I believe we are all similar in our yearnings to share with others the simple facts of our having existed. In this regard,we are like bottles stuffed with messages, cast out into an ocean clogged with millions of other bottles, filled with millions of other messages. Against all odds, we seem wired to hope that it will be our bottle, containing our message, washing up onto shore for some perfect stranger to discover, and that this stranger will be transformed thereby, and that we, in turn, will be transformed, too.
- Portent Hopewell

Introduction to The Pearly Gates Archive Exhibition Catalog
mounted by the Consortium of the Great Unraveling at The History Museum of Extinction Level Events, Bunkerstrad Alpha 01, District of Bhummer, 3030 CE.

On the planet Earth, a millennium ago, at the beginning of the 21st century of the common era, one of history’s darkest moments began to unfold. For various reasons, the threads of civilized societies around the world had begun to simply and irretrievably come undone. Pundits of the time referred to this collapse as The Great Unraveling. 

By mid 21st century, the effects of overwhelming disintegration had  become evident in all aspects of life. Conventional political systems worldwide had disassembled into an infinite jest of empty promises, unenforceable decrees and inscrutable proclamations. Graft and corruption were all the rage in every corner of human life, and arguments over whether authoritarian or democratic governments were better for the advancement of society had become debates without a difference.

Warfare had degraded into a chronic and brutal state of affairs, even as combat became more limited in ambition and scope – the waging of war reduced to the pilfering of ever more dwindling essential resources, rather than to the conquest of territory militant regimes of the day simply weren’t equipped to occupy. 

While famine, propelled by unremitting climate change, had become common, it was the Melting Sickness, in the last decade of the century, more than any other circumstance, that would contribute most to the dramatic reshaping and decline of human affairs. 

Over ten years, this pandemic would reduce Earth’s population to less than one half of its former peak. Its advance would be relentless, sweeping across a landscape already morally, politically, and economically weakened by decades of decline. 

After years in the spotlight and claiming more than two billion lives, the Melting Sickness itself would inexplicably melt into thin air, vacating the world scene as suddenly and mysteriously as it had arrived.

Plague, climate change, famine, economies teetering and collapsing, incessant conflict, governments rising and falling. A great many would come to believe, and rightly so, that the very end of the human species might well be at hand.

All of these factors had combined to nudge humankind to the brink of unmanageable chaos. Humanity had been dramatically reduced in size and bled of motivation, leaving those who remained frozen in place, as if they were exotic insects mounted on a display at an exhibition, though not in stasis so much as poised, expectantly, between stimulus and response, between the ledge and the leap. 

By the beginning of the 22nd century CE, humanity's disconnection from civilized norms had become so comprehensive, the destruction of societies so complete, that half a millennia would pass before the world returned to any semblance of stability. Today, only a handful of oral traditions and written histories from that time survive. Vernacular accounts portraying everyday life during the Great Unraveling, in fact, are virtually nonexistent.

Recently, an archeologist exploring a seldom visited beachfront along the sand-duned remnants of the old Gulf of Mexico in the southwestern region of Merica happened upon a previously unmapped ruin, partially uncovered by erosion. There, he happened onto a centuries-old graphene container, inside which were discovered scores of archaic “photographs”, facsimiles of twentieth century human activity rendered on paper, all remarkably well preserved. It was an unprecedented find. 

It is known that common folk from this period created and circulated, as keepsakes amongst their contemporaries, countless such photographs, called “snapshots,” mass produced by way of an early modern alchemical process. Created just before and at the onset of the Great Unraveling, these snapshots tell stories of enormous prosperity, confusion, and complexity, about a time, when viewed through the fractured lens of history, fantasy and reality had begun to intertwine into a single, indistinguishable thread.  

As it happened, humankind would, of course, survive. Though, as history tells us, not without disappointing some who had hoped for a denouement with fewer strings left attached, less open to the idea of our being held to account for stumbling our way into the morass of the Great Unraveling, and, then, only by happenstance, somehow surviving and stumbling our way back out again.

One of its survivors summoned this poignant word fragment, attributed to one of the great poet-bards of the late twentieth century, to describe their experience:

Slip slidin’ away

You know the nearer your destination

The more you’re slip slidin’ away.

And, we, centuries later, the inheritors of our ancestors’ predilection to “slip and slide away”, would find themselves instinctively drawn to the absurdities depicted here in The Pearly Gates Archive, as we see their resemblances in the world today all around us. Prompting one to wonder if any progress since The Great Unraveling has really been made, or lessons learned – or whether we are otherwise cursed instead to forever exist in an ever expanding fractal of repetition – genetically bound to shoulder the preservation of all life on Earth, in order to avoid our own extinction, while too often failing in our efforts to do so.

 Slayton Shatterglow
Curator Emeritus