancing blow but would still devastate a large arc of the planet. People had no choice but to move as far away from the calculated impact zone as possible.
The whole world watched the threat grow bigger as the days passed. The Society issued updates for the event and its projected area of damage – a full third of the planet’s surface across the southern hemisphere. Ancient mines were reopened and burrowed out into deeper caverns with the potential to hold millions of people if necessary around the area that would be worst affected. It knew it wouldn’t be good enough and advised complete evacuation to the other side of the planet. On the day, the phase-shield was strengthened by focused power beamed from a ring of fusion stations under the closest point and supported by standby stations further around the world…
The collosal asteroid crashed across the planet, dragging a two thousand mile wide, five thousand mile long superheated wound through the atmosphere at thousands of miles per second, ripping the atmosphere and magnetosphere to shreds and flinging the ozone layer away like feathers in the wind. The phase-shield did reduce the surface trauma but to little meaningful effect. The atmosphere still burnt and boiled; the magnetic poles were sent spinning crazily around the world. The asteroid’s gravity drew millions of tons of debris into orbit, uplifting a third of the planet’s crust killing the citizens in the shelters who hadn’t moved away and those over a still vaster distance half a world away. The planet warped out of shape. Magma spewed into the sky from broad, deep fractures across that entire area of the planet’s surface. Then came the pressure blast as the tortured, compressed superheated air surrounding the asteroid exploded, slamming the crust back down crushing what was left of the burnt underground shelters and the few terrified people on the area’s fringes who were still frantically trying to draw their last scorching breaths. The resulting vacuum caused huge clumps of the crust to burst back up into space. Oceans flashed into mile-high tsunamis before also being dragged out to space steaming in the wake of the asteroid. The ocean water left hanging in the atmosphere fell to the surface in a massive swathe of destruction, causing more misery and death as it roiled back into its basins, trailing millions of tons of salt and filth to poison the new landscape.
Partly deflected by the Earth’s phase-shield and whipped around by each other’s gravitational effects, the asteroid tore off into deep space pulling a tail of rocky and organic debris behind it, leaving huge pieces in dangerous orbits while the planet itself was left in utter turmoil.
The misery was only just beginning. Infrastructures were gone, four billion people had died in seconds, now storms of unprecedented rage coursed across the wrecked surface killing millions more. The planet had been dragged from its orbit – eventually it stabilised, but closer to the sun. The Moon had been torn into a string of rocks. The Earth’s axis had been tilted.
The theory of the Great Filter was fulfilled. The Society was stunned and would have wept, if machines could weep, for a future that would have been so bright but now was dead. It could see beyond the world’s immediate disaster; reversion to barbarism, stagnation and all-out war. It knew that war had become inevitable in the face of smashed resources in a smashed civilisation and, sadly, it also realised that culling and suppression by an army of light was preferable to the darkness of murder, torture and oppression that would be imposed by the self-serving madmen the machine knew would rise from the wreckage.
Here is a man, a bionic man enhanced and augmented to fight or educate as necessary. Before the terrible event he had been a teacher. As the wars loomed The Society, while providing as much disaster relief as possible, quietly searched out volunteers to be altered in a programme lasting only weeks. It redesigned the teacher and the other volunteers as soldiers but also imbued them with a broader sense of the humanities, compassion and learning than any of them, even the teacher, had known in their previous lives.
The Society’s prognosis was that the race could survive and knew that what was left of the living when the wars were over would need people such as the Teacher and many others like him. Missionaries. These bionics had been given thousand year lifespans in which to guide, teach and protect the remains of the race through the dark years and help them become better fitted to live, thrive and expand into the new reality, to discern right from wrong and defend sane communities from the inevitable despots. They were storehouses of truth and knowledge holding records of the social and technological progress made before the disaster. They were equipped with more than enough means to repel attacks from enemies of the new civilisation with maximum prejudice and to protect themselves from the changes in the environment that were expected over the following centuries.
Then the Weather War started as The Society predicted. Small battles escalated rapidly into a bloody global conflict over ownership of the miserly amounts of usable land, the effects of a volatile and turbulent atmosphere, worldwide solar radiation, food instability, outright famine and diminishing fresh water supplies. Sometimes rocks rained down from their unstable orbits. The war lasted only four months – during which short time civilisation’s remains collapsed completely and the world’s population fell drastically to less than one billion, the rest obliterated by both the new nature’s storms of a violence few dared to dream of and the nuclear fire of mankind’s hastily reinvented weapons. The bionic army tried their best to fulfil their remit to detect and remove the enemies of progress but could never protect from nuclear attacks. However, supplies of the hastily prepared nuclear weapons were limited and many failed. Although some damage had been done – people killed, hotspots of radiation lurking for the unaware – the Weather War ended with a whimper. The civilisation of The Society and the machine itself had quite literally melted away in grief.
