Solipsist Suicide

 

At its height, they estimated this world had held a trillion souls. The continents heaved with megastructures like mountain ranges. Factories and farms and apartment blocks massed atop each other until the crust of the world distorted under their weight. Brutalist monuments to the triumph of industry without cease or reason.

 

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

 

Of the people who had wrought this supreme architecture, none survived. The cyclopean halls were all mausoleums empty of everything but dust and the dead. Every passing season saw a little bit more crumble though it would take a billion years for everything to be erased.

 

Around the equator things were progressing a little faster. A falling orbital ring, itself utterly monolithic, had carved a canyon through the constructed mountains some ten thousand years ago. At the floor life had begun to take root in the strata of rust and rubble. Hardy mosses and gnarled trees clung to the concrete around dusty pools and streams. To either side the cross-sectioned walls loomed, gaping with millions upon millions of holes, severed corridors and sectioned rooms, exposing the rusting hulks of long silent machinery to the elements.

 

The crew of the Beagle had chosen to begin their expedition here, as the devastation revealed every layer of the superstructure for easy access and examination.

 

It also, Doctor Steadman thought, offered a better view. He sat at the end of a crumbling corridor that ran into empty air a kilometer above the ground. The wind howled, tugging at his hair and belt loops. As he sat he looked over the vast concrete canyon, and as he looked he thought, of the people who built these world-spanning megaliths. They did not seem to have ever discovered FTL travel; yet what they had built was greater in scope and ambition than any interstellar empire. And now- now they were gone.

 

Much was uncertain about how they died. But one thing was already clear-

 

His radio chirped. “Doctor Steadman. We have found another charnel pit.” He groaned in response.

 

“I keep telling you people, I’m a xenobiologist, not a forensic pathologist!” But he stood up anyway.

 

-They had died badly.

 

—

 

The labyrinthine interior or the world-structure could be divided into two types of compartment. On the one hand were the vast galleries of robotic industry necessary for sustaining itself, and the trillion souls who once called it home. On the other were innumerable chambers containing innumerable pods, seemingly designed to contain a single individual. Every so often they found a corpse still within. Of ordinary living spaces- apartments, restaurants or cafeterias, shopping spaces or recreational plazas- there was little to no trace. Only the pods.

 

Whatever purpose the chamber had first served, it was hidden beneath the bones. Perhaps a hundred individuals, carelessly jumbled together, remaining flesh long since decayed to a barely-organic stain on the floor. Steadman had no formal training in forensic pathology, true. But the charnel pit was not a complex mystery.

 

“It appears that most of these bodies were killed by blunt-force trauma,” Steadman began, after an hour of study. Took a deep, steadying breath. “Tooth marks on the bones indicate they were subsequently eaten- almost certainly cannibalism- and the bodies were subsequently moved here for disposal.” Another deep breath. “Same as the last two pits we’ve found.”

 

“And the other seventeen sites the other teams have uncovered,” Doctor Raghunath, the team’s leader, commented.

 

Steadman did not think of himself as a queasy man. But he had skipped lunch, and would skip dinner. Twenty charnel pits, discovered in mere days of slow and methodical exploration by a few dozen people. How many remained? Thousands? Perhaps even millions? How many billions of corpses were yet to be discovered? Another deep breath.

 

“I’m going to get some fresh air,” he said as he walked out of the pit.

 

—

 

Doctor Steadman once more sat by a hole at the edge of that vast swathe of destruction. He looked at the other rim of the canyon, blued and indistinct by the far distance. At the small, dusty pools scattered across the rubble-strewn canyon floor, and the ragged weeds that clustered around them.

 

He didn’t move when he heard footsteps behind him. Raghunath sat down next to him, and for a minute neither spoke. Simply looked out over the canyon.

 

It was Steadman who broke the silence. “How? How could a people capable of doing so much, die like… like that?”

 

“We’re started assembling a theory,” Raghunath replied. “The archeo-technicians are pretty certain by now that the pods we’ve been finding are VR systems meant for long-term use. Potentially even cradle to grave.”

 

“That would explain the lack of recognizable living spaces,” Steadman replied. “A civilization existing completely in virtuality, with only the barest concessions to physical reality…”

 

“Reliant on automation to sustain themselves.” Raghunath continued. “We move further into speculation here, but we think they developed to a point where their entire civilization could run itself, without personal intervention, for centuries at a time. Perhaps even millennia.”

 

Steadman could see the conclusion coming. “Allowing them to forget the outside world almost entirely. And then, when some catastrophic failure beyond the ability of the automation to cope with occurred… there was nobody who remembered how to fix it.”

 

“Ultimately plunging billions of people into a giant labyrinth with no means to sustain themselves, when the pods themselves began to shut down. No ready means of obtaining food… except, for the most vicious and desperate, each other,” Raghunath finished.

 

Steadman slowly collapsed on his back, and stared up at the worn ceiling for a minute. “Jesus,” he said at last. “How could any civilization allow itself to die in such a, such a stupid manner?”

 

“They lasted for tens of thousands of years before their end,” Raghunath replied, “And I suspect our own end will be equally foolish when it comes. Who are we to judge?” He rose, and began to walk off. “Besides, maybe we’ll find something tomorrow that blows all this speculation out of the water.”

 

“Maybe,” Steadman said to his superior’s retreating back. He hauled himself up, and after another moment looking out into the open air, followed. There was still work to be done.

 

A kilometer below, the weeds and the shrubs and the drip and flow of water continued their slow, slow work turning concrete into soil.

 

Nothing beside remained.