I died.... It was on a Thursday, I’d woken up early to head to the office to finish some work I’d left undone the night before. I was hoping to get there and finish before Mr. Newman, our section chief, wanted to actually see the work.

As it was often easier to show work once one some had actual done for the showing.

I stood at the window of my fifth-floor apartment, a warm, terrible tasting coffee in hand.

Like most people I was doing that thing, where I pretended to try to eyeball the sky before I went ahead and had my cellphone tell me what the weather would be, anyway.

Then I saw them. Lights that rose up into the heavens like great big fireworks.

Shining bright though it was still daytime. They climbed higher and higher and higher still, then just before they reached the limit of the sky, they turned towards the earth. Falling.

Their lights growing brighter as they grew closer. Eventually they hit the ground, and the dim morning was forcefully pushed forwards into a blindingly bright day. Across the planet a million small suns, bathed the world in brilliant white.

At least that’s what I assume, I’d already died, the instant that the rockets made contact with the city. Crushed flat with the rest of the building. Getting thoroughly atomized in the process.

*****

They’d destroyed the world... again. All the countries of the world blowing themselves up with such vim and vigor you’d think they were all in a hurry to die.

That was the problem with playing such high stakes games of chicken, farm fowl generally weren’t very clever birds.

The first world, the first earth, was lost the same way. Mankind was forced to abandon it after six world wars. Countless generations of pollution and one not-so-minor outbreak of gray goo.

In the end they all had to flee the planet, piling into rickety ships of iron and steel. Flying into the sky and wandering for several hundred years till we found Agartha, the second earth, our new home.

Humanity and their children, the humankin, and the machinekin, wept with joy when they stumbled upon the new garden world.

It was thirty times bigger than the old world had been, and though the fauna and flora were a bit more ornery, if we weren’t already beyond sick of breathing recycled air by then, we were at least pushing the limits, of our survivability for such conditions.

We’d have taken Agartha, even if it were a death world. Had there been intelligent life living there already we probably would have tried to conquer it or at least begged to be let in as refugees.

We settled down and we rebuilt.

Life was good again. Or at least it was a proper living, not just baseline survival like we’d been barely managing to do in the ships.

Civilization could restart and flourish. Things were magical.

Literally so, Agartha, had actual, literal magic.

There was a presence of some manner of thick, anomalous, particle field, that let the kind of stuff that filled comic books and novels, be possible.

Our scientists couldn’t really figure out the hows and why of it.

And our best Physicists joined the ranks of dentists and psychiatrists, as one of the more depressed professionals, but we “did” eventually figure out how to make use of it all.

The magic let us rebuild even faster. We worked our butts off. Or at least our great, great, great, grandfathers and mothers worked their butts off.

Then we forgot why we’d had to do all that hard work in the first place. Polluting again. Warring again.

Now here we were, just a few years shy of a millennia later and we’d gone and done it again. We’d ended the world.