wb :

He had told her to wake him in a thousand years or when it was safe, whichever was later, as he closed his eyes and laid on the white sheets on a steel bed in a cocoon of black; perhaps her aural sensor malfunctioned in that instant, or her processing core misinterpreted his intentions, for when he next opened his eyes, it would have been a million years.

All too quickly passed the first fourteen years, but while the people had long since forgotten the old days of hunting and warring, their governments had not; and so it went that while children played in pristine virtual-reality beaches and their parents enjoyed every conceivable pleasure in the synsation chambers, their leaders rose and fell like the tides of a time when the moon still possessed most of its mass, and their factories sowed the seeds of things only he would come to know of, and only for an instant.

As his shell hummed and whispered, forgotten in the basement of a home ruined by time, his family's rusted bones adorning the stainless pipes, the day arrived where man, blind with pleasure and deaf with ignorance, chose his future for himself, and picked the road paved with thorns leading to perdition; in the wake of the first bombardments, nobody was left standing who remembered who fired first, and as man strode the lands of his dominion and left the smell of regret lingering in the wake of victory, the pride of Mankind was torn as the hair from the few who survived as they beat their chests and wailed in torment.

Then it came that countless years later, as a village was digging for a well in the desert wastes of what remained of Southeast Asia, they struck a coat of ebony that even their strongest warrior could not break though he shattered his prized stone axe, and the medicine woman declared it the Devil and unbuddhist, but the elders called it a relic sent by the gods Elohim and Vishnu, and the tribe venerated the sarcophagus as readily as they held in awe the bones of their ancestors; and as they searched the world and grew stronger, they found more of the sacred relics, and they founded the first of the last civilizations of Man in the wake of what few remembered as the Flood.

One day, in the heat of winter, an archaeologist wiped the sweat off his forehead and adjusted his lead suit, and shouted for his assistants to come, and, awestruck, mouths agape, hearts pounding with sheer incomprehensibility, they beheld the zenith of all the works of Man, and they worshipped it, and they brought it to the Sister City at the other end of the world, declaring it a prize as worthy as the Cocoon of the Maker; the last elder knew what it was, and shouted and coughed his blood up in the comfort of his hospital bed, but the doctor simply shook his head and gave him an injection to put him to his last fitful sleep, and drove his nurses in his car to witness the unveiling of the priceless artifact with markings only two men alive knew how to read, both of whom were asleep, and both of whom never would witness the awakening of the relic whose title its makers bestowed upon it was World-Killer.

And then in the rain of dust and echoes he woke, and he kissed the vacuum, and it took him into its embrace; and that was the end of things for the race of men.

-~-

Flash fiction in 6 sentences, idea stolen from ZH.