The blue, white, and brown planet is quiet now.

It still continues in its orbit, whirling around the G2 star it has orbited for the past 4.6 billion years, the third of nine planets held in that massive, fiery, red-golden orbs inexorable grip. The energy thrown off by this star, that takes the form of light that is essential for all known life, still takes seven minutes to traverse the ninety-three million miles to the planets surface, always revealing oceans and continents on one half of the world, and leaving the other half shrouded in darkness. The third planet is still orbited by its own satellite, a round, white rock that is visible due to the stars reflected light off its desolate terrain. Its airless, cratered surface is littered with debris, including a sunbleached piece of cloth on a stick upon which can still be seen rows of white stars against what might have once been a dark-colored field. Several vehicles also rest motionless there, and clusier of cold, silvered domes near several holes dug into the surface give evidence that at some point some kind of creatures had walked on its surface, and perhaps delved under its crust for some long-forgotten reason still form in the blue planets atmosphere, grown, swelling, scudding across the bright blue sky, sometimes releasing violent storms that rage across continents and oceans, sometimes fading back into the rain cycle without shedding a single drop of moisture, just as they have for millions of years, and will do for millions more. Once an innumerable number of species of animals roamed over this planet, form lowly yet almost indestructible insectscockroaches, blowflies, and their ilkto higher forms of life, including reptiles, mammals of both the air, and the land, and sea creatures tiny and large. Now all of the animal species on the entire planet number in the thousands; mostly insect life, the hardy cockroach, season cicadas, and flies. There always seems to be flies. The oceans are nearly dead, containing only single-celled animal life, carrying on as it has for millennia. It is rare to see warm-blooded mammals anywhere on the northern half of the planet, anything left with fur or feathers is born, lives and dies near the equator. Looking north, it is obvious why. As the blue planet rotates, part of it always turning into the bright sunlight, land masses come into view, many of them unchanged for thousands of years. Except one. This irregular mass, pocketed with hundreds of inlets, bays, rivers, and lakes, with a small peninsula jutting from the south-eastern corner of an ocean, and a large swath of land bulging from the northwestern corner that seems to reach out with a scattering nearby, at first seems just like the rest of the land masses around it. But closer examination reveals a different story. What used to be a board, high, unbroken chain of mountains that stretched from the ice caps of the frozen sea at the top of the world to the banana-shaped landmass bridging the ocean between this continent and the next one is now shattered into pieces. What had once been hundreds of lofty, snowcapped mountain peaks in the middle of this once-mighty range is now a huge crater, more than one hundred kilometers wide. The crater would be visible from this planets moon, if there were anyone there to see it. As the stars light shines more fully on this vast terrain, it reveals that this land is not like the others. Every one of the other continents has pockets of green, small ones, no doubt, but pockets of vegetation. This land, however, has not a speck of green to be seen. Instead it is swathed in a thick, layer of graybrown ash stretching from the western coast to a cluster of five large, still, dead lakes that lie directly below a huge bay in the northeast quadrant of the continent. It reaches from the frozen tundra in the north to the end of that mountain chain in the south, and covers everything it touches. The huge canyon to the southwest of the mountain range. The dense, once-verdant forests that ranged the entire length of

the west coast, now only dead barnacles caked in a thick, hardened coating of ash. The remains of a long suspension bridge, its girders and foundation now twisted and buckled by a long-ago earthquake, and turned a dull gray as well. And the buildings. The hundreds of thousands of houses, skyscrapers, farms, churches, businesses, and every other building dotting the planet are all still and quiet. Ornate spires choked in dark dust. Mirrored windows, those that were still intact, obscured by a coating of gritty soot, hardened by years of rainfall that had turned them into a solid coating. Nothing living moves throughout the breath of the land. The planet turned, as it always has, and reveals more of what has been left behind by those that once lived here. Tall clock towers are now stilled, pointed hour and minute hands stilled centuries ago. Here and there natural wildfires have destroyed what was once dozens of communities, incinerating acre after acre of cities, towns and forests. Several pyramid shaped structures near a large sea are slowly being both eroded away by the constant wind and buried by the ever-drifting sands. A large lump that might once been a strange, sculpted amalgam of man and crouching animal is now little more than an eroded hill of featureless stone. On other continents, nature is reclaiming the land that had once belonged to it long ago. Thick jungle advances over tall buildings, disintegrating roads and foundations, and slowly bringing down what were once monuments to the race that once thrived here. Rivers swollen by melting runoff from the mountains overflow their banks and flood tens of thousands of miles of landscape, altering it each time. In other areas, the desert sand inch forward, covering earth and grass and water and buildings. The unstoppable ocean occasionally builds and releases its fury on the coastlines of the world, destroying, reshaping, renewing. Seasons pass, thick, heavy snow drifting down to cover the once-magnificent cities that were the pride of the race that built them so long ago. Once, the race that had erected these buildings had teemed on this planet spreading over the land and water in multitudes. Ever curious, they traversed almost every inch of the world they had inherited, scaling the highest mountains, descending to the bottom of the ocean, and even splitting the very atoms that comprised existence itself. They conquered disease, joined the world together in technology, and almost destroyed themselves more than once. They split the sky with their vehicles, always seeking to go further, faster, and eventually slipped the surly bonds of Earth to explore the near reaches of space. They even took enough of an interest in the galaxies beyond their own to send out a signal, hoping for a response from another life form somewhere in the universe. But, as with all cycles, their time had to come to an end eventually, leaving only the scattered monuments to their legacy behind. Now, the remains of the vast transportation systems lies in abandoned rows near what were once centers of civilization. The once-vibrant communications system that used light itself to carry information around the globe in the blink of an eye is long gone. The artificial space stations that had orbited this planet have long since streaked across the sky in a fiery blaze as they re-entered the atmosphere. The history of this race, preserved first in claw and stone, later on paper, in steel and silicon and electrons, is now dormant, the buildings erected to house their legacy stolen by time. Perhaps someday, hundreds of thousands of years in the future, another race will evolve on this planet that will discover the remains of this civilization, and will wonder at those who came before them. Perhaps it will be visitors from a distant star, who have received a signal broadcast into space centuries before, or who have recovered an ancient proper launched into space before any of them were alive, and who have journeyed across space to locate the source of this strange, technology. Perhaps they will unlock the mysteries of this race in the sealed technology hidden inside a mountain, or uncover records

that reveal the history of this race, and what eventually happened to it. Or perhaps, in about nine billion years, the star that this blue, white, and brown planet orbits around will swell into an immense red ball of flaring helium, incinerating the two smaller planets closer to it, and yes, this planet as well. After a few million more years, having exhausted its fuel, it will collapse into a dense core of tightly packed atoms, forming a white ball about the size of the third planet it had destroyed those many years ago. And in the end, except for those scattered bits of technology that may have survived their endless journey and centuries of radio and television signals that have been broadcast throughout the universe, it will be as if that race that had briefly held dominion over that third planet all those billions of years ago had never existed at all.