Edge of the Floating Cities

Ages after humans left the surface, the planet had finally healed itself.  The earth had finally reclaimed what it was before humanity, and had washed away it's many wounds.  The buildings were gone, the roads, monuments, and all other human markers that recorded a history of a destructive species no longer existed.

Many left the surface to escape massive pollution that was allowed and protected to corrode the planet.  They left to escape extreme hatred and uncontrolled violence that had plagued their kind since their beginnings.  They left to escape corporate greed and religious intolerance.

Aboard the massive multi-cities, humanity had become a species that chose to exist within their own technology.  Not all chose this, but those who did, survived to become new humans.  Those that remained on the surface, lived out their lives, but in time, become extinct.

Generations were born and passed their legacies to their descendants aboard the floating multi-cities.  Generations would work and contribute to the floating multi-cities; improving their technologies, perfecting their self sufficiency, and forgetting their own histories.  They were the great technological accomplishments that became the home of the new humans, and of the new human's many forms.

Over time, some of the multi-cities left the planet altogether.  They chose to orbit other planets in the solar system, and afterward, some of them chose to leave for the deep of space.  They would never return.

It had been several hundreds of thousands of years since anyone had set foot on the surface of the planet.  In all of that time, humans became different species; they were inadvertently modified by their own technologies and environments.  They were no longer joined to the planet.  Were one of them to return to the surface, that one would certainly perish quickly, as the new humans had no tolerance to the microscopic bacteria or other violent micro species that existed on the surface of the planet.

It was true that billions of souls would never even seen the light of the sun, the feel of a breeze, or the sight of a mountain or forest from under the shade of a tree.  Of the very few that lived near the surface of the floating cities, even fewer wondered about their ancestral home.  Even fewer than that cared or imagined life outside of their sterile world.  New humanity had become long-lived and sterile.  They had become a species intertwined with their mechanical inheritance.

Some had become more cybernetic than others.  Some had remained completely organic, but their features had adapted to their environments.  Some new humans were taller, thinner and weaker, as they embraced the sciences and knowledge.  Others who had left for other places in the solar system would adapt in different ways.  One floating city became the home of new humans that had become no more than humanoid memories in mechanical bodies.

There were many hundreds of thousands of these floating multi-cities, and over time, they would continue to advance and multiply and venture outward.  They were worlds of their own, and in time, only a fraction of them would float above the green and blue planet that had been the place of their birth.

One day, one of the cities would fail and it would fall to the earth.  There it would rest, until the planet would break it down and reclaim it's elements, and the other multi-cities would continue.

How long would the others remain before leaving the green and blue planet forever? What would become of the new humans?

Only the ages would tell.