Imagine there’s a hill, a completely normal hill, albeit somewhat tall, but not enough to be a mountain. However, it exists in a time when there’s no word for it. It has a name though. It’s John. At least, that’s how the local ancestors of what we nowadays know as ‘humans’ call it.
Atop the hill, on its tiny summit, rests a miniscule grain of sand. This grain may define Earth’s years to come. It’s sat, contemplating its choices. Every choice will bring about a different timeline of our existence (or nonexistence—this grain hasn’t decided yet) and alter all the things to come in unprecedented ways.
It’s just like that one butterfly, you see. She, Sandra—though she goes by her grandmotherly San-san—learned that she could cause vast tsunamis with a mere flap of her wings. Having retired, Sandra hasn’t caused any ruckus for the past five years. Thankfully.
Should this grain, however, fall to the side of the hill illuminated by that hot yellow orb in the sky, the side where the ground is warm but not too parched, I may keep on writing and you reading. Humans will come to populate the planet as they have, wars will be waged, civilizations will rise and fall, some will believe the planet is flat and Australia isn’t a real place, and aliens will make contact with us one day (to our detriment). But you and I will exist.
In the world of all the universes birthed by this decision that happens about 572 322 times out of the 572 323 possible outcomes. No this time, though. This time the speck of dust is feeling adventurous as it jumps from its resting place with the next gust of Chergui, rolling down the east side of John, the hill. This unprecedented act causes a commotion amongst other resting sand particles. "What in the world is happening?" they start asking themselves. They too leave their rest and follow driven by the most destructive case of FOMO in the planet's history. This motion in turn agitates small rocks, and then larger ones and then a giant boulder, who once was a cliff on this hill, but was greatly reduced by centuries of winds and rains, cannot hold himself and follows through. The landslide comes to a quick and abrupt end for John is not a mountain and just a hill. The dust settles and the world is still again. At least on the outside. Why am I saying so? Well, at the foot of the hill there used to be an entrance to a grotto where our first ancestors found their shelter. The whole tribe has finished moving in just two days ago and they were enjoying what could've become fika time in modern days if not for our little adventurous grain. Shock and panic could've been seen on the faces of grotto inhabitants if there was a lightsource present bar they had none. It was unlucky since it saved them a little bit of oxygen for several extra seconds of agony before any sentient life inside the grotto ceased to be.
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As all of this happened, another tribe of our ancestors went from being 2nd largest to being the only protohuman tribe in the world. The tribe of course was oblivious to this fact and couldn't understand the importance of their existence, else they wouldn't be hunting on the day on which a passionate pine tree was feeling like a real asshole. You see, this tree just broke up with its girlfriend today and being only 50 years old (a teenager in human years) needed to blow some steam. The girlfriend in question - Patricia the squirrel - decided to take her kids and move out to a bigger nest inside an old oak tree. The same old oak tree who always had a smug smile on its face when it looked at the young pine. So when two of the tribe's best hunters were running by the pine, it shifted its branches ever so slightly, which was enough to impale one of the hunters though the eye and cause instant death and get another one, distracted by the sudden wet "thump" caused by it, in the stomach. Even in our time this wound would be near-fatal and in the old days... Several virgins were sacrificed to the yellow orb in the sky with the inly outcome of weakening the tribe even further. Thus in two more generations, the tribe perished.
Monkeys took this hint to heart and collectively decided that this whole evolution trend was over and done for them. It was time for someone else to take the lead and rule the Earth.
Dolphins, being the 2nd most intelligent species on the planet after protohumans (arguably the 1st ones since I've never seen a dolphin take a huge bank loan for a wedding only to get divorced three months later) decided that it was a bit too much for them and they wanted to spend their time playing in the water, not sitting in a stuffy office cubicles for 9 hours straight to go back to their small overpriced appartments to cry themselves to sleep because the price of groceries went up yet again. Species after species took a pass on this opportunity until the rats, being resourceful as they are, agreed to take over the reigns. They've started grow in size and intelligence and slowly adopted to walking on hind legs. Once the cats realised what was going on and tried to catch up, it was already too late: many of them became rats' pets and were content with being fed, cleaned and loved by their rat owners (rats were smart enough to hold off with the nasty purple bows before the cats gave up evolving).
And thus the age of men was over before it even has begun. The world has entered the age of Rats.