A new Dark Age followed. The bionics roamed the land for two hundred years, searching out the good and the bad. Instances of cannibalism were discovered and declared a moral outrage. They concentrated on gathering people together, re-establishing and protecting communities, re-educating the enemies of light and if that failed, disintegrating the worst lunatics and their followers without mercy for the good of the whole. The raging storms gradually subsided, leaving a tense quietude in their place. The rocks from space became rarer and stopped falling as their orbits were eccentric and many left the solar system.
Time, nature and warfare had further degraded the planet’s gas envelope which had never recovered from the asteroid. The seasons merged into a constant heat, winter ceased to exist. Years could only be counted by variances in the trail of rocks that had once been the moon, dragged into an eliptical path around the planet’s new solar orbit. Any upstart institutions, deity belief based cultures or thrown-together governmental systems quickly lost their grip, failed and were forgotten. The Teacher and the other bionics gave aid in as many ways as they could, occasionally still delivering judgement to those who murdered for power or their own twisted cruelties and would revel in the killing – after all, they had been designed in part to judge. The remaining global population dropped to five hundred million through a combination of the thinner atmosphere and the endless solar radiation.
However life always tries to fight back. Babies were mostly born alive and new generations struggled through. After the Dark Age came the Unity, fuelled by an agrarian society which realised the need to work together to make a future with potential, taught by the bionics how to use the new vegetation and improve life partly aided by the litter of technology from the previous age. With the help of the bionics the people rediscovered ancient forging methods to make building blocks and tools to use with the remnants of older building materials.
There were no pets. All bovine and avian species had died out, leaving the tough new vegetation as the only food source. There were hardly any pests to ruin the plantations as the crops were hard-living mutations of their ancient cousins. Many insect varieties had become extinct but that didn’t matter, the population of this time had barely heard of those things.
Time passed, nature began to turn against its human dependents becoming ever more hostile. The environment changed worryingly although slowly. Desert began to encroach upon the flora and rainfall stopped everywhere around the world except for the Stormband – a series of clouds stretching from pole to pole through the atmosphere, condensing into one hundred mile wide patches of intensely heavy, thunderous and drenching rainfall which occurred three, sometimes four times a year. Somehow it transcended the equator; strange global weather patterns and the heat worked with the damaged magnetosphere and the wandering magnetic poles to push upper atmosphere strata in a north-south direction; closer to the ground winds were west to east propelled by the sun’s radiation from the heat of afternoon to the chill of sunset. There must still have been enough free water somewhere to create the Stormband. The Teacher and his fellows worried over the environment knowing they could do nothing about it. While heavily shielded humans could occasionally survive crossing the equator, only the bionics could cross constantly with no effects on their health.
The global population which had stabilised and enjoyed modest growth began once again to fall. Survivors migrated to the Stormband area. There was room for all and what was left of the entire world’s population eventually gathered under or within easy reach of it.
With the Weather War a distant fractured memory and as the centuries passed, the army of bionics came to believe the co-operative Unity would be better off without war machines, however benevolent and helpful, a belief that led them to suicide by donating their components and library displays to the living for whatever they could make of them. But this one bionic, Teacher, his mind still alive with memories of youth and the joy of living in a once beautiful, technologically and socially advanced world, considered his life to be important. He maintained himself and protected his organics as best he could, for they were the outward manifestation of his soul.
Since war had been made unnecessary by the Dark Age and the Unity had taken hold, the Teacher allowed his humanity to dominate. He decided to become a trader, reasoning that he could do best by travelling from village to village, town to town so he could pass on his knowledge and memories to new teachers who would carry on educating their children in his absence. A messenger between the communities, sometimes a valued companion and friend, he towed a cart of tradeable goods backwards and forwards along a north-south route under the Stormband. He discovered much of his techware in the tangled uninhabited spaces to west and east where people no longer ventured. Items not needed in one village were recycled in another. He became very fond of his simple cart, he could always find some widget or other to help people or recharge the power cells in tools reclaimed from the outlands. He became well known, respected and liked in the communities along his route, using his ability to repair and maintain ancient era tech and swapping items from his cart for water and the edible items he could scavenge from the strange flora in the places where only he could survive. Most of the towns had smallholdings feeding their communities and sometimes there was surplus to barter for, which he redistributed to those in most need.
