Chapter 18: The Sea of Dust
Post-nuclear Earth had plunged into an endless twilight.
The sky was an expanse of eternal gray; heavy layers of nuclear fallout shrouded the entire planet, obscuring sunlight and stars, and devouring the very significance of the cycle between day and night.
Upon the land, an endless stretch of scorched earth unfurled like a solidified black ocean, rugged and desolate. Once-magnificent cities were reduced to twisted steel skeletons and shattered stone walls, towering silently amidst weathered ruins—like the bleached bones of dead leviathans, forever frozen in the moment of their demise.
In the streets of the ruins, no sign of life remained. Vehicles had corroded away until only thin metal shells survived; shards of glass carpeted the ground, emitting a dim, cold sheen. Highway bridges had snapped and collapsed, their massive steel structures plunged into riverbeds and valleys like severed arms, stiff and cold.
The oceans were no longer azure, but had turned an unsettling ink-green. Violent algal blooms, triggered by nuclear radiation, blanketed most of the sea’s surface, exuding a putrid stench. Once-thriving coral reefs were now bleached graveyards; the coastlines were densely piled with the skeletal remains of countless fish and whales, cold and pale, recounting the tale of a time when life had flourished.
On the Antarctic continent, the thick ice sheets had cracked open; vast, profound fissures slashed across the land like scars, revealing the hideous black soil beneath. In the earth exposed by the melting glaciers, fossils of creatures frozen millennia ago were faintly visible, as if the Earth were reminding future visitors that life had come and gone here—that flourishing and fading were merely fleeting pulses in the stream of time.
Global storms never ceased, howling across the empty continents, whipping up dust and debris from the ruins like a mournful wail in a silent world. The atmosphere was choked with ash; lightning occasionally pierced the turbid sky, casting eerie blue flashes that illuminated a world devoid of life.
Yet, just as this world fell into utter silence, a solitary signal still drifted through the depths of the cosmos.
At the edge of the solar system, amidst the boundless darkness of the stellar sea, the Voyager 1 probe sailed silently. Carrying the voices, greetings, music, and images of humanity from billions of years ago, it traveled tirelessly toward the endless depths of the stars.
On the probe's Golden Record, a simple message from humanity was inscribed:
『This is a greeting from Earth. May our civilization and our dreams never be alone in this universe.』
At this moment, this lonely little probe was like an insignificant firefly floating in the vast, boundless darkness. Only it knew that the civilization it represented had long since been extinguished upon that blue planet.
Yet it tenaciously continued this endless journey, passing through desolate nebulas, sailing toward the deeper, unknown frontiers of the universe.
Perhaps, after countless centuries, other intelligent lifeforms will capture this solitary and obstinate signal and learn from it that there once existed a planet in the universe named Earth, where a brief yet brilliant spark of life and civilization had been born.
And now, it sailed on alone, shouldering the final hopes and memories of humanity, continuing its destined solitary journey amidst the cold, vast ocean of stars.
The stars were desolate. The dust-shrouded Earth, like a forgotten dream, drifted silently in the darkness of the cosmos, waiting for a distant—and perhaps never to arrive—day of reawakening.
[The End]