I came up with a concept to explain this pic. It seemed to want one. THE PRICE OF IMMORTALITY, WAS THE LOSS OF OUR HUMANITY. After the Final War, only a few thousand humans were left alive in safe quarters deep underground, where the nuclear devastation had not been able to reach them; however, the Great Plague did find them, bringing their numbers even lower, and leaving them sterile. They happened to count among their numbers some of the greatest scientists and medical experts from before the War, and after attempts to clone themselves failed (the Plague had damaged their DNA so badly, the clones were monstrous, and lived only a short time), they began working toward ways to prolong their own lives. They were able to develop a process by which the human brain, with all its memories intact could be kept alive indefinately by being bathed in a recyclable solution, and by being interfaced with a small but powerful computer, could be placed in a robot unit capable of locomotion, the whole process leaving a new type of human existence possible...one that was in theory, a form of virtual immortality. One by one, the humans grew old and their brains were tranferred into the units. Radio communcation was possible between the robot units, and as the units were designed to protect the brains from extremes of temperature and radiation, and capable of self-repair and absorption of all radiation types to fuel their processes, one by one of what was left of humanity began to go to the Earth's surface to explore. What they found was a world so damaged, that the entire surface of the Earth was a hard-pan consistency. All life on the surface was gone. The atmosphere was dense with poisonous gasses, the oceans had evaporated and the moisture stayed in the lower atmosphere, conditions such that rain clouds couldn't even form. The average temperature at the surface was 300 degress Fahrenheit. While thousands of years passed, the robot-human hybrids began to hate their hellish existence, and by shutting down their life systems, were able to commit suicide of a sort, until at last there were only a few stubborn individuals who preferred any kind of life to none at all. But they lacked the one thing that makes human life worth living: Hope. I posted the pic in 1024 size in my gallery, and gave it the title of the short story treatment above, but without the story. Thanks for the kind comments. Tjohn

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy