On Sequoia Time | Page 7

They did it with nanotechnology. One group of humans, who were good people--they would tell you so--created a molecule-sized nanomachine that fed on living creatures, and that reproduced itself, using common materials, to make more such nanomachines. They intended to use the nanomachine on other humans, who were bad people and who they hated and wanted to kill.
Unfortunately something went wrong.
It was humanity's last mistake in a very long line--the Big One. The nanomachines got loose before the good humans who had created them completed the controls that would have let them protect themselves from their creation.
The nanomachines ate them and their children first. Poetic justice, you might say, if that sort of thing amuses you. The nanomachines did not stop after eating their creators; they were not designed to. They drifted out on the winds, to the oceans, to the furthest reaches of the planet. And where they found biomass, they ate it. They swarmed over living creatures, reproducing and eating. They ate indiscriminately, people and pets and leather and wood and rubber and plastic; and when they were done nothing remained but a gray sludge of dead nanomachines with nothing left to eat.
The tree was--well, I do not know if fortunate is the word. It was all the way around the planet from the spot where the world ended; and years passed before the first spores of the gray sludge came drifting in across the desert, born on the back of the wind.
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THE TREE WAS, in a sense, the last representative of the human race, the last thing that might have said to an uncaring universe, they were not so bad. My grandfather planted that tree, and he cared for it while it was young and needed the care. He planted that windbreak for himself, for his own reasons; but any orchard of trees might have served as a windbreak, and more effectively than the trees he planted and labored over. And he loved that sequoia. It was the first tree he showed me, the first summer I visited him; it was the only one I ever heard him mention, or worry over. He worried that it would survive the winters, worried that he had planted it in a location that would stunt its growth, or kill it. And partially because he worried about it, it did survive; and because of the location he picked, it lasted longer than anything.
There were other things created by the human race that stood in monument, despite the nanomachines that were busy turning the world, from the depths of the Mariani Trench to the heights of Everest, into a vast gray sludge. Between its wars and its building humanity had inflicted scars upon the planet that would be erased only in the course of geologic time. The nanomachines did not eat metal or stone or cement or glass; weapons and vehicles and buildings littered the surface of the planet when the nanomachines were done.
But of the good things the human race did, there was one thing that still survived; and that one thing was the tree.
Perhaps it's foolish to talk this way, for the tree was just a tree. So far as I know it had no emotions. It could not think or reason. And yet it could feel, and had a sort of awareness of itself, and it knew that something was wrong. The nanomachines first entered the canyon on the wind; and they made short work of almost everything. All the animals, the lizards and bees and snakes and cats and rabbits and owls and crows, died within hours. The smaller trees took days to die, and even the oaks, large though some of them had grown, were gone within a week.
But an adult California big-tree, a giant sequoia, is huge. The gray sludge ate away at the tree, stripped it of its leaves, but the tree was made of more than two million pounds of living hardwood. Its bark alone was two to three feet thick, and the bark served to slow the attack of the nanomachines. The bark protected the tree, as evolution had designed it to, significantly slowed the nanomachine attack.
Months passed while the tree struggled for life. It was the last living thing on the surface of the planet that humanity had killed.
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HERE ARE SOME of the things we killed:
Hawks and seaweed. Horses. Puppies and kittens and parrots. Lions and lizards, lobsters and clams. Sharks. Grass and crabgrass and all the flowers, every last one of them; a rose by any other name was just as dead. Bats and vultures and pigeons and bluebirds, boa constrictors and garden snakes and earthworms. Elephants and marijuana plants. Milkweed and tumbleweed and all the other plants humans named "weeds" and tried to destroy because they couldn't figure out a