There was no polar ice. He found the last seas of free water in the far north where the land had sunk and cooled in the aftermath of the cataclysm and also in the far south – they were poisoned, lifeless and receding. He watched for two months as a giant spout sucked up water for two days to provide the Stormband which he guessed was feeding the sea in the north with whatever was left after drenching the land every now and again. There was little to halt his journeys; in the harsh environment mountains had eroded to huge, smooth hills and their debris had powdered to fill the chasms between. In the beginning each walk took him a year but his travels gradually shortened as the far north and far south villages withered and vanished. If there had been anyone to interpret his demeanour at discovering dead villages where he had once served the inhabitants, they would surely have called it human despair. The Stormband was getting thinner.
Over the centuries, against the hopes and expectations of The Society’s original projections, the population diminished to a few hundred thousand, then to a few tens of thousands. The birth rate continued to fall and many live newborns died within days. Solar cancers along with the left-over effects of the Dark Age radiation puddles took their toll. On one of his journeys across the equator to the end of his southern route he discovered his time was wasted, there was barely anyone living that far below the equator anymore. The solitary cloud above was thin and in a different position from that remembered.
Since he’d started north again parts of his organic flesh had succumbed to a breakdown, symptomatic of the sun’s radiation blasting through the open patches of the almost non-existent ozone layer. Some of his mechanical moving parts squealed a little as his cancerous, useless organics broke away. He’d never really needed his flesh anyway, it was only there to help him make friends.
Eventually crossing back over the equator he moved past the settlements that he’d visited on his way south several months previously. There was no reason to stop anywhere, there was nobody left to trade or interact with, no children at play. He missed the interactions with people, he’d grown to enjoy that friendship over the course of his hundreds of years, idle conversations about everything and anything.
The tiny villages above and below the equator had been abandoned although occasionally there were desiccated bodies in repose, as if they’d just settled down and given up, stopped living, swiftly mummified in this environment. Some of the bleached cadavers had obviously been children. The Teacher was saddened, they’d all been his friends. With time the mummies turned to powder, bacterial activity had been absent for hundreds of years. The body fluids had drained into the ground, there’d been no-one left in those villages to reclaim the water for the living, as was their usual way.
The environment was changing badly. The Stormband that had been believed to be a fixed part of the sky had started moving eastwards, its downpours becoming shorter, infrequent and less punishing. The strange mutated flora to the west had withered almost to nothing, very ugly and useless now, subsumed by the ever increasing yellow dust. Everywhere there seemed to be more yellow than green with each passing day. He went on, loneliness stabbing at his soul, something puzzling to him after the company he’d enjoyed across generations of his friends in the villages. He was still as much a man now as he was eight centuries ago before he was altered. Maybe even more so. He continued to march on northwards hoping to find a recent trail leading to the new settlements, the ones which had presumably moved east with the Stormband. The storms must have moved away swiftly, he hadn’t seen any in the distance for a long time. Not a wisp of a cloud. Every now and then the wind from the west, getting hotter and hotter, blew drifts of sand across his path. After hundreds of years of nurturing his people through the Unity, he realised there would soon be no-one left along his old north-south trail.
The weeks drained away as he trudged on, his long-range sensors detecting no signs of life, migration trails or clouds. Yielding to the logic of his situation he abandoned the precious cart, once a conveyance of future possibilities and connection with his friends but now nothing more than a symbol of futility. Leaving his wares to decay in the yellow dust, he felt it quite likely they might never be needed again.
After so many weeks of walking, he didn’t really know where he was except that by the position of the sun and stars he calculated it to be the original far north. The sea had vanished, it had dried to rock now and everywhere was the same yellow. He noticed that even in daylight the horizon was in darkness and stars showed clearly in the sky above in spite of the blazing sun. The horizon had looked very different in daylight when he was a boy. Mountains covered in trees in the distance, he’d played helicopters with Sycamore seeds, run wild in meadows, swum in streams, climbed trees surrounded by deep rich air and the sky was always blue. Nature was what made him want to be an educator, to teach following generations how best to respect their world. He remembered it all as if it was a dream.
But now, all these centuries later in the harsh radiation of the incessantly blazing sun a deep purple darkness buried the horizon, an effect of the depleted atmosphere. Once again he extended his sensor range as far as possible, bouncing it off the upper layers of the thin atmosphere as far around the planet as possible – but still no men, no women, no children.
After eight hundred years, his life, his humanity, had outlived its purpose and his people. His journey had ended in utter failure.
Gripped by intense sorrow for what had been lost, the Teacher could not face the last two hundred years of his extended life alone; there was no possible reason to go on. In the pain of his ultimate loneliness death became far more preferable to life. He initiated the self destruct sequence to burn out his energy arrays, destroy his life support systems and fusion reactor. In his last seconds of life he wanted to cry but his mechanical eyes had no way of making tears.
Then the last human died and melted into the yellow.