Things that Came
by Nikki Little
Creatures that live in Wonderland are blessed with an extraordinarily long life if they happened to begin living here early enough in their lives. Hatter was the one who discovered the effect. The flowers that covered the roof of Wonderland and light our world turned out to be the source of all that was strange and wonderful about the place. The flowers were phosphorescent and grew in great patches of a single color, but came in many hues. Pastel blue, pastel green, pastel pink, pastel yellow, and numerous other pastel colors. The roof of Wonderland was a riot of colors and glowed when the world above had daylight. The flowers were also the source of our longevity.
As the water trickled down from the roof when it rained in the world above, it picked up from the flowers an unknown chemical that not only greatly extended life, but suppressed cancer and nearly all infectious diseases. The common cold was unknown in Wonderland. Hatter discovered that it took about thirty years of non-stop exposure to this chemical to have its effect of greatly slowing the aging process. A lot of my old friends in Wonderland are now gone. It has been over 400 years since I arrived in Wonderland. Hatter was the first to go. He was followed by the Gnome Elder, Mr. White, Bill McGill, Caterpillar, the March Hare, and the Dormouse. Of my old friends, only two remain. Cheshire, stiff and creaky, is no longer spry enough for hunting and relies on underwater traps designed by Hatter ages ago to catch his dinner. Arianne, thanks to Rhadamanthus, has aged at the same rate as me. The White Chess pieces are nearly ageless, but I rarely see them as they almost never venture outside Pale Realm.
The world above is completely devoid of humans. Global climate change wreaked havoc on the food supply, spread malaria across the globe, and melted the ice caps raising the sea level enough to inundate low-lying islands and coastal areas. The stupid wars that people in the world above were always fighting completed the destruction. Whole areas in Asia are lifeless due to radioactive accidents and the handful of nuclear explosive devices that were used. What's left of Africa is nearly all desert. The map of the world has greatly changed, and without people, there are, of course, no national boundaries anymore. The scourge of malaria didn't just wipe out the humans, it killed nearly all animal life. For two and a half centuries we in Wonderland feared to travel uptop for even the briefest time. Then, a full century after the last radio station went silent, the moment came for Arianne and I to chance a trip to the world above.
We found a world covered by plants and barren wastelands. Buildings that still existed were covered by plants in the same manner as small trees and fences had been covered by Kudzu in the American South in the twenty-first century. The wastelands looked like the surface of Mars. Land animals were nonexistent. Even insects were almost entirely gone. Arianne and I sat on bluff covered by a meadow, and a honeybee flew up in front of Arianne. It was the only living creature we saw that wasn't a plant. Unafraid, Arianne held out her hand and the honeybee briefly lit on her fingertips before flying away. The meek had inherited the earth.
The End
This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.
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