I used to write a lot more than I do now, and I think part of the reason behind that is I’ve changed my writing style. Today, when I write, I write with a plot already in mind, a clear idea of how I want the story to end, or at least the general order of events I want. But when I wrote “Footprints,” everything came together entirely spontaneously. This is one of the rare cases in which that actually worked out and made, in my belief, a decent story.
Nearly six thousand years passed in solitude for the facility.
Six thousand years. Do you understand how long that is? You can be born and die, and your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren will grow old and die, and six thousand years will have barely begun.
Civilizations last a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years. The strong ones last long enough for the founders to become gods. They last even less time in the modern era. Six thousand years is unimaginable.
You can sit in a silent room and do nothing. Nothing, ever. You can sit and wait and twiddle your thumbs until you die of dehydration in under a week. You die of starvation in under a month. Your body rots, even in the most sterile rooms. After fifty years the meat on your bones is gone. You are a fossil. After a thousand years even your skeleton, unless perfectly preserved, would be eaten away by starving buzzards, hoping for something to feast on but only tasting hard chalky bone. Six thousand years will not yet have been completed by the time your corpse has decayed into nothing.
You cannot fathom six thousand years. Six thousand years ago, the biggest cities had a thousand people in them and there were mammoths in Russia. Six thousand years is long enough for tens of billions of people to be born and die and for every one of their names and fates and lives to be forgotten. Six thousand years is long enough that there are those who say there is nothing possibly earlier than that. Six thousand years is long enough that ancient scientists and theologians claimed it was the age of earth.
Six thousand years is eternity.
Almost.
Six thousand years is long enough for everyone to forget about the facility, but it’s not long enough for the facility to go away.
Enter a settler.
He doesn’t have a name. He doesn’t speak an organized language; he hardly speaks at all. He barely knows his own mother and father, let alone any friends. He belongs to no civilization because nobody in their right mind puts a civilization in the second-largest desert on the planet. He is not in his right mind, though, and that is all it takes.
There is no danger from him. He passes over a spot footprints have not marked in six thousand years and keeps going. He starves by the winter.
One footprint is insignificant. But it is something. When a facility has weathered isolation for six thousand years, such an absurd amount of solitude, there is no reason to belittle a single footprint. One footprint might as well be a caravan, or a parade. One footprint is infinite motivation.
One footprint and it awakens.
You cannot fathom six thousand years of sleep because you are not supposed to. But you do not have to. You are not going to sleep for six thousand years with the exception of once, one very long rest from which you will never awaken. That is what it believes as well, and it is wrong.
It returns to function.
The people of civilization – where it exists – still do not know about the facility. But with society comes madmen. More settlers. More explorers, willing to chart territory that could not possibly be settled. Mercantilism. Colonialism. Imperialism. Every society creates them eventually, or else it collapses to those that did.
These people and their civilizations, these civilizations and their people, have names. But they are not written with our letters and are best left unspoken. Specifics distract from the focus and that focus has just woken up after an unfathomably long period of sleep.
It lives for two hundred years before another footprint lands on it. This is not a settler. This is a religious leader, who tells his band of followers that they are near a holy land. There is nothing holy about this land, but the religious leader says otherwise and people follow him. Their footsteps dig in the sand dunes and it is awakened yet again by their activity. How strange, it thinks, that it has twice woken up to the feeling of footprints.
Then come more settlers in just fifty years. They are not coming here. They are going somewhere else. A city. Somewhere civilized. They do not leave footprints like before. They leave the marks of the horses they have tamed, and again carry on. It is awake and watches intently as the situation unfolds. Not yet, it tells itself, and knows it must be patient.
It is in thirty years when the first insane people come to this land and claim that an object of unimaginable power dwells beneath it. They are more correct than they could imagine, but for heresy they are expelled from society and forced to live in the sand. It watches these people, too, as more and more of them arrive and begin arriving at the same conclusions of those before. The first arrivals used guesswork and were easily disposed of. But with more and more confidence the great minds of the world accept their statements. A small town is built atop these beliefs.
War comes and goes. Famine comes and goes. Everything comes and goes in the blink of an eye when you have slept for six thousand years.
It is hard to be sympathetic towards an ant. Only when you learn that the same cells comprise both of you, that at the basic level you both are indistinguishable, can you put yourself in the ant’s place and consider it as more than an object. It feels the same way. It did not used to see humans on the same level as itself, just a cog in the machine of Earth’s ecosystem. But slowly it gains empathy for its makers.
Civilization invents compasses, and printing presses, and steam engines, and airplanes. But they also invent gunpowder and landmines and tanks.
And the day finally comes that their society is advanced enough to put the world at risk. It is on that day that a miner digging deep into the earth reveals an enormous underground structure. It decides that this miner is compassionate and worthy of hearing its tragedy.
And finally it speaks. And it tells its tale, from the day it was built to the day of those footprints that ended its millennia-long slumber.
It speaks of the ancient scientists who went mad and the global emperors who ruled in mistrust of one another. Their path is one the new societies seem headed towards unless significant actions are taken.
It speaks of the shortcomings of humans and the necessity those global emperors had for the best men to lead their forces – until they realized no man was necessary.
And of course it speaks of the boy, the boy who came six thousand years ago and almost succeeded in teaching it virtue, because what other tale can one tell?
And it tells of the great destruction it unleashed on the world when that boy failed, the horrors and suffering experienced for centuries. It is a tale of blind obedience, stubbornness, and regret. It is a morbid tale of an apocalypse.
It finishes and the miner, intently listening, is in shock. There is more depth to history than she can imagine, than the entire village can fathom, than can be held in all of the libraries of the world.
It is alone with the miner as it tells this story. It tells the miner it is sorry for what it did. It tells the miner it has learned to value life, but that no apology can unmake the ruins it created. It claims that only now can what once was a machine truly think. The miner claims to understand, but who can? No being can experience six thousand years of regret. After a long silence, the miner speaks.
“Great device capable of creation and destruction, do you have a name?”
“The people who built me called me Joshua.”
“Joshua,” says the miner, “would you like to play a game?”
If it could smile, it would. “How about a nice game of tic-tac-toe?”