The Fate of Monsters

I'm worried about you, humans. Do you want to go extinct? You sure act like it.

I think some of you want to watch it happen. The seas might boil in your lifetime, mortal, because you couldn't stop the death cult of capital and colony. You still can, there's still time -- but how much?

I don't know that you grasp the significance of the changes your hubris summons. It won't just be uncomfortably hot or cold or strange. You won't make a home in bunkers or vaults like your adorable stories depict, to wait it out, to inherit the ruins of a world that yearns for your return. Gaia won't wait for you. She will shrug you off and move on, with no more care than to shift in one's sleep. Like all species, you exist in a narrow band of ecological possibility, a puny sliver of tolerable conditions in temperature and atmospheric composition. If the oxygen content of the air you breathe rises or falls too much, the patience of bunkers won't save you. The Earth will have no place for you, and it never will again.

If Gaia does allow you a niche, if the extinctions you summon do not altogether swallow you, then some wretched few who have forgotten everything and who trust no one, who are sick and ill-suited and stubbornly alive -- they will be the offering to evolution's grace. If it takes mercy on you, it will take its penance. It will take your fingers and your toes and your frontal cortex. It will reshape your eyes and your tongues and your dreams. It will take civilization from you because it so clearly posed a threat to your survival. Your naked skin will become a crushing flaw in weather no longer meant for you; your grey matter, the very depth of your thoughts, a liability shorn like wool, braided into the layers of the soil of the eons, and you, none the wiser -- not any more.

You won't miss the world that was, because the world that will be, will be all you've ever known. You'll eat insects and be thankful for every calorie. You'll shiver in the winter and be grateful to wake up. You'll scour the microbial scum that grows on plastiglomerate stones, gnawing at the detritus of your Ozymandian ancestors, and make a paste of them that qualifies as nutritious.

Perhaps you will return to the trees, the ones that remain, and become quick-moving sloths that birds and lizards have nightmares about. You'll swing like a primate more savage than any other, because the lesson your body will learn is not that cooperation triumphs. If you'd cooperated, this wouldn't have happened. No, you'll learn that brutality is always the answer. You'll bite what struggles until it bleeds and struggles no more. You'll descend from the covenant of profit and privation, back to that of prey and predator, where the bears and tigers of the new world will consider you their delectable lessers.

Maybe you'll take refuge in caves again, deeper than any ancestor before you. When your bunkers fail you, maybe those frail bodies that spill out of them will find their way in the dark down deep below. You won't need eyes there, not like you have. They will become white and empty, and your ears and nose sharper than ever. Your digits will turn stubby for digging, or long for climbing. Slick surfaces that generations of fingers slowly wear away will one day feel the touch of fingers grown for them. You won't think anything of it because it'll be all you have ever known.

If you want to keep what you love about being human, you'll have to use it wisely. You can transcend the covenant of predator and prey with a few fancy tools and institutions, but that doesn't get you out of your pact with evolution itself. If you live at all, it's because you keep a niche. If you lose it, you're done. No descendants. That's what it means to be part of a genetic legacy, mortal. As for me, I'll return regardless. I'll be one of those birds and lizards that has nightmares about you, and every time you catch me and bite my head off, my last thought will be to wonder: why would Creation contain a monster like you? Unlike you, immortals can't learn. I'll never understand why you do this to each other, but I'll keep coming back to try and figure it out. I hope the calories of my corpse grant you the time you need to change your mind.

Unless, you really do want to watch it happen. Then buckle up, my dear voyeur. The fate of monsters will be quite the show.