Sep 28 2008
The Choice; Evolution=Devolution
One of the worst things about ants is that you can hardly feel them as they crawl on your body. The absolute worst thing about ants these days is they’re all infected with a very contagious strain of HIV. They’re called AIDS Ants, and they’re literally everywhere. It all started several years ago, when I developed a supposed cure for AIDS. The government told me to release it to the masses early, before I had done adequate testing, and now…now look what happened. But you have to understand. Even though, of course, you never will. My family was starving. My three boys were sick. I had to find money. And if I didn’t release the drug soon, my grants would be cut off. I did it for my family, not out of my own intrinsic greed.
Nobody died for the first few months. People were fine, actually, their diseases clearing up in no time. I was a national hero, my name plastered over the front pages of the papers. Despite my initial desire to just care for my family, I found myself drawn into the cultural vortex of arrogance and greed. When the first deaths began, no one could figure out how. And once we did, we didn’t say. Turns out the disease can’t be spread by mere human touch, so in that sense, we were lucky. But would you call it luck now, you raving optimists with your bright eyes and hopeful hearts? Because there are a lot more ants than you realize, and every ant became infected with the disease. For some bizarre reason, the ants weren’t affected at all. No, they were fine. But my wife wasn’t. Nor my children. Because this AIDS wasn’t exactly like the other one. It was more virulent, more harmful. It had a 100% kill rate. It was spread between humans the same way as before; fluids. But ants, somehow something in them just contracted the disease automatically, and they…they were everywhere, as I said before.
It’s 2012 now, and most of the human population is dead. Some would say this is a good thing, that all humans have done is pollute nature. But we’re nature too, and those people are just not patriotic about their species. You want the consequences? I’m living in a two-room shack in the middle of nowhere, typing this onto my laptop. I haven’t seen another human in a year. When I wake up in the morning, I look at the empty place on my counter where my wife’s picture used to be and I cry silently, no tears. No, my body overused that function a long time ago. I gaze out the window at the single grave, marked by two sticks put together feebly by an aging man with arthritic hands. My boy, Tommy, is in there. He died last, after I’d moved into this shack. I thought we’d be safe, with the walls coated with ant poison and our daily injections of the vaccine. But he’s dead now. And why I am still living? I don’t know, perhaps it’s just the hope that someone will read this if civilization ever picks up again, that someone will realize that evolution is just devolution and progress is backwards. Perhaps they’ll realize humans are just nature, no better, no worse, and that we’re happiest when we don’t know there’s a better world out there.
Do you know what it’s like to not be able to cry? I do. I’ve gone through that. And I don’t even know what I am anymore, what I believe. I mean, I very well could’ve done the right thing. I just don’t know anymore.
