We always knew this day would come. I mean, it's inevitable, right? That's how entropy works, that's how consumerism works.
You try to accumulate potential even as potential must naturally ebb away. You try to accumulate stuff, but the more stuff you have the less it means. The Law of Diminishing Returns should be written in letters of fire across the sky, hundreds of kilometers high.
They'd burn out eventually, of course. The Law is universal.
Well. As soon as people started to figure out that the planet is a circle, a cycle, a snake eating its own tail, there's been a big push to get off it. Never mind that they're all running to another planet that is, itself, another closed system, they're just trying to get away and "get theirs" before somebody else gets it, and try to die with more than average. Doesn't matter, what the "more" is, they just want it.
I'm not quite alone on this world. It's a pretty nice world, or it was before the inevitable industrial cycle, repeated now so many times in so many places. Fire, wheel, wood, metals. More fire. Electricity, a variation of fire when you think about it. The heat economy, the information economy and finally the long, drawn out shuddering orgasm of everybody who can scrape up enough money, spurting off the surface of the world just as fast as they can, just as soon as they can see that the party is nearly over, that economies and cultures cannot grow anymore. They run away, knocking themselves, paradoxically, back to a barely more than primitive state, on some strange new world where humans have never been, and start over.
I'm not exaggerating a lot when I say "fire and wheel," either. Settling a new world with only a few hundred thousand colonists, with what little technology they can carry with them, there are small pockets of technology while those hardier souls that venture out to the frontiers of those new worlds do it with even meaner means to their names. Some of them have to relearn how to make fire.
And then there's always us. We're the ones who don't run.
We could if we wanted to. There's always a few of us who stay behind on a smoothly shaved planet, in a reamed out husk of an asteroid. Always some who opt out of the panic.
You see, it's one thing to say that the world is depleted. In many important respects it is. There's metals still to be found in this world's crust - there's no possible way to get them all, let's not kid ourselves - but it's too much trouble to do. Dig much deeper and you get to discover what the world's molten mantle smells like. There are no hydrocarbons left to combine with liquid oxygen to power rocket engines off the ground, although I suppose you could, with a bit of work, power an ancient ground car with what could be scraped together. Not that you would - solar power works fine and has for generations - but I suppose it could be done.
So here I stand on this reamed, raped planet, me and a few million other people. "Plucked bare," the news reports said. "Tapped out," the economic analyses decided. Okay, if you say so. Take your last load of shipmates and go.
With the sound and fury of all that commerce, all that technology and striving and wild eyed desperation finally gone, one can feel oneself cooling off.
I've said before that money is the heat of the friction of the engines of commerce. The hotter they run, the more money there is - but what of it? It's people that make the engines go. It's people that commerce is about, and money in addition to being a side effect is also the product while also being a means of keeping track of whose engine is running harder. What happens when all the commerce, the engines and their noise and heat go away? What's left?
Me. That's what's left. On a planet nearly devoid of human life - a few million counts as nearly devoid, on this scale - you can feel yourself cooling off as the heat and noise all go thundering off into the dark. Let them go.
"Depleted" doesn't mean "dead." The soil's pretty good, it rained yesterday and my tomatoes are coming along. I'll have beans in a couple of weeks and once I've finished hoeing these weeds out of the corn, there's a hammock under the shade of a pair of maple trees just waiting to take the load off my back. It'll feel especially good when I've earned the break.
I've got all the resources I could ask for. I've got mine. It isn't much, but it is certainly more than enough.
*Originally published on Reddit in r/WritingPrompts
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