(First chapter of a more serious work. It needs some editing and for me to write more, but here's what I have . . .)

There’s a crackling sound of an engine and whoosh of a car, tapping of footsteps, a sound like no other. The daylight is foggy and grey, the kind of sky the sun can’t see through, making blind men of constellations. A breeze flutters leaves, flutters trees and hair, and a shaft of rare sunlight falls upon golden bows, tallest branches, eternal pothering. And then the breeze leaves, rabbits freeze in the tall grass and I too have froze, hidden in sedge underneath a laurel tree; something is in the air, something to set goose-flesh on your neck and shivers up your spine. A whirring is heard, a clacking whirring mechanical sound. There stand three men like aliens, made of metal, made of things torn from men’s dreams, and bits of copper string, broken parts of rust and bronze, glinting upon guns for arms and tall metal bodies, bolts, glowing eyes, clicking shivering gears. There was a time when all the world was ours, and man did speak like a profit that it would be forever more. There was a time when there were cities, there was a time when there were roads, but now all is lost and the only thing we own now is ourselves. But isn’t that how it’s always been, all this time, all along? A man can hold a pen but that pen might break and splatter ink like blood, a man might own a house until it goes to fire and smoke, to ashes blowing in the blackened wind. Daylight no longer shines on this world, not since the Great War, and as we die and mutate in its nuclear waste the robots, unaffected with metal carapaces, help us off. Built to serve God, man destroyed Him; it only serves just that those built to serve us should kill us all. I lay in wait, gun ready, but it’s too late as hot metal sears through living flesh, and I am no more. Man’s greatest folly always was imagination.

In the time to come, new species will arise, but the likes of which you’ll only see in nightmares, men with no necks but eyes from their chests, and you shall call them the anthropophagi; tall men of bone like Holocaust victims only alive, and wild, ones that crawl and ones with two heads, cyclopes, two fused as one, no arms and many arms, shrunken heads, the living undead, some with legs fused together. They will cry a thousand utterances, gutteral shrieks and moans, the whole Earth’s a Chernobyl with torn land, blackened sky, disease, acid rain, choking air; the lucky ones are the ones already dead for they will feed off of themselves, and none shall know rest. Only cockroaches and rats and rubble and trash, that is all that remains, and the remnants of technology as robots see all species left as enemies to destroy; for the most part they are right; few humans remain truly human.

Today the waters rise another inch higher in the oceans of every nation, but no one was there to measure; still more of millions, hundreds of millions, died today as oxygen grew scarcer, as carbon monoxide levels raised, but no one was around to take a death count, no one was there to bury the bodies. No good burying the bodies anyways, food is scarce.

Somewhere up in outer space though, one person did escape, one astronaut who took an unplanned, unapproved flight as soon as the fighting began; he was a coward, he was a pacifist, but he is alive, and watches the events of earth from monitors so many thousand miles remote, watches in horror but does and can do nothing; eventually, he turns the monitors off.

His name is Captain Nassif, and thankfully he has brought with him chickens and a quickly flourishing garden, and many, many, many books, data discs, and video holograms. He has at least one book on every subject and many parts to build things, but the books he has been reading most of lately are the Bible and Koran. He was never a religious person, but he glances back to the monitors of Earth from time to time to see if Mohammad, or perhaps Jesus, will rise from all this and officially begin a Judgment Day. He is rather beginning to loose it.

It is strange how slowly time passes in a world with no people, no outdoors, and not much sound but the tink of your china cup as you set it down and contemplate something so frail as this surviving what all humanity could not. Up in the capsule Eyad Nassif looks out onto an eternally shining sun and contemplates suicide; there is nothing left to wait for really, weeks have passed according to the befallen Earth’s calendar and by now all but one monitor have gone dead. Eyad looks in the mirror and sees an image of himself through carnival glass, a face with hollowed dark eyes, slack chin, paled complexion with new wrinkles. He is twenty-three. Small burst veins form bloodshot in his eyes; a twitch has begun in his temple, his eyebrows are eternally knitted. He fancies a shock of grey in strands of thick hair bit it is just reflected light. His hands shake, at night he dreams a dreamless sleep yet wakes in cold terror and shaking. He was always a bit of a loner on Earth but now he could be content to be around just about anybody. But there is no going back; there is nothing to go back for.

It’s three hours later that Eyad hangs himself. He chokes, he gags, feels his eyes bulge and his neck pop, and out of the corner of dying eyes, he sees figures.

He is very disappointed when he finds himself alive again, who knows how long later. He is laying on his back with a shimmering white ceiling above him, golden light that can only be natural sunlight slanting through; it feels of autumn, of afternoon, of late October, he turns his neck and finds hardly any pain, no displaced bones or broken column. Was it all a dream? he wonders, as he arises with an aching back. And then he sees the burns on his fingers from gripping the rope, and finds this assertion quite wrong.

There is nobody around but he is in a white metallic room of rounded design, with a starburst ceiling and glass-brick walls. The outside, whatever it is, is warped and skewed by the bendy glass and he runs his hurt hands over its cool surface; he wonders why this is the worst injury he gets out of a hanging attempt.

Suddenly he hears a sound of footsteps on metal in what must be an outside corridor.