Dragon’s Tear

Earth, the third planet in the solar system, the birthplace of humanity, was dying.

Jacob Lind had already known this, but the evidence was now everywhere around him as he walked across barren fields of black rock, under an even darker, starless sky. How he could still see, he didn’t know. The one thing he knew for certain was that he was dreaming, so it seemed pointless to question that aspect of his vision.

Jake never indulged pointless questions.

But here…here, all around him, was the most important of questions, and perhaps if he looked and searched hard enough, he would find the answer: how Earth would finally die. So he walked for what felt like hours over black rock—devoid even of soil.

Or any other organic material, Jake noted with a clinical eye. That was the first clue he had gleaned from his search, and he was frustrated with himself that it had taken him this long to realize it.

Then again, nothing about this utter destruction made any sense. None of the hundreds of ways Earth could have met its end fit with what he was seeing now.

Jake was not ignorant of humanity’s foolish, headlong rush toward self-annihilation. He had become an engineer out of faith in the ingenuity of his species to solve their problems. He was often surprised to find that faith was still burning, even though he had long since grown weary of trying to create solutions in the face of humanity’s equal unwillingness to use them.

Jake had always taken the long view, calculating with excruciating exactness how his actions now shaped his future and that of his family. It always aggravated him how few others did the same.

So he was saddened but unsurprised to be walking the land of humanity’s ultimate demise. Yet he was also increasingly puzzled as to what could have brought that end—and increasingly intent on knowing the answer. If he knew how, then perhaps, just perhaps…he could prevent it.

However unlikely that was. He was realistic about his odds of saving the world—one lone engineer working for a small firm and teaching night classes at an insignificant college in suburban Pennsylvania, with a wife and eight children to think of. True, his oldest had begun his own career and family, and his second could support herself if she had a mind to. His third.…

He pivoted his mind away from his third, with recent events making thoughts about her too laden with emotion for his current task. Though he had an inkling that her disappearance and this dream weren’t unrelated.

Ever self-aware, he admitted to himself that was one reason he was becoming so determined to find the answer.

Yet it eluded him. Disease would have left the buildings intact, even if they might have crumbled a bit from neglect, yet only shells or fragments remained. Besides, a disease that would have wiped out humanity should have left most other life flourishing, perhaps even more so for their absence. Yet no life lay in sight.

None.

Global warming would have disastrously upset world order, and yet there still should have been life somewhere, even if in a vast sea. Yet there was no water, either. Not a single drop in this dark, desiccated waste, not even after hours of walking.

Conventional or nuclear bombardment would have created the broken structures he occasionally passed, but why would it leave steel frames or stone pillars intact and little else? Those shells of buildings were charred black, true, but they still stood as recognizable ghosts of what they once were, like the bones of enormous beasts left on a cracked earthen waste, every scrap of flesh picked clean.

Jake wasn’t one for dramatic imagery, but that last uncharacteristic simile his mind had produced gave him pause. Perhaps his answer lay therein.