“So… the concept of time is something extremely familiar to humanity. Over hundreds of thousands of years, as our ancestors gathered and accumulated coincidences, they came to realize that if you plant seeds and wait, you can harvest crops. They also learned how that process works—sunlight, water, fertile soil, and the like. Without records, this would have been impossible; records allowed time itself to be accumulated. From that point on, time truly began to function as a form of currency.
Even in matters of survival, conditions differed for everyone. Ancestors who lived in deltas and river basins, where fertile soil was replenished regularly, enjoyed both the blessing and the curse of high productivity. Others were forced to farm on barren or sloping land, clinging to life as if crammed into it. On the grasslands, where farming was difficult—if I may put it this way—cultures of nomadism and plunder took shape.
Whether cultivating land, stockpiling surplus, or seizing what had been accumulated, there was always an art of time involved. Growing crops inevitably brings critical moments with each season, and the time of harvest—awaited by all—could deceive no one. When the fields turned gold, the time of plunder and domination ripened as well. There were thousands of contests. Of course, all of this unfolded differently depending on day and night, summer and winter, heat and cold, latitude and longitude, altitude and ocean currents, and position within a continent.
There were civilizations placed in geopolitical conditions that left them constantly exposed to hunger and forced to continue struggling, even as the world was painted over thousands of times with the brush of time. Superiority gave rise to self-sufficiency within, while inferiority exploded outward into the external world. Mongolia built an empire by utilizing the overland Silk Road of the steppes, but the moment its conquests reached their endpoint, it collapsed from within.
In Europe, where a centrifugal force of division kept similar-sized powers constantly fighting to reorder their hierarchies, roughly two hundred years after the Mongol Empire reached its peak, maritime routes were opened to avoid the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the overland trade routes between East and West. Maintaining tension even amid intra-continental rivalry, Europe ultimately reshaped the fate of East and West entirely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
All kinds of technologies developed explosively. There were no particular rules governing how that power should be used. And so it circulated unfiltered, employed to devour the rest of civilization. Humanity, which had once spread across the world simply to survive, to stay alive, gathered again into one. Humans who once had no sources of power beyond their own hands and livestock became capable of artificially transforming and using energy. Railways and communication. In their grip, countless civilizations were smashed, broken, collided, and sucked in, as if caught in traffic accidents. To summarize it all—are there any questions?”
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No one raised a hand. The silence was suffocating.
—
In agrarian societies, the flooding of rivers would let out a single, sharp scream before swallowing everything, leaving behind fertile ground for new farming. Perhaps now, too, in order to give me a chance, everything has been taken away—yet something may be hidden, allowing a new beginning. But my body did not move, and the hunger continued. With no choice, I taste the world. Nothing special—just the taste of a handful of soil clinging to a rock, the taste of the surface. Like that joke from earth science class, about how if you accidentally drop slices of bread in England and Brazil, or in the U.S. and India, or even in Antarctica and the Arctic, you end up with an Earth sandwich. I taste the palest, softest parts of the world. The taste of things as they are. Forever, the Earth’s crust.
It glimmers again. The light of a glass bottle—no longer new, yet always the first time. And perhaps all the screams of the world that I have yet to discover are gathered inside that bottle, mocking me together. If that were truly the case, wouldn’t it be ridiculous? Amusing, even? Are you one of them too? You, who cannot be resumed?
Before I knew it, night had fallen. I try to sleep. I wish tomorrow wouldn’t come—yet it will. I wait in order to end waiting—yet waiting never ends. When I close my eyes, the distance between the eyes wrapped inside my eyelids and whatever they might look at is too short for any image to form clearly on the retina. Yet the more I shut my vision and attempt to sleep, the more paradoxically something comes into focus. Waiting murmurs in a low register, as if it cannot itself be waited for. A long-lost sensation was returning to me. Then… is it time to leave?
Despite the night being fully set, the glass bottle repeatedly emitted light, then retrieved it, over and over. It looks like a glass bottle, but now it clearly seems not to be one anymore. Perhaps because I hadn’t moved for days, it shone light in my direction, as if trying to monitor me. So I first met its expectations, closing my eyes and lying still like a corpse. I could feel the tiny blood vessels pressed against the membrane just in front of my retina becoming vivid. A snickering sound approached. As I squinted and let my eyes adjust to the dark, the bottle shone toward this place like a lighthouse. It changed angles, as if wary of my motionless body.
This was no longer a tedious description of algorithms or cycles of life—it was clearly a signal that someone was alive. Another survivor like me was searching for another survivor like me. I wanted to stand up and shout, but no sound came out. I’m sure my Adam’s apple trembled… damn it. Could there be something there? Food that isn’t an MRE? Clean water? If I’m lucky, maybe I could even fix my ears. Whatever it was, if I survived alone, then even if not on this cliff, someone else might still be alive. I had to go. My heart was pounding roughly. Even if going there was a dangerous inertia, even if it led to the most painful possible outcome, it felt as though someone was whispering that I had to go.
