they came ... part 2

We survived, as I've noted, on the edges of this new-forming reality brought by the cephs--that's what we came to call them--this small band of humans clinging together like a ring of hope.

Hope was something that became strange, more like a religion, its wording and its contours cloaked in a cabalistic vocabulary of prohibitions. The word wasn't spoken like some shibboleth for our kind's creator. Hell, some even worshipped tattered remains of ceph technology. They'd form elaborate, for our lot, ritual masks, resembling the cephs, and do a light bobbing dance to mimic their synchronous movement in massive oceanic swarms.

Something strange about the cephs as we knew about our own versions of them here, before they came, is that the mind of a ceph is not centralized like our own. It's eight arms each has its own brain component. The only analogue to our own specialization would be the thumb, but a whole tentacled arm with its own mental investment contributed to the multilateral activity and thinking, so we thought, of the cephs. Our kind, on earth, before they came, could and would sense and taste and understand through the use of their arms. Yet they could stare at you with those eyes, those strange piercing, oddly human eyes, so round with their jagged pupils. Those eyes were an evolutionary extravagance, more adept at surveying their surroundings for the sake of making their protean pigmented canvas. So to the eight brains, as we came to believe, of the cephs they contributes various degrees of aptitude. And in their mass they each had one mind honed to the synchrony, and in that synchrony they controlled the oceanic currents and by extension the winds and finally the planet's rotation itself. Days extended for weeks and the remainders of humanity were thrown out of their circadian rhythm, committing to long stretches of activity and equally spasmodic and lengthy sleeps. It was our new normal.

To speak of a norm is misleading at this juncture. We weren't our earth's offspring. No, we were the rats of a new dawn, the creeping lowly beasts living among the shattered remains of a population cataclysm. In its shadowy nadir we crept, scraped, and grew a new identity than that of our forebears. We were not human in that sense; and it was a very real dawning of a new identity, one etched out of the hard contours of survival. We had lost most of the knowledge that we deemed to specialization. We lost most of the knowledge of its transmission and its indelible imprint on those things known as books. We had given them up not too long before the cephs came. And, like most of our culture at that time, it was loaded onto digital simulacra that we accessed through any number of powered devices. Now, with all power gone that once-ubiquitous access point to all of humanity's fitness of memory was gone, snuffed out in an instant. We could not have anticipated the delicate nature of culture because it was the stuff of our daily lives. Once we were untethered from the substrate of normal activity we cut it loose like so much dead weight pulling us into the briny murk of this new earth. Our settlement was on a broad but jagged remnant of a large mountain range. Here, we set about re-establishing a life, but not for long.

History, culture, and any stable definition of humanity were swept away in the first tidal rushes that came with the eruption of the cephs onto our planet. Our rituals were that of survival, and the sinews of our daily activities were taut and strained by each second of our hunger, our thirst, our loneliness, our abject existence. A beautiful thing about being reduced to a minimal population of 72 is that most of the disease that once flourished among a planet inhabited by trillions of humans was all-but-gone. With those bacteria and viruses, which pirated our cellular DNA we counted the ghosts of a vast heritage, a heritage of trillions, built of hundreds of thousands of years. All gone forever. Our language was denuded of plurals, pronounds, verbs. It was simply an undifferentiated soup of noises to which we claimed a fleeting significance. The ghosts, the many voices of the past were all gone. We lacked any understanding because we had no time to prepare. I cannot even tell you if I was born here or climbed to this vantage point to avoid the tidal rush. I had no yesterday. Those nearest me stared off into the vast wastes with the same forlorn and vacant expressions that I had. Our faces mirrored the great emptying of the inner life that once nourished us, that played a central role in shaping our experiences. Now, our visages were what we carried into the world behind which was a chasm of nothingness, the ocean itself. Our bodies were marionettes to an older puppeteer, and with the massive planetary changes our bodies followed suit. Atavistic appendages emerged, as the vibrating crystal that made up the planet's cool iron core was realigning the spin of our every atom. We were coming apart at a deathly slow pulse, and it registered on our bodies as these many and vast scars from which emerged the buds that would sprout something strange, scary, painful, old to the world but new to us.