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Day 9 - If Only

100 Day Writing Challenge
Day #9
Prompt: “The Third Terra was going the way of the First…”



Humanity has encountered extinction twice before. Once a couple millennia ago on the planet Earth, and again circa 500 years ago on the planet Horus. Both times humanity drove its home planet into an inhabitable, unsustainable land stripped of all its resources.

No one likes to take responsibility, but I personally blame the obvious offenders: Overpopulation, greed, power-mongering, radical religions, and narcissism. It’s rather easy to burn at the stake the big companies for polluting the water supplies, corrupting the media, or sucking the planets dry of all their life-blood. Notwithstanding, it is individuals who enterprise those vile corporations.

Individuals over-breed their populations out of carelessness, ideologies, or criminal pursuits of passion and power. Corporations only sell what individuals will consume and only fabricate what the listeners will accept as truth. The general population in both planets spent more time gazing into the mirror than glancing out the window. They each saw their own lifestyles as right and all others as toxic, always unyielding to a new change of life.

And yet here we are, once again, staring into the dark eyes of the monster ready to devour humanity. We poked and prodded this vile creature ever since we learned to manipulate the world around us to benefit ourselves. We nearly escaped the ravaging jaws as we fled the crumbling planets of Earth and Horus, abandoning our self-made disasters to become parasites on another.

We were only here for a couple hundred years on the Third Terra, and the eyes of the Great Monster preyed upon us once more with a rage stoked by our insolence and narcissism. Despite our past encounters with this monster, the monstrosity within our own humanity has plunged us into the way of the First Terra one more time.

And this time, I don’t think we can survive.
We barely reached the atmosphere of this Terra centuries ago before our engines failed. We have since been unable to recreate the technologies of our former civilizations. Not that we could have been better off had we reinvented the wheel on this new planet, but this Terra was the last inhabitable resource-filled planet in any of the surrounding galaxies.

Third Terra was our last hope. And we squandered it, spitting vomit in the face of our ever-watchful predator. We infuriated it with our disregard for other life upon our home planets. We mocked it with each new chance presented to us. The sins of Planet Earth could have been forgiven. We were innocent children in the eyes of nature. We knew not our folly. But to realize the dangers our mishandling of life bled into the Second Terra in the wake of Planet Earth’s demise was unforgivable.

Our enraged predator wiped the bile from his face that we spewed upon him and glared with an unquenchable hatred that burned to consume us. He charged for us with jaws clenched, nostrils flaring, and eyes locked on. His throat growled in hunger. We were his prey yet again with no escape.

Our extinction was nigh and we were the ones who pulled the trigger. No one was to blame except ourselves. I am to blame. You are to blame. If only our ancestors could look into the soulless eyes of our predator and come to realize the dangers of their insolence. If only our ancestors could shatter their mirrors into shards and open their windows to see the world for what it is. If only our ancestors could embrace the beauty of all nature and life that surrounded them and enter into a harmonious existence.

If only.


- (c) Kevin Barrick 

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