It’s the year 7,777. They said that the 777th prophet would appear on this special date yet the day passed, as many others before it have, without the slightest bit of difference. You’d think people would’ve become disillusioned by now but as the years went by, only a select few learned to adapt to a post-apocalyptic world without religion, while the majority could only survive by making the sole purpose of their lives revolve around their proselytizing profession. On Mars, the new pantheistic faith “solipsism” put the former trite monotheistic religions to shame. When astrophysicists were finally able to move humans to a new destination prior to the final and fatal meteor-shower, many clergytrackfficers rushed to pack a few holy books with them before everything remaining on planet earth incinerated and nothing was left behind but dirt, rubble, and a few unfinished and unfulfilled dreams. On Mars, all the basic patriarchal social structures were maintained -- as they had been in the past 400 years: Every family consisted of a biomother, a biofather, a cultured sterilized germ gradually defrosting from its centennial slumber, and of course a lolistilla lavendrus – the cannibalistic species of the lotus genus known for its masochistic self-generating tendencies as it bites into its own fleshy leaf dripping slowly the elixir of life that cures all ailments and makes immortality not just possible, but also the least difficult objective to maintain for the sustenance of every robohumanoid on Mars. Order on this planet had also changed very little; if at all: the planet was divided into marshes (what were formerly referred to as “countries”) where each marsh district had its own representative, and every few centuries the ministers would meet to discuss how they could finally transcribe or decode some of the cryptic messages their forefathers had left them on those strange parchments they referred to as “papers”. Rumor had it that many of them contained blatant alarming warnings urging the past “humans” not to get lost in their own inventions, but the marshlords only ever vehemently denied those allegations and always insisted writing was now a gratuitous archaic art-form no longer necessary since the invention of digipills that weekly record and report all our thoughts into megacellabrumaticallyhexaadvancedteloportals. This was a world made easy. Where people lived longer, though they had nothing really to live for. Where humans did very little because machines did everything and self-coded themselves for scheduled repairs, upgrades, and other types of rudimentary maintenance. Where the only ailment people ever complained about was about how there was never any ailment to complain about. Hydropulsatables had become the norm for heating metallyzed-huts, yet an eerie cold lingered on. And as no one believed in Old Hallow’s or Saint Eve’s anymore, most plain days brought about equally plain nights. Nothing ever happened. And no one was saved.
