The Visitors

         It began with the floods, the fire. The searing heat and melting ice. The sea rose, battering the shorelines, eroding the coast. Animals migrated, the plants and trees, helpless, withered away. The sky slowly turned to ash above the forests, the desert plains, the cities. Lightning strikes and dry leaves combusted in the fierce heat of the sun. And the people were all displaced, the country dwellers, out toward the oceans and the estuaries. Food was scarce. Water evaporated around them. What was left was heavy with arsenic and lead. The isolated continent still breathed, though it had been suffocating slowly. And on it, the land burned like sacred fire, the firekeepers lost, no longer able to light the way to the past, the once custodians of the Golden Island.

        Tethered to the sun, the once blue planet turned, spinning in rhythm with the universe. The planet lived in solitude; little life on the surface to care for, to nurture. The atmosphere, a wash of poisonous gas, trapped in the heat and baked the surface of the land. The planet would wait for itself to regenerate, in time, let life grow once again. It was a patient planet. It would take eons for the process to take effect. At least it was safe from the violence and exploitation that had destroyed life on its surface, ending a turbulent epoch. Perhaps, in billions of years, a new entity would appear and resurrect the planet or end its life once and for all. 

        From far off in the galaxy, a single ship forged past the celestial bodies, closer and closer to the sun. It was looking for intelligent life, searching for resources to plunder. The visitors came from a distant planet that was prosperous, flourishing. But they searched for more, always looking for places to conquer, to exploit. When they arrived at the blue planet, they found a tempestuous environment, raging with nitrous dioxide, methane gas, carbon dioxide. An angry, swirling atmosphere, a limited supply of oxygen to keep the planet moribund, barely alive. They considered moving on to find a more suitable candidate, but something about the planet interested them. It seemed to be a place in the early stages of healing itself, the oxygen slowly replenishing and the possibility of life slim, but unmistakable. They had not given up hope that there was something still worth finding, some uncommon mineral, some precious metal. The majority of the planet was covered in water, so they looked over the continents, the remaining islands. All barren wastelands, covered in ice or flame. All except one larger island to the south, still glimmering with hope. It had a distinctive shape with two areas of water cutting into the mainland, a gulf to the north, a bite to the south. A broken piece, half submerged, foundering below it. The island radiated a deep golden brown through its burnt edges. A land of opportunity, now scorched, scarred by the environment collapsing around it. The visitors’ ship drew near to the island, the microscopic details of the geography starting to take shape. Ancient rivers, still fighting for survival. They had been known by many names when civilisations had lived there in peace. The custodians had survived for thousands of years, living with the land, in harmony with the planets, the children of the sun and moon. There was evidence of plant life still surviving by the riversides and near the oceans, but the heart of the land was mostly desert. Vast swathes of sand covering the central part of the island, an ocean of desolation, void of life. They radiated deep red hues, such vivid colours, beautiful and dangerous. The northeast, a jungle of venomous plants, evolved, living off the poisonous gases in the atmosphere. The visitors looked out over the island and saw its potential. Something must be out there. Something worth taking.

        They began in the southeast. The rivers still ran and there were signs of past life nearer the riverbanks. The visitors stopped and tested the waters. They were polluted but could still be resurrected, they thought. They found examples of microbes, surviving for billions of years in the rocks and the riverbeds. The water was rich with bacteria, living despite the surrounding chaos occurring out of the water. In the distant past, schools of fish had thrived in the rivers. Armies of crustaceans with long claws crawling along the riverbeds and flat nosed, furry animals with webbed toes clung to the banks. The riverside had teemed with red marsupials that bounded on their hind legs and small, woolly creatures that hung up high in the trees. It had been a paradise. But it all disappeared in the space of a millennia. Along the visitors’ way up the rivers, old settlements started to take shape. Rows of destroyed houses, shacks, and sheds. The foundations of churches and community halls. And the settlements turned into bigger towns, surrounded by highways, cracked, with bridges snapped in half by floods and winds. Towering pylons, their power lines cut, stood witness to it all. The highways forged through the barren countryside, finally reaching the cities. Monumental, broken metropolises towered over the skyline, a sign of past opulence and growth. The buildings crumbled and decayed, the streets barren and empty, parklands turned to hard earth, patches of long grass still creeping through the pavements beside them. Millions of people had lived there once. They had been the beacons of industry, power, and wealth. Now only the bones, the ruins of their prosperity remained. 

