Tensions grew. Diplomacy became a nonstarter, and eventually the differences became too great to reconcile. Each side spoke of the other as monsters ready to purge all good from the world. Each side began believing the conflict to be a matter of existence.
A breaking point was reached, and the leaders let fly the fires of war.
These fires, these weapons, were not conventional. There was no need to gather troops or manufacture guns or assemble tanks. A couple button presses, and the Earth opened and missiles took to the sky.
Deadly missiles… Dangerous missiles.
Missiles capable of ending billions of lives in a single flash.
Missiles launching from hidden silos.
Missiles arcing into the upper atmosphere.
Missiles locking on to populated targets.
Falling. Rocketing toward Earth.
Ten thousand feet.
A thousand.
A hundred.
A crash…
…Then nothing.
There were no explosions.
There were no deaths.
There were only inert missiles.
Thousands of them scattered across the planet, each undamaged save for what they sustained from their fall, and each with a tiny hole burnt in the cone on the front.
Having been so close to ending the human race, tensions eased as diplomatic means were sought. Each country felt grateful their rash anger had somehow been diffused without ushering in an apocalypse.
But how had they been diffused? Who had diffused them?
Researchers and scientists studied the missiles and found their burn-holes had been caused by extremely powerful lasers. These lasers had somehow deactivated the explosives that would start the nuclear reaction in each and every nuke.
Thousands of nukes across the planet, instantly rendered inert.
Whoever had disarmed the nukes had done so from multiple locations. Measurements were made, and the point of origin for one of these lasers was calculated.
Deepest Africa.
Explorers traipsed through a nearly impassible stretch of forest to reach it.
At the site, a statue of a monster was discovered. The explorers noted the burn-marks around the creature’s mouth… Burn marks making it appear as if it had recently fired a blast of high-powered energy toward the heavens.
At the base of the creature’s body, held in its claws, was a tablet made from something resembling bone. It was roughly two feet wide and three feet tall. Most of the bottom section had been left blank, but strange writings filled the top portion.
The explorers took this tablet back to civilization.
Tests were run. The symbols used at the top-most sections of the tablet were undecipherable, but the writing at the bottom was recognized as belonging to a proto-Babylonian script.
Experts were summoned.
The text was deciphered.
This is what it said:
‘Ours was the fourth time humans have threatened to destroy ourselves with world-ending weapons. The ancients have once more saved us. As punishment, our technology failed within 3 moon-cycles. If you have discovered this tablet, it means you followed the lasers to their source, which means your people have committed the same sins as ours. The ancients will see fit to punish you, too. Your technology will soon fail. Before it does, please recreate this text in your native language as a warning to the future, then place it back in the statue’s claws. Hopefully ours was the last civilization to commit such a folly, but if it’s not, hopefully yours will be.’
No one knew what to make of the warning. Surely it couldn’t be real.
A few days later the lights went out. A solar storm, directed toward the Earth and lasting three days, had knocked out all technology.
Anything running on electricity was rendered inert. Infrastructure failed.
Panic set in. Fighting. Destruction.
Death.
Mass death.
The explorers who’d retrieved the tablet, many of whom were quite comfortable surviving in the wilds, decided to take their chances away from the blood baths of populated regions. In the pandemonium they managed to steal the slab and disappear into the forest. They did as the proto-Babylonians had instructed, carving modern man’s account into the bone. They placed the slab in the statue’s claws.
A statue that had an account of 5 different civilizations… 5 civilizations, 5 attempts at a world-ending war, 5 times the ancients had intervened to save mankind, and 5 times those same ancients had punished their descendants for foolishness.
The explorers rested at the statue for a few days, then headed out from the site.
As they walked into the distance they looked back, each hoping they’d be the last humans to ever see it.