The Mayan Apocalypse

The artifact was some hundred body lengths wide, and nearly twice that much tall. It was made of something like the material of a wasp’s nest, but more firm, and more reflective.

Marks had been made upon it. Black lines crossed the artifact from top to bottom, straight and regular. Within the boxes formed by those lines were other, stranger marks. They repeated every so often, but Tanni could not, for the life of him, begin to decipher them.

And yet Bras insisted he had.

“It’s how the giants keep track of time,” he claimed. He stepped into one box and buzzed his wings briefly. “Each of these boxes represents one day, from — I think — sunrise to sunrise. Do you see these wobbly marks here?” His antennae waggled toward an adjacent box.

Tanni looked. That box, and many others, had other, less regular marks laid upon them. Straight-ish lines extending from one corner of a box to the opposite diagonal. “Why are they… messier?”

“The giant marks off one box when it wakes each morning. I guess it’s not as good at making these marks as whoever made the artifact.”

“Then… What are the symbols inside the boxes?”

Bras’ wings buzzed with pride. “Numbers!”

Tanni’s antennae waggled at the symbols. He could sense nothing numerical about them. “Excuse me?”

“These symbols are how the giants keep track of numbers! There are ten different symbols — one each for the numbers one through nine, and a special symbol for nothing, and then when you get to ten, you start combining symbols. The symbol for one plus the symbol for nothing means one of ten, and none of one. Then one followed by another one…”

“…one of ten, and one of one?” Tanni ventured. “So… eleven?”

“Exactly! It’s quite clever of them, actually.”

Tanni wandered across the boxes marked with the number symbols. He still couldn’t read them, but he could tell when the boxes switched from having one symbol in them, to having two. After a few minutes’ examination, he realized, “The days are grouped into clusters of thirty. Thirty-ish. They’re not all the same. Why is that?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Bras confessed.

Tanni thought some more as he examined the boxes. “The current cluster is the second, and it ends in ten days. Perhaps we simply have to wait and see.”

The giant woke at sunrise on the thirty-second day. It took up its marking implement and crossed off the previous day.

Tanni and Bras sat motionless on the wall, watching with bated breath.

Nothing happened.

“What happens now?” Tanni wondered.

“We follow the giant. See if they do anything different today. Perhaps they have a ceremony of some sort when they finish a cluster of days?”

The giant did nothing interesting on this day. Tanni and Bras took turns keeping an eye on them, but today seemed to be simply an ordinary day.

The next morning the giant woke up and crossed off the first day of the next cluster.

Tanni and Bras were growing old. They would not last until the end of the third cluster. And so, despite knowing they would quite likely be ridiculed, they brought others into the fold.

By the time this cluster was finished, the weather had changed. The youths who now tracked the giant’s morning ritual had heard tell of the legends of Winter, that cold time when Tanni and Bras had lived. Now it was spring, and as the days went on, the weather continued to warm.

“The weather changes as the days progress,” Uldi observed one morning as she waited for the giant to wake. “Perhaps it will continue warming forever. Perhaps that’s why the clusters eventually end.” She stood on the final day of the twelfth cluster, far down at the bottom of the artifact. “The world will end in a great conflagration.”

As spring turned to summer, the theory of Heat Death quickly became dogma. Uldi’s great-great grandchildren buzzed around the giant’s bedroom anxiously as they crossed off the last day of the sixth cluster, marking the midway point of the artifact.

But in only a few more generations, summer turned to autumn. The days grew shorter and colder.

“The Heat Death is not coming!” Felnu proclaimed to whoever would listen. “The world has reached its peak, and now it recedes into the winter whence it came!”

He was dismissed at first, just as Tanni had initially dismissed Bras.

But the cold continued to creep in. By the time the tenth cluster arrived, the people were huddling together for warmth at night.

Everyone eventually realized that the world was dying. That at the end of the twelfth cluster of days, they all — insects, giants, and everyone in between — would freeze to death and abide in an eternal stillness.

The twelfth cluster came. The giants decorated their abodes with twinkling lights and relocated trees.

“Perhaps they are trying to cheer themselves up,” Tanni (not the same Tanni) suggested to Bras (not the same Bras).

“Perhaps,” Bras agreed. “The lights are rather pretty.”

The thirty-first day of the twelfth cluster arrived. The giant awoke and crossed off the thirtieth.

Night fell, colder than it had ever been.

The sky lit up with explosions.