The world stopped working one day.

It was gradual at first. No one really noticed. The trees slowly stopped growing. The grass died out just a little bit too quickly. The seasons grew strange and long, and storms raged throughout much of the planet. And winds which should have blown strong and true, faded away. But these things, we noticed these things. They were obvious. Like when the animals died out.

The animals, I vaguely remember the animals. How they used to run freely, hunt each other, drink of the formerly free flowing waters of our streams and rivers. The birds, and their songs, poetic and harmonious, and how they would fill the sky, flying through the days and nights, filling the horizon with fluid motion. The rabbits, hopping along their merry way; and the wolves, beautiful animals, akin to the dogs we breed and keep now. Every movement of a wolf was sheer poetry; even the darkest moment, the savagery of the hunt, as they killed. But most animals killed each other; it was the way, and was glorious in its own right. They hunted not for sport, but for survival. They hunted each other to live.

They were also hunted by us, many to complete extinction; a moot point now, as all save humans and the pets we cultivate are gone. But oh, how wondrous and beautiful they once were; and, once again, almost no one noticed when they began to vanish.

At first it was viewed as a God send. Animal attacks declined, then became virtually non-existent. Diseases carried by rats and insects began to decrease, though we did not even consider that this could be due to a decrease in the animal and insect populations. Soon they were gone, and we were told not to worry. That our technology could make up for the ecological changes we were experiencing.

"Don't worry," they said. "We have the technology. We can fix it."

They say that it all started with the industrial revolution; they say that this is when we began spoiling the land, with our engines and factories, our waste and our greed. It would be just as easy to say that it began when early man first fashioned a tool, first took hold of evolution and began to shape it as it shaped him. It's all a load of bullocks, really. The only people who truly believed in that were the environmentalists, and we all know how selfish they were. "Protect the planet". Rubbish. The only thing that was ever at stake was our ability to live on the planet, and everything else for that matter. We were, and still are, parasites. To their knowledge, the planet would have gone on long without us, or any other organism. Or so we thought.

However, it appears that fate is not without its own sense of irony; and the environmentalists, selfish bastards we believed them to be, were only half wrong, really. They were wrong on the time frame, when we actually began hurting the planet.

It was when we began to tear apart the heart of the planet, to remove the vital organs of this once fertile and very much functioning globe, now left as a cold, almost desolate rock floating around the sun. If only we could have seen. If only we could have known.

But, like I said, it was subtle at first. We removed rock from the lower layers of the ground, searching for gold and silver, for silicone and lead, and we destroyed entire landscapes, ruined ecosystems, created rock quarries and landfills out of what was once beautiful land. But whenever we thought we might be going too far, might be hurting the planet, we were calmed, cooed, pacified.

"Don't worry," they would say. "We have the technology. We can fix it."

Then a little human ingenuity lead to the discovery that the metals we¹d previously used to kill could not only conduct heat, but also electricity, and at an amazingly fast rate. Later we learned how we could conduct signals, encoded in electricity, through these metals. And so more of the metals of this land were mined in the name of progress to create radios, TVs, microwaves and, of course, computers. Meanwhile, famine began to strike certain areas. Whole crops were lost due to irregular weather patterns, called "freak storms". Spring and autumn began to dwindle. And once again, we were calmed, cooed. Pacified.

Don't worry. We have the technology. We can fix it.

And as the earthquakes and diseases grew at an alarming rate, we were occupied with another problem, a man made problem. It seems we had not equipped our machines, these machines which we had based entire societies upon, to handle the slightest adjustment in our regulation measurements of time. And so, at the zero hour, when stock markets fell, bank machines froze, and missiles were launched, we were calmed, cooed, and pacified.

Don't worry. We have the technology. We can fix it.

But it seems we missed the foreshadowing. See, we never thought, never even dreamt that maybe the planet itself might run in a particular fashion, not dissimilar to a computer. That maybe, just maybe, the planet too required all the silicone and steel to maintain itself. We never caught on, not even when the seasons grew longer, and the days became sporadic. It was only when they stopped altogether, when our half of the globe was left in darkness, the other in perpetual light, that we thought maybe we were wrong about a few things.

Of course, some believe that the planet can heal itself. That its just waiting out the lifespan of a virus which is, to this day, still removing parts of its vital systems. But we're still here. In our heated homes, our domed, fluorescent lit cities. We'll always be here.

We have the technology.