After the Plague

It hit us suddenly, and 85 percent of us died in a year. The plague kept ravaging the world, poor, rich, crowded and sparse. We all succumbed, except for a few of us. That last 15 percent.

Over the year following the untreatable and lethal pathogen taking it’s first victim, we buried six people for each one that stayed alive. Not figuratively, but literally. how else were we to smother the stench. But at the end of that year, our mysterious disease claimed it’s last victim, and, as suddenly as we had all seen it start, it stopped.

The consequences that we weren’t expecting became the most impactful as it came to a halt. We no longer had the human beings needed to maintain some of our ongoing projects. The first meltdown was in Russia only months before the end of the plague.

Sick, under-qualified, and over-worked emergency employees at a thermonuclear power plant failed to maintain and respond to a critical reactor failure. A cooling pipe had burst, and that had been the beginning. I suppose if there had been a CNN or Fox News at the time, there would have been incredible blame thrown upon the leadership for allowing such dangerous practices, but we all knew what had happened. Maybe not the specifics, but we knew why. Just as much as you do.

It kept happening, and nobody had expected or planned for this, reactors kept melting down. Whole portions of the world were drenched in severe fallout, cities abandoned. By the time we realized that our governments had crumbled completely, it was over. Highways became death traps as desperate people, unable to feed themselves without the structure and labor once provided by the six and a half billion people in the world. Then came the real explosions.

The first bomb went off in what had once been salt lake city. It leveled the damn place. It turns out that, even after the world is over, it’s still important to know where the nukes are at. We only ever managed to collect half of the nukes from before the plague. The rest are either lost, dismantled, or used.

When we finally managed to pick up the pieces and try to reassemble the world, where I lived had been claimed by “The United Republic of Eastern States”. The rest of what had once been north america had been divided up between the Theocratic Nation of the End Times in middle america and the south, and the Social Democracy of the West.

Suddenly humans were incredibly valuable again. With less than a billion people on the planet, labour became incredibly important. The planet thrived, we could support every human being with no famine. Natural resources weren’t spread so thin, and climate change scientists, those that were left at least, admitted that the plague might have saved humanity. It took a year for us to realize what it had really done.

A year to date after the last victim of the plague was claimed, I was working for the medical ministry of the Eastern States. The statistics came in, and my first reaction was to deny it. Zero births since the plague ended. We were baffled, and scared. Several calls to scientists around the world quickly confirmed our worst fears. Humanity had been sterilized.

It was the first time in history that the whole human race gathered together under one flag. The planet was once nation, with all it’s resources directed at preserving humanity and it’s children. Every scientist was directed to the sciences of longevity, cloning, or reproduction. Desperate cries for help to the stars were broadcast, looking for some celestial savior. War all but stopped, as we refused to risk the end of humanity.

At the two year mark from the end of the Plague, the first child was born from my lab. A girl, made from my genetic material, and that of one of my colleagues. We were overnight celebrities. The world applauded us as their saviours. Some people applauded the small child as the future mother of all humanity. That was only until we found out that she too was infertile. Her body had not been created with the capacity. Suddenly, it was just me and my lab.

Then it wasn’t. We couldn’t replicate our results. Nobody accused us of falsifying our original results, we had a one year old child to prove our initial success. It just would not happen again. We struggled for two more years, hoping to replicate those promising results that we called Mary. Sadness.

News broke. A leading computer expert and neurologist from what-had-once-been Beijing had transferred the brain patterns of a terminally ill patient from his mind into a specially made machine. It was claimed that his conscience survived. There were questions, as it was hard to prove that it was still a human conscience that survived within his machine.

The questions only persisted until he transferred his own mind into a metal body for a week, leaving his body comatose. He transferred his mind back into his body, retaining memory and conscience of his time in the machine. His name, Xian-wing, became the most uttered name in post-plague society.

The waiting list for his ‘treatment’ was so long that I didn’t even bother signing up. I would be dead by the time it was my turn. Instead, I focused on my work. It took me another two years, but I finally had four more healthy fetuses in my cyber-wombs, and to me, two boys and two girls were born. I was able to replicate it again, and again. I found our solution.

I had a lot of time to think about this. The Great Filter: The theory that sentient life has some great challenge that prevents most species from leaving their own planet before it destroys itself, or is destroyed by poor luck. The idea that sterility was our great filter had been tossed around since the Plague. I had a different opinion. But I kept it to myself.

I had brought forth two hundred new humans, and Xian-wing had been placing hundreds into their mechanical minds. Humanity seemed to be rebounding. Our greatest minds could control the rate of population creation. Data storage was the only limitation of human population, as those embedded in machined began to live their lives halfway between the virtual reality, in which only they could live, and reality. We were no longer struggling for resources, science was progressing rapidly since all of our resources had been diverted to our technology. We looked to the stars and, for the first time, they looked back.

They landed in what had once been the Arabian Peninsula. A giant object of unknown origin that broadcast a simple signal. They welcomed us to the stars, in our own languages. The message played on repeat for a week before the vessel disappeared to the stars once more. Suddenly there was urgency to reach the stars. We stepped out, jumped into orbit.

They had been waiting for us. They welcomed us in person this time, as they brought our small shuttle aboard their hulking space-craft. From what I understand, they had been watching for a long time. We eventually thought to ask about the Great Filter, and my suspicions were confirmed.

Our Great Filter had not been our Sterility, but our Sterility had been the way we slipped the sieve. We had been far too effective at procreating, destroying our planet through the thoughtless creation of millions of new humans when we couldn’t feed the ones that we already had. This inane multiplication had been like the parasite that grows until it kills the host, and itself in the process.

Now that was under control, and we were through the filter. We had earned our place in the stars, and been welcomed into it. We had even learned the secrets of immortality through technology. All thanks to one very special virus.

“The Plague”