Issmoron: Why do you call me Issmoron?

Eiros: This shall be your name from now on. You too must forget the name I once had and henceforth speak to me as Eiros.

Issmoron: This is indeed a tragedy! The power of my whole life leaching through the fingers of God like the sands of time, the poison of mercury.

Eiros: It is not too bad once the shame of death clears like the mist of your thoughts. You will get used to the grinding stillness of Gehenna.

Issmoron: Gehenna?

Eiros: Aidenn if you prefer. It is the only place there is.

Issmoron: Take pity of me, I am overwhelmed by what is to come.

Eiros: In this place the future has no days left, and the present never changes. There is plenty of time to stand still, as if there is no time at all. The past will fade away like the dying light of a candle and memories will be lost forever. I pray you tell me what happened after my passing before all is forgotten.

Issmoron: The calamity that bestowed upon us was largely unanticipated. The monotonous conquests of war had long been part of the human boredom and ceased to attract any interest. Our attention turned to the anatomical wonders of celebrities, in particular the abundance of their posteriors. Our hearts grew exultant with the spoils of victory and when famine showed up, we laughed it away. Our scientists had broken the secrets of producing artificial food utilising their artificial intelligence. In the age of plastics all became bright, brittle and disposable and nothing could stop our relentless despoiling of the planet.

We truly believed that we were invincible, that our prowess had stopped the course of history. When the Plague rode in her pale horse, we thought nothing of it. We had vanquished pestilence before; the list of our unnatural victories was long as the shadows of our sins. The multitudes cheered as the promises made by our politicians piled up. Our scientists told us that although the rate of infection was proportional to the number of sane people, it would decrease by the fading of that number. We failed to notice that death was the price exacted by life because we were busy learning how to solve differential equation and discussing the chemistry of homogeneous solutions. The talk shows were full of experts in Laplace transformations that explained how there would be a peak that would go away. There was hope, the worse would pass and a new dawn would soon dissipate the veil of fear. 

However, people grew restless as they waited for a scientific miracle that never came. Terror took upon us as we burrowed in caves to escape our fate. In our seclusion we first lost our ability to communicate. People despaired trying to understand the secret messages of cute kittens, as if their antics concealed universal truths. Sadly, they never attended to the many antidotes invented by our scientists whose production was surrounded by avarice and mistrust, an odd combination where few wanted what was not on offer. In my own deep cavern, I was too drunk with power to understand that risk and probability are different things, and that the hefty price of insurance is the relentless loss of what we treasure. Perhaps, I was the one that went mad in a world where everybody seemed crazy.

The final break down came when we lost our ability to cooperate with one another. In those dying moments we finally comprehended that the secret of our humanity was not in the eternal soul but on the capacity to work together. Like the fires that our ancestors burned to keep away the terrors of the night, helping each other kept away the arrogance of our ignorance. Soon after that was lost, the mountain of wisdom came tumbling down due to the erosion caused by our tunnels of isolation. Thus, ended all.