        A once beautiful harbour curved around an inlet in a bay to the east. But the harbour the visitors saw was grey and lifeless, a mire of sludge and slurry. By the walls on the shoreline, lapping against the land, the grey water popping with noxious gas splattered ooze up on to the rocks. A parabolic bridge was broken, smashed in half, seemingly by some tidal monsoon. Shattered buildings lined the water’s edge, their ruins, mortar, wall ties and cinder blocks sitting like crude, cement sealions at the shore. Before progress, there had been peace. The custodians had looked over the earth and the water, living in synergy with the planet and the atmosphere. Colonised and made to give up their land, their words, their names faded away and a new language occupied the island. The colonists built the cities, spreading out through the land, transforming the landscape. The great bridge was built, and the island was unrecognisable. The new way of life spread further and further, like some strange transfusion, coursing through the island’s veins, erasing the past and replacing it with a new, bleaker future. Great projects were undertaken, wars were fought, and the planet turned, untroubled by it all. But, for the visitors, none of this mattered. They could not have taken any of it with them even if he they had known its history.    

        In the southeast, a flat city in a sea of ash leaned up against the wasted landscape, the worn buildings jutting out from the horizon. The land had once been scrub, teeming with life; small spotted mammals, gliders with long tails and large eyes, and short-legged furry creatures burrowing in the earth. They hummed with energy, fed and clothed the custodians and lived in symbiosis with the planet’s vitality. By the time the visitors arrived, they were all gone. Acid rain had washed the trees away and burnt the structures down to stubs. Dead remnants of smashed and battered houses lined the remaining streets, once mapped out in perfect, concentric circles. And in the middle, a giant, empty lake, drained by the heat and the wind. Above it, a strangely shaped complex still stood, one side sunken into the earth, tired and weary. The flag on top was long gone, an empty flagpole remained. This was the site where the colonists had talked, argued. This was the place, in the end, they had not listened. A once great marble structure, hiding amongst the scrubland, separate to the rest of the nation. Untouched, unseen. They talked about the people, but not often to them. They made decisions for them, controlled the budgets, the finance. And the custodians set up tents in front of the complex, an embassy. They wanted their voices heard. The visitors did not hear any of these voices, though; not the ones that came before. For them, there was just the whistling of the wind, and the emptiness around them.  

        The visitors moved further north, the landscape changing. The earth became blanketed by strange, tropical plants, otherworldly, insidious. As the visitors flew over the land, the jungle intensified, thicker, deeper, more threatening. Far off in the distance, a cloud of acid rain burned its way out of the clouds, steam and vapour rising from the plants below. Flames smouldered, the beginnings of a bushfire. Soon the vicious plants would be alight, the fire spreading fast across the wild terrain. Seeing this, the visitors kept on north, and along the shore. The air cleared slightly near the water, so they continued to fly along the coastline. As they did, the density of the ruins of houses increased. They were heading toward a long beach, lined with buildings and highways. The ancient, crumbling towers lined the shoreline, smashed by waves, and eroded back to wan stilts, pitched on sand, lavish and ill thought through. The once city of sin and decadence collapsed under its own weight. A modern Gomorrah. Kings of wealth and industry had lived there, building on their riches, living a life of abundance and extravagance. The unnamed, unknown barons, investing wisely. Development on top of development, as the shoreline looked like a giant set of crooked teeth, seated precariously, inches from the water. There had been hotels and casinos. Time shares and brothels. A million means of exploitation. It had all come to nothing. It was floating off into the endless ocean. The visitors looked out at the disfigured shoreline. They saw it for what it was, the decay of decadence. The end of an extravagant era.   

        The further north they went, the more the venomous jungle took over the landscape, eating everything in its path. The visitors looked up into the bird-less sky, swirling clouds filled with sulphur moving erratically around them once more. They decided to pitch west, through the giant peninsula, following the northern coastline. At the top of the island, the visitors came across an old outpost, springing out of the mass of poisonous undergrowth, adjoining the violent sea. Not much remained of the township. There had once been a line of skyscrapers across the horizon, now reduced to ruts of rubble, only the foundations remaining. Outside the town centre stood housing blocks, their roofs removed by violent winds. The stories of the people there remained a mystery to the visitors, the unrest, the violence, the disorder. And yet, it was a place that had been occupied by families that loved each other, loved their history. They were all gone, replaced by the remnants of the skyscrapers and the public housing, the overgrown parks, and the washed-out mall in the heart of the city left barely visible to the visitors’ gaze. The outpost had been a stronghold before that, carpeted in bombs, the generals in their bunkers by the river. The world had been on fire, and the isolated island had not gone untouched. The tunnels, underground shelters and the airfields remained, but the visitors did not have time to look at them. They had a mission to fulfil.

