at the top of the Old Mountain stood a building. a complex of bookshelves, servers, and twisted iron girders reaching into the sky. it was meant to be a monument to human information. an epitaph for our species that would stand forever. but that was a long time ago. now it is rotting. sealed containers of books espoused to last thousands of years are mouldering in under a hundred, the humidity and water lapping, seeping into the cracks. the bones of countless refugees fleeing from the flooding cover the ground outside, locked outside of the last refuge. it was thought they would contaminate the memories within these walls. a faded sign standing on rusted posts, nearly unreadable with age. "Mt. Saint Helens Information Preservation Repository."
we stretched our fingers to the sky, our own towers of Babel. we, foolishly, thought we would be spared the wrath of a god. we belched our fumes into the sky, blackening the air with smog. we dug out the heart of the planet, and used the stolen flesh to build great works. but now we are gone. and the only memory that remains are those within these walls, and the bones outside. the doors are rusted shut, never again open to the world.
rusting machines, servos long burnt out, litter the halls. meant to maintain this place for millennia. the water in here is more slush than liquid, for it was so, so cold. the builders of this place thought the cold would stave off the rot, the damp. and it did. but not long enough. nothing will ever last long enough. we cannot classify the decay of our species. we cannot catalogue, annotate, and understand what fundamentally requires the end of everything we have ever built. we cannot taxonomize the end.
within the servers, even the data is rotting. the increasing power demands, heightened by the cold are unable to be supported by the limited geothermal power plant in the depths of the complex. the files are slowly but surely being corrupted. missing folders, entire books, poems, video games. digitized. gone.
for decay is a persistent thing.
the radio tower at the center of the building has long since collapsed. meant to receive the last gasping words of a dying world. desperate survivors on ships with not enough food. families stuck atop the Empire State building, the Burj Khalifa, the great towers of Babel we once thought were greater than time, the water creeping ever closer. they are probably all dead now. it does not matter.
time does not stop. it will consume our flesh, sloughing the skin from our bones like rotten fruit. then our pages, pulping and emulsifying the paper until it is a sodden, continuous mass. and finally our files, corruption, power loss, and time eventually scrambling data to naught but noise.
the great work of humanity, the most wondrous work of creation, had ended.
