Chapter 5 Paradise It was evening, and the sun gave everything a warm glow.
As I stood on the stairs of the white building and looked out over the countryside, I could see that everything had changed from the world I knew.
The Eloi, the buildings, the flowers, and the fruit were all different.
Even the River Thames had changed.
After hundreds of thousands of years, the great river had altered its course and now took a different route to the ocean.
I decided to walk to a hill about a mile away to get a better view of the surrounding area.
Along the way I came across a huge pile of metal and stone, overgrown with plants.
It was the remains of a large building that had fallen down long ago.
It reminded me of the broken glass and stone in the white building I had just come from.
I wondered how long before that building turned into a pile of rubble, too.
As I walked, I noticed a number of wells with small roofs over them, but I didn't see any small houses.
It looked as if people lived together in the large buildings.
Far in the future, there seemed to be no more families and no more homes.
I looked back and saw that a small group of Eloi had followed me on my walk.
It was then that I noticed how much they all looked alike.
They wore the same clothes, they wore their hair the same, They had the same thin bodies.
From a distance it was hard to tell the men and women apart.
The only difference between the children and adults was their size.
Most of the things that make us different were gone.
Soon I was alone at the top of the small hill.
The climb was too hard for the Aloys, so they had left me.
I found a yellow metal bench and sat down to look out at the countryside.
The sun had set, and the sky was full of beautiful purples and reds.
The colorful sky was reflected in the Thames as it curved into the distance.
From where I sat, it looked as if the great city of London had disappeared.
There were no longer streets crowded with people in traffic.
There wasn't row after row of homes, offices, shops, and factories.
Instead, statues and tall buildings were spread out across the countryside.
They dotted a lush green landscape of grass, bushes, and trees, for as far as the eye could see.
I didn't see any farms, either.
There were no cattle or sheep to be seen in any of the fields.
There were no fields of grains or vegetables.
It was as if the whole world had become one endless garden.
I sat and thought about the future I had discovered.
It seemed as if the world had become a paradise.
No one appeared to work, and yet everyone had plenty to eat.
There weren't any factories or machines, and yet everyone had clothes to wear and a place to live.
I couldn't imagine the alloy fighting or killing one another.
My guess was that war was a thing of the past.
Even the weather seemed perfect.
In the last moment before the time machine had come to a halt in the future, I had noticed that the countryside was green even in the winter.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the Aloy wore their robes and sandals all year long.
As I sat on the bench, I noticed that the air was free of insect pests and filled with colorful butterflies.
I didn't see any weeds or harmful plants, but fruit trees and beautiful flowers were everywhere.
Below me, the Aloy strolled through their paradise.
They all seemed healthy and happy.
No one appeared to be richer or poorer than anyone else.
For as far as I could see, there was no dirty air or water in sight.
The world truly was a paradise.
As the sky darkened, I imagined how it had happened.
Today's science is always making new discoveries that make our lives easier.
We are finding better ways to fight illness.
We invent new machines to do our work for us.
We build machines that can travel across the oceans or fly through the air.
Couple of hundred years ago, there was no electricity.
We hadn't invented the telegraph, steam engines, or railways yet.
Now, only two centuries later, we have all those things.
Two hundred years ago, disease, war, and poverty were much worse than today.
In such a short time, we have made great strides.
Today, those problems cause less suffering than ever.
We have come so far in just two centuries.
Imagine how far we could progress in hundreds of thousands of years.
Here it was as if all the struggles and hardships of life had ended.
The world of the future was a world without war, poverty, or illness.
It was the world humans had always dreamed of.
After 800,000 years, the dream had come true.
At least the dream had come true in some ways, I thought.
And other ways the Eloi and the world of the future disturbed me.
Life was too easy.
The Eloi did nothing but eat, sleep, laugh, and sing.
Because of this, they'd become small and weak.
They couldn't climb even a small hill or else they were too lazy to be bothered.
And because they had everything they needed, they didn't have to use their minds either.
They didn't invent or build things anymore.
They'd stopped making art and music.
They'd left all these things in the past because they didn't need them anymore.
Their bodies and their minds had become weak.
This bothered me.
I had always imagined that humans would become more and more advanced as time passed.
I thought we would grow smarter and our progress would never end.
Instead, we turned into the alloy.
We'd become weak and simple and spent all our days playing and eating fruit.
It may sound like an enjoyable life, but to me it was the end of our growth as a race.
I sat on the bench and looked out at the night.
I felt disappointment at the world of the future.
I didn't know then that there was even more to discover about this new world.
