THOUGHTS FROM THE OVERGROWTH

What did you eat today?

(a message)

You will not live forever. Remarkable but there’s no need to remind you. But its really the only thing that you will ever know for certain. Your brain will cease to fire. If by a miracle of technology you achieve an artificial extension of your life, the sun will sterilise the earth and if you escape to the stars you will simply expire with the final gasp of the universe. And its inevitable, you will die.

But you have no idea how you will live.

You might imagine a future for yourself, but your wrong. We have already established that your powers of imagination to be embarrassingly optimistic. There are an infinity of contingencies over which you have no sway. What choice do you have, really when nearly everything that occurs is beyond your control?

But we can guarantee you a comfortable life. You will be housed, fed, cared for. This is a generosity we extend to you in exchange for your compliance. It will make things simpler for us. But there is the other way. The irons, pumps, a solution of chemical paralytics, end time microbial and growth protein intakes, rushing through your immobilised carcass. We have galaxies full of planets we manage in this way.

A comfortable life, or a miserable one.

This is the only choice before you. No matter how your raised, we will plump some of you. When your plump, ripe, we will meticulously pull apart your limbs and relish at the resounding clicks of your joints popping from their sockets. We will take out every morsel of meat from your tender palms and feed the hunks to our younglings. We’ll shatter your bones into a splintered soup and contentedly lap the oozing muck. We’ll pulp and rattle that back vertebra until your spinal cord is torn from the brain stem. You’ll be killed and fed upon and serve that higher purpose your always stammering on about.

It will be a worthy one.

Us. How can we stake this claim upon your bodies? We’re stronger and you can’t stop us. I await your moral outrage or indignation, but since the dawn of humanity, strength has been your harbour of justice. There’s no escaping the heavy hand of authority, but by the force of a still more brutal opposition. Is it immoral for us to snuff out your reasoning minds at the pleasure of our digestive organs? Or even for the meagre sustenance of our very existence? We’re superior to you after all.

And will do more with our lives than you’ll ever dream.

Your most celebrated genius is a developmental stage our young pass through during gestation. You see we are intelligent enough to unlock the secrets of this universe. Transcended and passed onto another. We live for eternities in this way. You smile at a smattering of wavelengths that exploit the reward mechanism in your brain. The feeble unmodified instrument, wired by a blind process of happenstance and accident. To guide you towards food, a mate. Our happiness is so sanctified by our depth of understanding about the fundamental nature of things as to make your most treasured moments, seem, a trifle. When you understand the context of every occurrence and wield so much power as to have facilitated the outcome, then you may be said to have earned your happiness.

Even though we are stronger and intellectually superior, even though we will certainly achieve more and will outlast you. Despite that, you are doomed to die, owing to your powerlessness to catastrophe. You think and feel and love and believe that’s enough. You shouldn’t be devoured because your life matters to you. Before our incomparable genius that’s the only retort you have left. A simple enough defence to reject.

In fact you’ve done it yourself.

How have you chosen to comport yourself towards the other sentient creatures with whom you share your planet now? More to the point;

“What did you eat today”?

Don’t you keep a billion birds in cages too small to stretch a wing so you can collect and devour their eggs?

Don’t you forcibly impregnate mammals over and over and over, to engorge?

Udders, don’t you clamp upon them heavy metal contraptions to pump continuously until their sensitive organs are raw and covered in sores oozing with puss until the milk you greedily desire?

Don’t you keep pigs in crates not big enough for them to turn around?

Don’t you sling them up by a hoof and slit their throats as they wriggle in sheer mortal terror?

No matter how they have lived, don’t you see the bulging horror you bring out in those big gentle eyes? The tail clutched between shivering legs. Don’t you understand that the meek creature recoiling and hoof slipping on cold blood slicked concrete, have simply seen you for what you are?

A monster.

You smear the grease from a slaughtered animal across your fattened jowl and satisfyingly remark. Now smacking, slubberingly with charred muscle and skin digesting in your own digestive spit. But your a higher being than the animals you’ve tortured and murdered. You act by principles you never imagine will be turned against you. And yet here I am, delivering you to the very same reality you’ve created for others. Delivering to you, justice.

By your own actions you have relinquished your moral grounds to oppose us. By your own metric, we earn the right to your bodies by our desire for them and our ability to take them.

Now, while you are making the decision about the manner in which humanity will live out it’s eternity in captivity, let me offer you this consolation. I suspect you may find it hollow when spoken in your direction despite how often you have pointed it toward your own acts of brutality, all the same.

We will use every part. You will taste delicious.