Mars Michaels: The Beginning At The End.

 

There once was a time when the world wasn’t always so quiet, a busier time, when the hustle and bustle of life drowned out the great silence in an endless hum of chatter and rhythmic mechanical noise. Machines rode along great wide ribbons of asphalt carrying people to and from, back and forth. And the skies roared with the deafening sounds of jet engines, that carried commerce across the world from one continent to the next. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves here, let's take one giant step back and try to remember how we got there. Lots of hard work. Generation upon generation pulling the world up- literally, by the boot straps. Lots of doing things, building things. The hard way.

Too many lives spent bent over, laboring in the hot sun. gathering food in vegetable fields, hauling timbers to construct shelter from the elements. Laying bricks. Forging steel, reaching ever so higher towards the heavens. And then someone made the first machine. Then another, and then another still, and before long we had machines doing all the work. And eventually doing all the thinking as well. Well, life was good. But like every good story has a beginning, they have an ending as well. It wasn’t that no one was giving much thought to how it would all eventually come to an end, there was after all a fair amount of speculation in concerns to: “The End.” 

Some thought that in a sea of fire, the end would come. Sweeping across the landscape like a biblical flood washing the world away into the pits of hell. Others, still, had thought that the machinations of a civilization consumed by greed, lust and power would devour the world, and reduce itself to a nuclear wasteland, where nothing in all reality would have even the slimmest of hopes for long term survival. And then there were those who thought that a great golden ship would descend from the clouds and save only the faithful, forsaking all others, leaving each to their demons to swim in a sea of hopelessness. 

But the truth is a funny thing, no one really even understood fully how it worked, this mysterious thing called life. The end. Who would have thought that those two little words could fill the hearts and minds of all human life with such a sense of dread. The most brilliant minds in the world could not conceive of it, could not embrace the inevitable, the arrogance, resisted, refusing to believe that for once in their pitiful lives that they no longer held the illusion of control firmly within their grasp. For once nature would have its say and on August 12th, 2195 we would finally pay for that arrogance. The End... Over… Done… Like it or not… Here it comes. 

It’s funny, though it didn’t really come like anyone back in the day thought it would. When, in fact-in reality, it didn’t end at all. It was like one day God woke up and decided that we weren’t getting it anymore. Like humanity had lost its way somehow. We’d lost sight of what was really important and just in the world. We’d grown soft, spoiled… Lazy… And if you close your eyes and just hold your breath, just for a second, you can almost picture him rising up out of his chair, slowly walking across the room and with but a flick of his finger. God turned the whole world off… And overnight everything changed. The machines didn’t work anymore… Didn’t talk anymore… No more computers… No more Internet... Financial collapse… There was rioting… Plunder… The worldwide collapse of the police force.

Then there came lawlessness, the ability to protect and serve long since vanished, followed by the collapse of governments- one by one… Worldwide, like one gigantic landslide that started with but a single, tiny pebble… Then there was the sickness… Some called it the second coming of the great plague… Not enough medicine, not enough hope, no more machines to do the thinking for us, when many forgot how to simply think for themselves. People died… A lot of people… Millions, perhaps billions. But still, after it was all said and done, life endured and many that survived moved on. Here we are twenty-two years later and many are still moving. They say that sometimes when a person gets lost, and are no longer certain of where they are going or what their purpose is anymore, the best place, the smartest place to start looking for where you went wrong is at the very beginning. So here we are.

And then there were the stories of those who would survive, who would live and breathe another day, the stories though similar-not like his. None like him. The sickness took his mother from him when he was still quite young and not long after, heartbreak, despair and loneliness-his father. He had to fight every day to simply live to the next, many times until his young body was wracked with the pains of hunger and weariness. Without purpose, without meaning, one foot in front of the other, minute to minute, day by day, he would endure. Until one day it all became too much, and he decided to simply stop, he lay in the snow, in the woods along the side of a road that he couldn’t even remember the name of- he had almost found himself hoping for death-almost praying for it. 

Then he opened his eyes and he was warm, next to a fire, and he looked up and for the first time, he saw the first of many… The first was a woman… She sat across from him and stared through the fire. And with a softness and comfort in her voice-she spoke.

“You will not die here alone in this cold place, Marston Michaels. For it is ordained that you shall serve this world a greater purpose. You will seek out those lost, you will help them find their way, you will tell them Marston, that no matter the challenge, the hardship, no matter the pain, we will never leave them… Nor you. The righteous shall live on… The wicked shall fall. go now Marston… Lead them to deliverance.” 

~Scratch.. A.B.T. Copyright © 2010~