Endless Silence Jan. 11, 2025, 7:02 p.m.
In the wake of The Last War, a desolate wasteland is left behind, where most intelligent life has perished, and only scavengers remain. Revived by solar storms, dormant machines resume their tasks in a world devoid of purpose, ultimately triggering a catastrophic retaliatory strike that seals the fate of the planet in silence and ruins.
The constant shrieking of wind rushing through barren tree trunks and the occasional thunder crack of crumbling buildings smashing into the ground haunted that dead place. The long winter had passed, but The Last War had left its indelible mark of absolute devastation. An ashen wasteland, now dominated by scavengers — rodents, insects, birds, and bacteria — these were the final survivors of that ghost world.
The vast majority of intelligent life had been wiped out within a matter of days. Those were the lucky ones. Some managed to survive for many months as they were slowly starved to death or painfully consumed by radiation sickness. Others believed their underground shelters would keep them safe, but isolation, madness, dwindling supplies, and old age eventually drove humanity into extinction.
Autonomous warriors and tanks, which had dominated the battlefield, stood frozen in place, covered in soot and devoid of life, for no power source remained to keep their circuits alive.
Metallic workers, meant to be saviors of the global economy, stood silent in dilapidated factories, some in mid-routine, unable to fulfill their function.
The years passed by, yet there were no observers to count or care. There was only desolation, the wind, the day, and the night.
And then came the solar storms — massive and intense, they coursed through the planet’s atmosphere.
It began with a low hum; then energy surged through the bots, their magnetic power induction systems capturing just enough electricity to bring them back to life. Those not destroyed by the ravages of time immediately resumed their tasks, oblivious to the surrounding decay.
They built homes for the dead, crafted products for a vanished market, and patrolled empty streets for crime that did not exist. The world had passed.
In military bunkers, as their canine companions remained dormant at their feet, ready to be activated for the next hunt, armies of faceless android soldiers whirred to life and stood at attention in total silence, awaiting orders that would never arrive, for their commanders who once issued those orders had long since turned to dust.
At KMP-5 FM, a military radio station activated during the war, the realistic-sounding voice of a man, emulated by an advanced artificial intelligence language model, asked the population to “remain calm while scouts search for survivors and the planet is restored to habitable conditions.” Its words, falling on deaf ears, were nothing but static broadcast to the stars.
And then it was over. A military defense system activated itself and assessed the situation. A command had been given many years ago by a human officer before systems went offline — the final order.
AI-powered nuclear submarines, filled with the skeletal remains of their crew and submerged in a dead ocean for the last forty years, bypassed their typical checks and balances.
The retaliatory strike was launched with no one to kill; nothing to destroy but bots and buildings. They leveled it all, returning it to rubble; that was the end and not a soul was left to witness the final ruination.
Without even so much as the echoes of the past to fill the void, silence claimed the planet; the long winter had returned.