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

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PEARLY GATES ARCHIVE

On the planet Earth, some 500 years 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 at the time called this collapse, The Great Unraveling. 

By mid 21st century, the effects of overwhelming disintegration were 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 fashion 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 dwindling essential resources, rather than to the conquest of territories 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. In two years alone, seven hundred million persons would succumb to the infection.

Its advance would be relentless, sweeping across a landscape already 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, 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 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 stumbled onto a centuries-old graphene container, inside which were discovered scores of ancient “photographs”, prints 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, as keepsakes, created and circulated among their contemporaries countless such photographs called “snapshots,” mass produced by way of a complex, 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 merge into a single, indistinguishable narrative thread.  

As it happened, humankind would, of course, survive its near death experience, though, as history tells us, not without disappointing some survivors who had hoped for a more uncompromising end to this chapter of humankind, one with fewer strings left attached, less open to debate. Instead, just as an unwary surveyor would by accident discover The Pearly Gates Archive, so, too, would our ancestors stumble their way into the maze of the Great Unraveling, and, only as luck would have it, stumble their way back out again. 

While its absolute rarity attracts us to the Pearly Gates Archive, it is the space between the images that binds us to them – inspiring us to wonder whether or not, in the years between Portent Hopewell’s time and our own, we as a species have made progress – some witnessing in Portent’s photographs ominous portents, pointing to the disturbing aspects of our own contemporary societies, as others would dismiss any evidence that might diminish their deep and abiding faith in the providence of humanity’s superiority. 

Great civilizations, of course, are known to rise up from the ashes of the ones that have come before – just as, after they too have fallen, narrators of local and world events are given to craft myths and fables and cautionary tales from the shared traumas that remain, written in blood, as old and true as humanity itself.