Endless Vessel

by Charles Soule

These days—and for some time now—the news came in any flavor you wanted, as long as you wanted awful. There were no good surprises anymore.

“I like that you can finish the newspaper too,” she said. “It’s . . . finite. You can read it and be done. Better than just scrolling constantly, seeing the next bit of nonsense to come across all your feeds.”

The world was still running, but the gears were starting to stick, the engine winding down. The obvious conclusion: if enough humans stopped caring about keeping society going . . . it wouldn’t keep going.

But after the hammerblows to humanity’s psyche brought by pandemics, the creeping dread of climate change, political upheaval across the globe, and now, of course, the Grey, believing the world had much to look forward to was starting to feel like an act of extreme naïveté.

“It ain’t easy to get your head around, but the truth is humanity’s over. The planet has gotten sick of us, there are too many people, not enough resources, madness is seeping in around the edges. We’re done. Anyone with half a brain can see it. Even more . . . we feel it. That’s where the Grey comes from, I think. Deep in our bones, in our hearts, in our very souls, we understand there’s a wrongness to us. We can’t fix it, we can’t make it better, and it’s getting worse!”

“That is why we burned the Louvre and all those other museums. We don’t want you guys wrapped up in thinking about the art humanity has created or might make down the road. It’s why we hit the stock markets. What are you saving for, investing in? Come on. Paying attention to all that stuff is like doing homework over summer vacation. There’s no homework. Not anymore. We just need to get out there and play.

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is a fantasy. There is only now, now, now. And, if you want it . . . joy, joy, joy.”

“Promises are like bananas. Very hard to keep,”

Her dad’s car was a pretty standard sedan, though. This was . . . a swirl of cream stirred into a coffee and set upon four tires.

His voice did sound a bit smoother—scraped from his throat with a finer grain of sandpaper, maybe. But now it was Lily who had gone silent. Peter Match, noted possessor of one of the loveliest voices in popular music, had throat cancer. She reeled at the precise, calculated injustice of it. Evidence of a lower power.

“I think that’s what the Grey is. Humanity reached its yield point. Everything bad and quick and enormous happening in the world all at once stretched us too far, so we can’t get back to what we used to be. We’re something different now.”

The thing was huge, two meters high, commissioned by Lily’s father from a local artist before she was born. It looked like a thousand bolts of lightning, or perhaps a maze made of light—an ever-forking set of pathways that grew finer and finer as they progressed.

For tens of thousands of years, humanity had cornered the market on delusional thinking, ignoring the costs of progress paid by the innocent. Pretending that civilization was trending toward an increasingly humane world when in fact the opposite was true. Society grew increasingly imbalanced, the vectors of control becoming more sophisticated and subtle. Facebook instead of jackboots. Opioid addiction replacing firing squads. Endless debt just as effective a prison as work camps.

The dream factories are gone. Is that sad? A little bit. I liked going to the movies. I liked bingeing the latest dumb, wonderful thing everyone else was watching. But that time is done—and we need to recognize it. I just didn’t want any of you thinking maybe it was worth hanging on until next summer, until that next season drops, or opening weekend. None of that is going to happen. Humanity will not be making new art. The Star Wars have ended. The Friends will not reunite. The Avengers and Justice League will not be back to save the day. That time is over.