Author : Clint Wilson, featured writer

“I wrestle with it every minute of every day. However please let the record show that every precaution was considered when it came to keeping it humane. No one ever knew for even an instant what hit them. One second we were a planet overrun by thirteen billion parasitic beings, all of whom were in immediate danger of mass extinction via overcrowding and disease. And then the next second they all went peacefully away, and we were suddenly a very healthy and robust selection of the top five hundred million people considered essential enough to keep around.”

“This court has already recognized the previous global crisis and is thankful to be among the surviving carriers of our specie’s precious DNA. But what we really want to hear from you is, how was it actually done?”

“Ah, that is the genius of it… it was the Captain Trips antivirus that carried the doom bringers in the first place. The world was so scared of the super flu that they clambered over top of one another violently to get to the abundantly distributed free bottles of Red Five.”

“Yes, yes, and the Red Five contained microscopic machines… nanobots you call them?”

“Yes your honor. They still exist in all our bodies, everyone who drank the antiviral medicine, which was pretty much everybody on the face of the planet. But don’t worry, the machines are now in permanent sleep mode, their command program destroyed, they are nothing but electro-microscopic bits of gold and silicone floating amongst your blood cells.”

The chief justice tugged at his collar uncomfortably at this, as if though imagining the countless microscopic intruders coursing through his body, the same ones that had instantly severed billions of brain stems with their deadly lasers, and then had oh so quickly dissolved their victims gruesomely albeit efficiently into morbid puddles meant to evaporate or wash away in the rain. Not losing his scowl he said, “And you just gave the order then? The command or whatever? To kill most of the human race?”

“If I hadn’t none of us would be having this discussion right now, or any discussion for that matter. You see your honor we were at a critical level, in fact we would have already gone ahead with the plan over a year earlier but we still lacked the computing power.”

“The computing power to kill?”

“Actually the computing power to segregate who was and who wasn’t to be deleted. Once we had the comprehensive genome map in our system we could divide those to be sacrificed from those of us like you and I, the ones who were meant to carry on.”

He leaned back in his chair, contemplating, tapping his fingers together. Then finally, “Might I ask why it was you who personally? pushed-the-button so to speak?”

My answer was simple and direct. “Because it was my idea in the first place.”

In another half hour I walked out of the building flanked by my own armed guards, I sidestepped a spot where the courthouse steps were discolored a pinkish hue, a one meter circle with a wispy bit of hair at its center. I was free to go wherever I wanted, the man who euthanized over a dozen billion people with a single keystroke. But I prefer to think of myself as the man who saved the world.