Imagine, if you will, that contemporary human civilisation is a village clinging to the slope of a mountain. Above is a bluff from which you can look down upon the village. Below is a precipice. If you stumble over the precipice, you have no hope. The fall is calamitous. There is no climbing back.
Looking back
Over a period of time – recent time, insignificant to the history of the Earth, insignificant even to the time humans have existed in their present form – over this short period of time a group of horsemen appeared on the bluff above the village.
Some of the villagers looked up. Seeing the horsemen, they trembled in fear. “Look!” they cried. “They threaten our village! Unless we act, all may be lost!”
Others glanced briefly toward the bluff and as quickly looked away. “You exaggerate,” they said. “There is nothing to fear.”
Others would not look. “Of what do you speak?” they replied. “Horsemen? I see no horsemen! You imagine things where none exist!”
But the horsemen did exist. In part, they had been summoned by the actions of the villagers. In part, they arose from the nature of the world in which the village struggled to survive.
They were the horsemen of the apocalypse, and each day they grew in strength.
Now
Look up. Look at the bluff. The horsemen are still there.
Some exude a force that already influences and harms the inhabitants of the village.
Some harbour their energies in anticipation of their onslaught, for which they greatly long.
Some gnaw at their knuckles.
Some spit phlegm into the dirt.
Look up, if you dare. They sit upon fine steeds: some black, others pale, some white, others a strange hue of red. Theriders’ knuckles bleed. The mountain air draws blood from their eyes.
“Who are they?” You ask, you who dare to look.
Look again.
Before, there were only four. Now there are many.
Their shape and form are difficult to discern. They shimmer and change. Their flesh is shuffled and reshuffled by the wind.
Some resemble algorithms or patterns made of numbers, artificial yet with agency, intelligent, and malign.
Some resemble illness, physical debilitation, plague: infective, bacterial, viral, pandemic. Of these, some are unnatural, microbially misshapen, as if crafted by the villagers themselves.
Some of the riders are gargantuan and bloated, expressing in every aspect of their being an image of human greed. Some are skeletally thin, as if composed of systems that have devoured all else and now begin to eat themselves. Of these, many wear the faces of traders.
Others glower like mountain clouds, stifling and freezing in turn – the very environment that the villagers have despoiled.
Yet others resemble warriors: territorial, tribal,ruthless, and psychotic, expressing a dreadful hunger for the death of all who do not wear the same armour as hem. Of these, some display images of mushroom clouds that rise towards a steel-grey sky.
None feel empathy as they look down upon the village.
None show pity.
Their horses stamp.
The riders wait.
Looking forward
The time is close.
How close, I cannot see.
Will these horsemen of the apocalypse unite as one and descend upon the village in a single horde, destroying every home, pursuing those who do not die beneath their hooves to the abyss’s edge, there to thrust them out into the open air?
Will they come one by one, treading on each other’s heels—or leave a little time between assaults while those surviving wait in dread?
The strength of the horsemen is upon them. There is no doubt that they will come.
But when?
In hours, days, or weeks?
In years?
In some small number of decades?
I cannot say.
