Edited this some, from when I'd first written it several years ago:
It's early Monday morning of the Week that Wasn't.
Mother Nature sits at her kitchen table and sips java, the first cup of the day. The one that always tastes best. She raises her eyes and gazes out the kitchen window at the Little Blue Planet she'd set up way back when.
She'd been up late last night, on the phone with her counterpart over in Andromeda. They talked about this and that. Discussed the impending galactic collision between Andromeda and Milky Way. Kidded each other about which would become "dominant" afterwards, and argued good-naturedly about which had more, and better, stellar stuff. Banal talk, really. The collision was scheduled 3 billion years hence or so. Still, Mother Nature mentioned, with a touch of pride, that the dominant land animal on her Little Blue Planet had projected the collision quite accurately, awhile ago. Her counterpart tried, but failed to mask her awe at this impressive tidbit. "What do you call them again?", she wanted to know.
They referred to themselves by various terms, appropriate to the diverse sounds they made for communicating. But not long ago, Mother Nature had started referring to them as The Destructors. That's how she mentioned them to her galactic phone pal. "The Destructors did this and have I mentioned The Destructors doing that...", and so forth.
There is something very wrong this morning. Mother Nature's "radar" has pinged and she is trying to get her mind around it. The sound coming from the Little Blue Planet today... Such an odd sound! What the hell is it? Mother Nature races through her mental checklist at lightning speed, correlating, analyzing, pattern matching... Nothing. Then, of course, it hits her. It's what she ISN'T hearing that tripped her internal alarm. Because this morning, to her astonishment, Mother Nature does not hear the crying of a baby Destructor. She takes a seat at a kitchen chair closer to the window, and focuses in on what is happening with The Destructors.
There is only one group of Destructors left, a few hundred or so. Over the eons, Mother Nature had become quite adept at reading them, roughly interpreting their thoughts. She now scans faces within this last band of Destructors at point-blank range. Her heart flutters a bit. Because she knows that they know. The Destructors realize that with the death of their final baby Destructor last night, there won't be any more. All the female Destructors are unable to produce any more Destructor offspring. They've tried. Everything. To no avail. As Mother Nature watches the flitting eyes of The Destructors, she reads a growing, quiet terror. These Destructors understand that they are the final page in The Destructor line. There won't be any more, after they are gone.
Of course, Mother Nature could have told them this day was coming. That isn't her way, though. Balance and self-correction are woven into the fabric of Nature. That's how she fashioned it way back when. There came a point when Mother Nature knew that this species, The Destructors, would self-correct its own kind right out of existence.
She knew it when Destructor mothers could no longer breast feed their offspring. Because of poisons, such as vaporized mercury, flung with abandon into the environment by The Destructors. She knew it when The Destructors actually invented something that she herself hadn't come up with: Plutonium. The most poisonous substance to be now found on the Little Blue Planet. She knew it when their freon gas and ammonia and chlorofluorocarbons rose into their atmosphere and destroyed the protective ozone layer. She knew it when their noisy, gassy, explosive machines they used for transportation and power generation altered the chemical balance of the air. Altering the climate - faster than they could adapt to it. She knew it when they drained wetlands and covered the ground with impervious substances like concrete and asphalt, nullifying the cleansing and recycling actions that she, Mother Nature, had painstakingly evolved.
When any of her species departs, Mother Nature has a bit of a bad day, and then she moves on. This species, The Destructors, surprised even her for a time. She remembered her amazement that day when The Destructors sent something away from the Little Blue Planet to travel to, and land upon, the Little Red Planet. She thought they had promise. She thought they understood.
Mother Nature believes that on the morning she looks out at the Little Blue Planet and spots no Destructors, she'll sob a little. She's seen a hundred million species come and go. But this one, The Destructors, is the first who KNEW it was going to go out of existence. She feels a bit of their pain. It will be an especially bad day for her then, she projects. Yet, she'll gather herself together, and move on. She's Mother Nature. And that is what she does - how she survives.
