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We broke the world

We were so very blind. In so many ways. We never planned for the future, our quarterly reports never having the scope to see what was coming. And when everything began to fall apart, we thought our empires of vast wealth would protect us.

The end of the world came gradually. The average temperatures and carbon dioxide climbed over time. But these were not things we worried about. Our lifestyle protected us from the negative effects, our riches acting as a buffer between our comfortable life and the reality. And since we were so safely cradled, why would we do anything about it? The profits were elsewhere, the status quo was all we ever wanted or needed.

Eventually the storms and rising tide swallowed our coastal cities, the ever-growing deserts chipping away at our fertile lands. Swathes of land becoming uninhabitable. But we worried not, for these weren't an issue for us: we could always move further inland and surround ourselves with machines so that we'd never need to compromise on comfort.

By the time we saw that what we were doing was unsustainable, it was already woefully late. Conflicts driven by dwindling resources and famine broke out. Masses of millions trying to escape slow death wandered across the globe pillaging, looting and trying to survive by any means necessary.

That is when we made our final, blind decision to continue evading responsibility as far as we could. Our vast riches poured into projects of space travel to try and escape the planet dying underneath our feet. Those of us who had set ourselves above our fellow man climbed into rockets launched from remote sites.

But no science fiction utopia waited us in the skies above. It should have been obvious, even a child could have figured it out. But we were only ever concerned with escape, time had long ago run out for long-term plans. Some made it farther than others, but never far enough for it to matter. There was no future up here, all we can do is float up in nothingness until our capsules give in or the food runs out. There is no friendly colony to find, no interstellar republic to found.

Even if those below us die first, what did we get out of it? Are we the winners of a grand game of "last man standing"? Is that what we wanted? I think the only meaning in this existence is the cruel joke the world played on us: our prize was the perfect vantage point.

We broke the world, and as a reward we get to die gazing at the devastation we caused.