Whence have we come from, and where are we headed?

The emptiness within us all, the great unease of not knowing why we are here or what we are, what are we? And was our downfall decided from the very beginning? Why are we the way we are? Are our genes at fault? Did we really have to end up like this? Have our genes forbidden us from straying from the path headed towards self-destruction?

Why were we born human? Did we have to be human?

Did we have to destroy the world we lived in? Was that really the only way, as long as we remained to be human, to destroy everything?

They’d arrived at a once great city of stone, now a city of rubble and ruin, paying homage to modern society, a grave built of stone.

They’d landed the day before following a more or less comfortable flight nestled between boxes.

“If you set your mind to it, you can do everything,” she had said as they’d stood outside the last remains of a fence, “if it’s physically and technically possible, that is.”

"That's the kind of world we now live in. One in which everything goes, and no one cares anymore. Most are gone, and those still around are hurt too deeply to give a damn about anything.”

He had shortly been worried she’d been planning on hijacking a plane, but they’d actually come to a peaceful agreement in the end.

“I guess it is true that anything goes.” 「いい意味でと悪い意味で」

But then again, the world had never been that kind of a place.

Climbing over rubble and stone, he followed her closely as they made their path through the ruins.

There weren’t many big cities that had been spared from the bombing, or rather, the only ones that had been spared had simply already been laid to ruin by natural catastrophes, another one of mankind’s evil plots to destroy itself.

There were also no towns, villages, communities or isolated houses that still stood as they once had before the fall of civilisation. Everything that now existed was a poor excuse for a reconstruction of the world as we once knew it, a mockery at best. But values had greatly changed, if not almost but disappeared. There wasn't much left to value anymore, after all. No children to protect, the young and the old had been the first to fall victim to the poisonous air and those hiding from it to disease. No loved ones, no family, only a handful of lucky survivors were left of humanity to form new communities. And numbed by the pain, most had lost all interest in the world or society as a whole. Only the need for the bare necessities remained. People still needed to eat, should they not have the courage to let go of life or were too stubborn to give up on it, even if there was nothing left for them to look forward to.

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'It's been midnight in our world for so long, and no one looks for the dawn anymore.'

Since infrastructure had crumbled, and until a new old-fashioned manually manned system had been erected, all contact between the last remnants of humanity had been lost. And for the most part, it had remained that way. Those stranded across the globe, far away from what they would have considered 'home', had been too afraid to find out the true condition of that which they had left behind and had chosen to stay ignorant.

Naturally, the end of the world hadn’t been a sudden one. Had not everyone known this would happen sooner or later? Having ravaged the ecosystem for so long, not even their parents' generation had had any prospects left, nothing to hope for, no future. This begs the question, for what purpose had they been born into this already dead world?

‘We’ve been born to die.’

Having depleted the resources and poisoned the waters and the air, vast areas of land had begun to become uninhabitable before his generation was even old enough to vote. They had seen the world fall apart, being sentenced to death by the adults before they had any legal rights to challenge them. No open ear had been ready to listen to what they had to say. They were only children, after all. And once they had finally grown up, nothing was left to say. So they had awaited their doom while the wars had worsened and the world had taken on a shade of brown and grey. Dust had begun to fall, covering the lands like a blanket. Finally, night had fallen, never to fade.

And the final blow had been some trivial argument, one that would end the modern world. And still, there was life. And still, there were those living in the aftermath, amongst the ruins.

They walked on through the wide open field, a sight unthinkable before the fall of the skyscrapers trying to challenge the heavens like the tower of Babylon once had. Only the foundations of former buildings now decorated the wayside.

And on they walked, passed them until they came to a green meadow stretching far into the horizon. Even during the night of the world, at this very edge, New Zealand remained a marvel of nature. And across this miracle, someone had haphazardly been digging holes. Someone had been digging graves. Someone had bothered to care for the dead, though they most likely did so more than they did for the living.

Kazuya let his gaze wander across this last great monument of mankind’s tenacity as he stood and waited for Nii to find what she'd been looking for. At last, she came to a halt in front of a broken stone and, walking up to her, they had finally come to the conclusion of their long, long odyssey and of her journey.

“I’m home.”

And she carefully placed the souvenir on the grave, the one she had failed to bring home for so long.

‘So she hadn’t chosen it for its usefulness, huh?’

♫

“So, what do we do now?”

"Now, we head towards the future," Nii said, smiling softly, turning her back on her past.

“And we go as far as our wings take us. And as far as our paths run together, we’ll be each other’s company.”

“Then, I guess it’s gonna be a long way yet.”