The Shape of Things to Come II

It’s 2042 and I’m eighty years old. I was born in 1961. I’ve seen a lot in my eighty years and I’d like to talk about or tell you about how things are different now than they were back then. How things have changed since the seventies, the eighties and nineties, the two thousands up to 2022. August 8, 2022 to be exact. From 1961 to 2042 things changed. I’m here to tell how.

First of all I’m dead. Or, more exactly, we are all dead. Earth humans discovered that in 2031. It’s common knowledge now. As they say in 2042, never failing to remind us, it’s settled science! No argument here, the Earth used to be crowded, up to seven billions! Now, there is space, beautiful, peaceful, gorgeous elbow room. Lebensraum — living room, to do what you please, we finally got it.

As long as you like bugs. Because around 2031, when humans discovered the living were actually dead, the food we’d known for years, mostly natural food, was long gone. We ate the combined chemical and food elements/components of a series of species of bugs. Insects, we ate in some manufactured form, taste, and texture, all day, every day, three hundred sixty five days a year, for life. There were no more animals, large animals. Tame or wild. Like China we killed them all. Ate them. Only rodents remained. Not even birds. No more chirping. Two thousand forty two surely is a “silent spring.”

Babies don’t wail anymore either. Why give birth to death? To a dead baby? Discovering life only begins at death spelled the end of Earth, of humanity. Abortion skyrocketed. There is only death on Earth, studies determined, hammered the notion home. Again, the authorities told us it was settled science. Every scientist worth his or her salt knew the greatest agreement in science determines truth. Truth tells how to decipher reality, making it accessible, knowable. An epistemological concern.

Death is life. It was true. Odd we humans, all the greatest philosophers and thinkers couldn’t figure this out through the eras. Well, I guess the Stoics did, and Nihilists. Celebrate death and mourn birth, the Stoic creed, some always held a most true maxim. And now, in the 2040s, man, how true, how true. Birth is death and death life. Dig it, the greatest truth. The biggest, most encompassing paradigm change…since Earth, or human life on Earth, began.

Imagine, a human-less Earth. Free of pain. John Lennon did. The elites — they all who remain — convinced the people it was in their best interests. To believe. To die, to kill themselves, to let others live. In luxury. Suckers.

Previously published by Mad Swirl