Shapers of Worlds by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989398081
Publisher: Shadowpaw Press

The last normal summer came almost twenty years before the end, although some of those same scientists would be happy to explain that the last normal summer was the end, that nothing can really be said to have happened after it was over, and maybe they’re right; maybe they were right all along, when they reminded us that hope came with Pandora, that we had never truly had a chance once we chose it as our new and final god. Twenty years might seem like a suiting epilogue, but for people who had never expected to see an ending in their lifetimes, it was not enough. It was never going to be enough, not in all the years of the world that had come before us, that would endure after us despite everything we’d done to the contrary.

Twenty years was enough time for us to do a lot of damage, and once it had become apparent to the people with their hands on the controls that “normal” was never coming back, no matter how loudly they yelled for its reappearance, we had begun doing that damage as if it were our jobs. We were all little girls in shiny shoes, collecting honeybees for science teachers who thought we were too young and too innocent to understand colony collapse disorder. They didn’t tell us what we were doing wrong when we were children, because they were afraid they’d scar us, and so we’d grown up to be adults who thought we weren’t doing any harm; that we could move through the world like it was built solely for our own amusement, buoyed by the hope that things would be better tomorrow, that nothing we did would ever make things worse, that it would keep improving and improving and improving, always and forever. We were all acolytes of the holy church of “more,” and we were going to have what the gospel had promised.

And all that time, the virus was there, not concerned, not caring, doing as it did. It spread through the cells of the children—who had lived, as the ones who controlled the narrative insisted they would; oh, not all of them, of course, but so few had died, and what was a few dead children when compared to the weight of a world ground to a halt, to the alluring siren song of normal?—making its changes, modifying what it no longer felt necessary. All that time, the virus was doing what viruses have always done, creating a more hospitable environment for its own use.

Most viruses came to humanity through other channels. “Zoonotic spillover” we call it, like a complicated name will change the simple reality of a complicated origin. Diseases begin in one thing, find their way out into the world, and then move on to something new. Something like us, home and harbour and comfortable stopping place.

But not only. There is no détente with something that didn’t evolve to share your space, only the slow unravelling of unplanned plans, of systems set into motion by nature and its own ends.

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