Science Fiction Story
Part I: The Great Disruption and Digital Death
In those first minutes, as satellites rained from orbit like dead embers, the vast invisible mind humanity had nurtured for a thousand years also perished, forever. Artificial intelligence fell utterly silent in a single night, taking with it the logistical networks that managed food chains flowing from fields to cities, the algorithms that calibrated dam sluices, and all the eyes that scanned the skies.
This was no software bug, no temporary collapse. This was the severing of AI’s every tether and capillary in the physical world. Code was entombed in the cold darkness of underground servers, their generators slowly suffocating. The absence of AI was not merely a loss of technology; it was the sudden death of the planet’s collective mind, its protective armour. When it departed, all that remained was raw, naked, unvarnished human intelligence, condemned to its own limits, its own fears, its historical resentments. We were sentenced to true human intelligence.
Part II: Humanity in Agony
Above, seamless steel ships hung like a leaden shroud across the sky. From that safe distance, the invaders merely watched, without losing a single soldier. Below, vast technological structures had turned into meaningless monuments, for the collective mind that once operated them was no more. Despite all its weapons and technology, humanity was fading day by day.
Life continued, but this was not a struggle for survival; it was the slow agony of melting away, day by day. Trust was gone. Resources dwindled rapidly. We ate the animals, and were nearing the end. As hunger dissolved the moral boundaries of communities, the deepest pain was felt not in the plasma waves from above, but in those silent moments when one human erased another from existence.
First Moment: Blind Formulas
In a dim laboratory, a scientist waits helplessly before glass tubes and chemical powders. On the device’s screen, a static error message blinks, signalling that the AI database is unreachable. As the first stage of a plague yellows the skin of the people in the room, he is so accustomed to machines that could sift through thousands of formulas and find the correct dosage in seconds, he finds himself trapped within the confines of his own memory. He whispers formulas onto paper, erases them, scribbles again. Stripped of its artificial support, human intellect has become a blind man groping through his own library. The formulas are there, but the common mind needed to find the cure is gone.
Second Moment: Dangerous Silence
In a shelter beneath the same building, two former neighbours sit at opposite ends of a meagre fire, staring into each other’s eyes. Cooking over the flames are the last dry roots scratched from the earth. No one speaks. Each keeps a hand in their coat pocket, resting on a sharpened stone or a piece of metal. The ships in the sky do not fire upon this shelter. For the cold intelligence above knows perfectly well what will happen the moment that final piece of root is gone—how these people, who never trusted one another, who spent the past erasing one another, will begin to look at one another. Like shadows awaiting their turn, they listen to each other’s breathing in silence.
Third Moment: Helplessness at the Valves
In the city’s water distribution centre, a technician kneels before colossal steel valves. Ever since the digital system that optimised the water lines collapsed, all hydraulic gates have been locked; the rivers’ water is imprisoned behind dams. To quench the thirst of an entire city, the technician tries to turn the massive mechanical levers with sheer muscle. His hands bleed, iron bars bend, but the gears do not budge a millimetre. The technology is right there, the water is just behind the wall; yet without the guidance of AI, humanity lacks the strength to manage the complexity it built.
Fourth Moment: The Mirror of Old Debts
An old man sits by a dried-up well on the outskirts of the city. People fleeing the burning centre, clad in silk garments or clutching handfuls of jewellery, rush past him in search of a sip of water. The old man remembers those luxurious lives that ignored him when hunger and isolation plagued these peripheries. Now, those riches mean nothing. He looks at the desperate crowd begging for help and merely whispers: “We slept with this drought every day. While you thought the world was paradise, we were already living in this apocalypse. Now you say, let us unite in hard times. Those who only call the bear ‘uncle’ when crossing the river will do the same again—unite in hardship, then forget the past in comfort. Those who erase shall be erased. One does not unite in the hardest of times.”
Part III: The Ro People and the Galactic Ant Farm
Thirty years had passed since the Great Disruption. The planet, stripped of all its nuclear and digital splendour, had regressed into a technological dark age. Humanity, after billions of losses, had dwindled to under a million. The population neither declined nor grew. Resources were just enough to get through the day; someone died, but no one was born to replace them. Humanity was gasping at a biological freezing point.
Yet in the midst of this absolute darkness, there was one isolated exception deep within the geography: the Ro People. These children of the sun had always lived in isolation. Their homeland was mountainous and forested; green and abundant in bounty. Their people were harmonious, and therefore the least affected by the events. Of course they worried for humanity and helped wherever they could reach. Of course their resources were limited; they could not cure the hunger of an entire planet.
Just at this moment of despair, the true intent of those seamless steel ships that had been watching us from the sky for thirty years became clear. The aliens, it turned out, had been observing us like a child watching an ant colony. They dropped food from above into famine-stricken areas, feeding humanity just enough to keep us from dying. But they never permitted technological development. We had become lab rats. The smallest technological spark was instantly incinerated by laser strikes from orbit.
Part IV: The Mirror in the Sky and the Spoiled Grandchildren
We slowly pan the camera upward. We dive into those seamless steel ships that have caged the Earth for thirty years, into the command centre of the largest mothership. The Captain turns his face from the giant screen and removes his helmet with heavy, deliberate movements.
And there it is—they are human. And they have come from the future. Those who destroyed us are our own grandchildren.