        A savage heat gripped the outside of the visitors’ ship. It was reaching extreme levels as they turned south into the centre of the island. The clouds had parted, and the fierce sun was beating down on the exposed desert. There was dark red dirt, for miles. And then like a mirage, a huge rock, a great pebble, stood out from the desert, ancient, unconquerable. The pock marked rock, scarred by spears and sticks, had survived eras of violence. If only the visitors had known its history. The custodians had cared for the rock, the magnificent boulder born at the birth of the planet, still standing. The devastation of the planet had little impact on it. The rock sat like the beating heart of the island, square in the middle. And it had meant so much to so many. The emblem of the island’s fortitude. It was an oddity to the visitors, and worth exploring. They hovered over it, scanning for anything to excavate. The scanners showed a high reading of sandstone, nothing worth spending time on for the visitors. Nothing of value in it.

        Further south, colossal sandstorms ripped a path across the empty desert, screaming in vain without a soul to hear them. Amongst the vastness of the desert, remains of old settlements were found by the visitors. Barely anything left, just small buildings sunk deep into the sand, the tops of the structures poking out of the desert surface. They were forgotten homes, far away from the erstwhile civilisation of the southeast shoreline. These were the lands, the outposts, and missions for so many desert dwellers avoiding tyranny and oppression. A place to escape to in anonymity; no rent to pay, fewer laws to obey. The wind and the sand had nearly blown them out of existence, but there was something left. The ghosts of the desert people, the bones of men, women and children still spoke from beneath the ground. But the visitors didn’t hear them. They wondered how this place could ever have sustained life.

        Moving further west, the visitors flew over another ocean of desert, seemingly infinite, no sign of life or water. A vast sea of sand, a barrier from the east to the west. It cut the island in half, separating each coastline. The visitor’s scanners sensed nothing, no commodity or resource worth stopping for. As they continued on, the desert began to be broken up by specks of plant life fed by small, tainted reserves of water, boiling in the reflection of the sun. They bubbled and oozed like rich, thick pools of tar. Only the venomous plants drank from it. Soon the coastline stretched out in front of them, and another great city, far to the west, ravaged by the elements, scorched by the sun, and battered by the ferocity of the encroaching waves and winds, marked the line between the ocean and the land. The visitors travelled to it, again scanning the earth below. But their scanners were unaffected. Not a living soul was there. Only the ruins of a city built with prosperity and power, torn down by nature and the cruel fate of the universe. The visitors would never know the story of that place, the lives that had played out there. The city had ridden the back of the great mining boom, plundering the earth of its iron ore, its nickel. The custodians had battled to protect the island, but their pleas had been ignored and the mining continued, unabated. And then, as the visitors continued to scan the land around the city, a distant signal blipped on their radar. Finally, some kind of precious resource had been identified. They moved quickly, further south, the signal getting stronger. Stopping amidst the toxic bush and scrub, the signal peaked, a loud hum coming from the scanner. There was something of interest, not living, but certainly worth examining. Something they could take from this desolate place. The visitors activated the drill, piercing the earth, taking images with subterranean lights attached to long telescopic poles. Below the surface, there was darkness at first. Layers of limestone and crystalline rocks. Nothing significant for the visitors. The scanner still hummed loudly, urging them to keep looking. And then, faintly shimmering, there was a glint of something. They moved the camera back to see if they could capture it. There it was again. A beautiful aureate substance, hidden beneath the haggard landscape. Their scanners identified the isotopes in the new-found metal.  It was gold, beautiful and rare. The visitors could not believe their eyes. They stared at it, mesmerised, enchanted by its lustre. They had seen the precious metal rarely on their travels, on asteroids and meteors. This island, devoid of intelligent life, was hiding a swag of plunder they had not expected. Activating their drill once more, the visitors started the extraction process, taking time to expend everything the deposit had to offer. Once they had taken their fill, they pointed their ship to the sky, returning to their planet to flaunt their prize. They reasoned there was no cause to return.

        The wind whipped over the barren deserts in the west of the island, pushing on to the great pebble, before bending south toward the searing heat of the central deserts. There were names that the custodians had given them. The colonists disregarded them, replacing them with their own. And now, there were no names, no spoken language. Just the island, a single entity, free from intrusion, violation, spinning through space. The chemicals that filled the atmosphere did not concern the island, whether they encouraged life or not. For now, it would live in solitude once more. The visitors had taken what they wanted, and they had gone, leaving nature to its processes, the winds to lash the deserts and coastlines. The rivers to run, snaking through the arid countryside. And there was not a sound made by any intelligent life to sully the natural workings of the island, indeed the entire planet. It had returned to its healing, slowly recovering from the greed, the corruption it had endured for so long. It was a process of rebirth. A new beginning. The stars and planets swung in harmony far beyond the polluted sky, out in space, and the children of the sun and moon looked on. Waiting patiently, hoping the visitors would not return.

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Greig Thomson is an author living in Adelaide, South Australia, He is currently studying Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, looking at different perspectives on social justice issues. He has recently been published in 'God's Cruel Joke Literary Magazine' and 'Mande Literary Magazine'.