In the Emotionary, this short story is filed under the emotion: Joy.

When I heard the news that they would rather give the serum to a photographer-journalist than the brightest of scientists, I knew humanity had expended all means of trying and had ultimately given up hope.

I raised my camera, aligned my left eye with the viewfinder, and took a shot. Tsssht. I took the film out and flicked it with my thumb and index, the image gradually materialising. People have been doing this for a century or two now, but nothing has come close to the efficiency, and perhaps the keepsake value, of a polaroid photograph. 

I looked at the photo and then at the structure. 'Skyscraper' was right—the Babelian tower had pierced through the clouds, bifurcating the white floss as they went their separate ways. The ancients thought heaven stood among the clouds, and that meant I was in heaven, but I saw no golden gate before me nor the city that was to come. I sat down, flipped the polaroid and wrote:

‘Proudly standing at 3 kilometres in height, the Xingjian Tower in Guangzhou, China was mankind’s magnum opus of architecture and engineering. The tower was named after its architect Qi Xifeng’s late daughter, who had died from accidentally falling off a radio tower in Beijing. The extraordinary height of the memorial turned business hub was intended by Xifeng to capture his forbearance surrounding the inevitability of his daughter’s death—if he had negotiated with Death to prolong his daughter’s life, would Death just make the building taller? The skyscraper had reinforced windows and ventilation to prevent similar accidents or acts of suicide from occurring.’

I adored the sentiment behind the building, but my heart broke knowing that the immortalisation of his daughter might not stay immortal after all. I looked at the ground below me through the glass panel of the hull. The smaller buildings were beginning to crumble like dry scones and the debris of what used to be the walls and the roofs and the beams became followers of the wind. I lifted my eyes. It had seemed that the lower half of the tower, too, was slowly eroding. Eventually all that would remain of the daughter would be this photograph in my hand, and the same would come to pass for all but the Earth.

I then travelled to the Giza Necropolis. I met eye to eye with the Great Sphinx, humouring myself with its lack of a nose. It supposedly had a beard, too, but Time’s razor had rendered the creature clean-shaven. I have seen images of it during the days of the Internet but had never beheld it up close until now. I snapped a picture of the beast, writing behind the film:

‘The Great Sphinx of Egypt was a gargantuan limestone statue purportedly of the pharaoh Khafre, the Egyptian king of 2600 B.C. With the head of a king and the body of a lion, the Great Sphinx represented man's dominance over nature.’

‘Man’s dominance over nature.’ I read aloud. I wondered if that painted humanity as arrogant. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! A few years ago we could agree that man did dominate nature, but it seemed the contrary now. What began as scientists playing God and tinkering with ways to cultivate vegetation without sunlight and water ended up causing the destruction of all things living.

The pyramids were next, and so on and so forth. In such a fashion I proceeded, taking pictures of Earth for the next decade. In sixteen years I had captured every spectacle Earth and man had to offer. I had four years left of fuel, and five left before I forget who I am. I gingerly wrapped the 1,011 polaroids with a silk cloth and placed the bulk into the graphene canister. Screwing them shut, it suddenly came to me that I had forgotten one crucial photograph—that of us. Whoever finds this remnant should at least know what humans looked like before this mess. I took out a creased photograph from my wallet. It was a picture of my family stargazing in New Zealand when I was five. We were happy, and perhaps this was a good enough representation of us. I slipped the photo between the other films and tucked them to sleep. Who knows how long it will take before someone, or something, uncovers you. I just hoped that they would see what we have done while we were here. That we’d be remembered by those who follow us.

I opened the vault and cast the vessel. It shrank before me as I saw it drop. I witnessed it slowly sinking into the sand, before grabbing the 9mm out of one of the drawers and shooting myself in the head goodnight. 

Tsssht.

_________

‘(What happened here?)’ a humanoid with hollow eyes asked as it stepped out from its craft and onto the sandy silence.

‘(We’re not sure, but the only thing that remained hinted at some sort of organism-caused calamity.)’ responded another humanoid, procuring from its belly a fragment of the graphene contraption.

‘(So there were living, breathing things here?)’ the leader said.

‘(Yes, a whole race. Look at this.)’ it passed a creased photograph.

‘(Seems like they’ve figured it out too.)’ it thought, eyeing front and back the photograph. ‘(You suppose we could use the star patterns here to figure out when this was and rewind?)’

‘(Yes, we could try.)’

‘(Great, do that.)’ handing the photograph back. ‘(Eliminate the pests, and we might be able to bring this annihilated place back.)’

About the Author

Ivan Huang is a Chinese-Malaysian short story writer hailing f rom Kuala Lumpur, and is pursuing his study in psychology at University College London. His writings revolve around themes such as love, loneliness, death, and impermanence. Ivan’s greatest misfortune is that inspiration often only hits him in the dead of night, which means he can typically be found typing on his laptop at 3am.