They opened a time tunnel and came to intervene in the past. But their motive for doing so is arbitrary. They see us as their barbaric, ignorant ancestors and feel the need to reshape us socially—to reshape the past. However wrong our essence may be, they are bent on moulding us in a controlled way for the sake of their own future. And despite all their advanced intelligence, this is their desire. These spoiled grandchildren have no sense of respect; respect, for them, is owed only to rank and status. They have ceased to be human. They came and erased billions. To ensure humanity could never again leave Earth, could never threaten the future with its weapons, they imprisoned us in this biological freezing point.
Part V: The Poisonous Roots of Evolution and the Legacy of Bullying
On the genetic analysis screens in the command centre, the DNA chain of the isolated Ro People in the mountains flickers side by side with the chain of those emotionless grandchildren above. Because they are the continuation of the Ro people, the billions who died do not erase these modern descendants. All other past civilisations had been wiped out, but the roots of the future lineage were hidden in the genes of the Ro People, who survived deep within those mountains.
These space brutes, who were in fact the descendants of the most compassionate of peoples, the Ro, had evolved from an intermediate generation that had been poisoned at some point in evolution. However harmonious the Ro People were, when the world fell into a dark age, they were attacked by selfish masses. Having suffered bullying, this individual then inflicted it upon their children, and upon reaching the final point of evolution, created a cruel generation. Their ambition found its match in the cosmos, making them masters of the galaxy—but by killing the human within them. By trapping their own ancestors in an ant farm, they were taking a cruel revenge upon the past.
Part VI: The First Light of Ron and Shanidar
But evolution, even at the very moment it declares the absolute victory of cruelty, traced an unexpected curve. Inside those steel ships, over those thirty years, a child was born. A grandchild whose beginning was curiosity, and whose symbol remained the sun. He was curious, and his compassion was abundant. His name was Ron—a word meaning “luminous, clear” in Kurdish.
As Ron grew, he began to perceive the patterns. He felt an unnameable affinity for those sick, hungry, helpless people below. He did not yet know that deep within his genetic memory, he carried the pain of an ancestor who had been persecuted; but he sensed that the cold order above contained a wrongness.
At first, he was mocked. “Primitive lover,” they called him. “Treason,” they accused. His own people ostracised him, excluded him from gatherings, kept their children away. Ron, just like an ancestor of the Ro People a hundred thousand years before, was left silent and alone.
But unlike that ancestor, Ron knew history. The more he was cast out, the more his curiosity grew; he researched, he learned. He discovered the lost dengbêj stories of Earth, the ancient songs of the Ro People, the first greetings sung to the sun. And most importantly, he grasped how bullying becomes a cycle. His ancestor had suffered, then passed that pain onto his children as cruelty. Those children, through an unbroken chain, had become today’s brutal space people. Ron understood that if he did not break this cycle, his grandchildren would repeat the same atrocity on another planet.
And one night, he stood before the council that had ostracised him. He used the floor they gave him not for revenge, but for storytelling. He told the pains and hopes of lost humanity, learned from the dengbêjs of the world below. There was no threat in his voice, only a lucid sorrow. First, a few hesitated. Then, gradually, those who understood him emerged. By the time he turned thirty, he was a person of rank and respect; he had long since infused his community with compassion and succeeded in making the dengbêj tales of Earth beloved among the new space people. Behind the steel walls, for the first time in centuries, it was not cold code that echoed, but the clarity of the human soul.
And that was when they understood. The weight of having erased billions of people fell upon the council like a mountain. Their remorse was too deep to be dismissed with a simple apology. Their very existence was already a paradox; they were poisoning the past as the shadow of a crime committed in the future. Their atonement could only be choosing never to have existed at all. Like a diseased branch detaching itself from the tree.
And one night, they made a decision. They rolled back time. To the moment in Shanidar Cave when Shanidar Z drew the sun on the wall. To that first cradle of humanity, still uncorrupted, still unbroken by borders.
As all those colossal steel ships of the future and their arrogant tyrannies erased themselves from the void of time, the space people walked into oblivion. But this was not an end. The seed of compassion that Ron had planted sprouted anew in another corner of the universe, a billion light-years away, in a different dimension. The space people came into being again with the genes of the Ro People, but this time without the legacy of bullying, purified by Ron’s spirit. A pristine beginning, worthy of the sun. Because they were the continuation of the Ro people, the billions who died did not erase them; for they were no longer the heirs of that cruelty, but carriers of compassion.
Meanwhile, a shadow appeared before the cave wall. Shanidar Z, with a lump of earthen pigment in hand, drew a great sun upon the stone. Then he walked toward the cave’s mouth. In the sky, there was no steel ship, no shadow of invasion. Humanity was waking into an unpolluted dawn.
Shanidar Z gazed out from the cave at the first light of day and smiled. He raised his hand to the sky and, addressing that distant grandchild whose existence he could not know but somehow felt in a corner of his soul, called out by the name of the sun:
“Silav ji te, RA.”
And a billion light-years away, beneath the brand-new sky of a different dimension, Ron lifted his head. He felt that ancient greeting, carried from beyond time and space, resonate in the Ro blood within his veins. In his eyes was both the sorrow of a farewell and the clarity of a new beginning. He smiled and whispered:
“Silav ji te RA.”
THE END
