Author : Scot Noel

It won’t be a big red button that ends the maniacal arguments of man, no nuclear winter to silence the right, the left, and the in-between. No, just me and my little trick no one else has yet conceived.

In the silence to come, no one will ask how I put to rest the radicals of both Bible and Koran, striking dumb at once all questions of Constitution and tedious harangues, blocking out Shakespeare and the Greeks in a single bound. No, I’ll take us back to the hundred thousand year quietude that bore real men and women through the ice ages and beyond.

No sickness is stronger than the one that grips us now, none but for this, which I unleash: a fever set to burn like a firebreak through the world.

How enraged I am by your whining ineptitude and meanness to one another. People with fat bellies and fat children speak of the tyrannies they suffer. Others ignore fact in favor of god-fearing fancies, or strap on explosives to win the shallow arguments of unsound minds.

In my own country, men whose actions, words, and spirit would make the founding fathers puke stand up to invoke patriotism with the demeanor of hysterical women.

Today, it ends. The conflation of symbol with reality is over; the building up of vicious castle walls in our heads is done, for I shall take away the cause of it all, those symbols we wield like knives, the words at the foundation of all lies, and the ability forevermore to recreate a single stitch of it.

At first, true contagions inspired us to infect our networks with the codes we call viruses. Now the computer virus comes to me, naked in its simplicity, a fearsome bomb ready to plant into the body of man as base pairs, chains of nucleosides, and transcription factors. Bio-engineered on a precise genomic level, I’ve encapsulated terror within the most contagious and immutable of viral shells.

No, not a single body shall fall dead to the ground on my account. The fever I’ve created burns away words, but not a single memory. It touches neither music nor math, assaults neither art nor engineering. The pilot who can fly, the surgeon who can cut, the dancer who can dance, all shall continue as before, perhaps even pass on their skills through demonstration. But honestly, who can pass on the insidious, boundless weight of unending bull except by words? (And my plague shall take them all.)

It seems so right, so well considered!

Don’t cry to me about literature, learning, or the progress of man. Where has it gotten us? Hate is taught by rote and spread through the easiest corruptions of reason. It is love springs naturally from the human heart, as does the urge to comfort and protect.

Isn’t it in times of fear that the self is most often put aside? Won’t they have to help one another, banding together against the great catastrophe I visit upon them?

I’ve thought of it all, and if I haven’t, I shall embrace my design as the one true resolution to this era of idiocy, for our 10,000 year enterprise in argument and deceit ends today.

Yes, this is the test itself, one last rant from the man who can never be blamed, for in a moment my keystrokes will be as indecipherable as the markings on the moon.

From the start, I’ve felt the fever building, and here at last comes the climax to click across the circuits in my brain, delivering for all time the last w…

Discuss the Future: The 365 Tomorrows Forums
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows