short story

2038
As usual, I smelled them before I heard them—and did they stink! So I scuttled into my favorite hidey-hole behind the back side of the Great White Mountain, where it was dark, dusty, and dank. Oddly, the mountain was shaped like an almost geometrically perfect, rectangular cube, not the merest sign of weathering nor sculpting by the forces of Nature has pockmarked its surface. It’s as smooth as can be. Perfection in more ways than one!
      Their alien sort is literally everywhere these days, and their swarming explosion across my world had been so, so quick to come about. The most ancient of the legends of my ancestors have no mention of such heedless apes as these—the Great Disruptors, we call them now. It’s as if a great plague of vermin has descended upon us all: the hunters and gatherers, the foragers, the recyclers of each other’s waste—one beast’s poison being another one’s meat, as they say, and all according to the Laws of the Great Chain of Being, as the Good Lord had intended for us. Where was He, then, when we needed him so?
      What’s more, the alien beings seem to hate my type more than any other, a paranoid affliction given the measure of their constant attempts to wipe us from the face of the earth, despite the fact that we pose little, if any, threat to them. “Eradication” is the term we hear them repeatedly use in clear disregard for the Genocide Convention. Don’t they realize the service we provide for them? If it wasn’t for us, they’d be inundated by their own filth by now. But at the merest sight of us, weapons of mass destruction are launched without warning. Great fogs of killer gases are released without proportion; toxic sludges are smeared across the landscape like biblical floods. But somehow we live on, as if our DNA is indestructible, made up of primordial star-stuff left over from the Big Bang.
      So, I’m hidden away on the dark, far side of the Great White Mountain, in full anticipation as to what is about to come next. The scenario is oh-so-predictable, like a song that’s worn out its welcome already. The crash of forceful entry shatters the peace, such as we have it, accompanied by shouts and screams as if we all just can’t wait to hear what they have to pronounce—and on any subject you like, believe me. For all of their so-called scientific savvy and their technological prowess, they chatter ceaselessly leaving little room for listening, listening attentively to the Universe, the Song of Nature. But that’s what we are tuned into, if only incompletely so—none of God’s Creation is a perfected piece of evolutionary design, but the Great Disruptors are delusional, believing they were made exclusively in His image and that, thereby, special favors and insights have been bestowed upon them. If talking were the currency of a long existence, the Great Disruptors should outlast us all. But I’ll be honest with you, it doesn’t look like they will. You know, hubris and all that, pride coming before a Fall…
      Good thing my acoustical hearing is not that great, but there’s no escaping the next onslaught they launch: the searing light of the birth of a new sun that swallows the dark wholesale, even on the far side of the Great White Mountain where there’s just enough room through a crevice or two for blinding rays to penetrate. I squish and squirm trying to form a singularity. Blatta sum, I think to myself, if the cap fits, wear it—and I do, like it’s a badge of shame or something, cowering like a thumb-sucking fetus.
      But the Great Disruptors are always energized by this great cosmic light, and they bathe in its seemingly endless energy, like it’s a perpetual free lunch, which of course it isn’t. But they’re hooked on the Great Whiteness, and they won’t give it up, the high is just too intoxicating, showering great material gifts upon them and making them feel immensely rich in the poverty of their reckless ways. But they don’t understand the contradiction, the unsustainability of it all—or at least they pretend not to, such is the power of self-induced delusion. Unlike them, we’ve seen all this sort of tragi-comic opera before: so-called free lunches running out of gas sooner or later; and given the way they’re going about it, this lunch of theirs is going to be over sooner, much sooner than they think—maybe even by next year, or next month, or next week!
      There’s a massive earthquake, perhaps, or maybe just one of their exploding Balls of Fire in the sky that shifts the Great White Mountain on its foundations, and it moves, grinding and squealing, and I am exposed. I don’t move a muscle, remaining as stock-still as a stone, pretending there’s not an animate impulse in my entire body. A Great Disruptor is there—I know it, even though I can’t see him in all the glare and confusion. I feel thoroughly naked, as if all my body armor has just fallen away. But there’s no time for modesty, my life is at stake. He will fire off the Great Misting Gun at any moment, so I scatter off at warp speed, bobbing and weaving as much as my segmented abdomen will allow me. It’s almost like I’m marvelously double-jointed, such is the elusiveness of my flight. The Gun is fired after me, like the gunner’s in a mad panic, even more scared of me than I am of him. He’s yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs, but I sense mortal fear more than the bravado of a triumphant war-whoop in his voice. He easily misses me; his aim wild and wandering and always targeting the very space I have just vacated in my headlong escape. Then I am gone from his presence, squeezing effortlessly into the dark, shallow Flatlands to the east of the Great White Mountain, where no Great Disruptor can possibly follow.
      I’m safe—for now. But will I ever be able to venture out again? Be free and wild as Nature meant for me?

Caution being the better part of valor, I stay in the Flatlands for a good long while, making do on whatever scraps I can find there. It’s fortunate that I am frugal in the need for sustenance. That’s why, the ancestors’ legends relate, our sort have prospered for so long, almost defying entropy, it seems. In the history of the Life on Earth, we are one of the very few who have persisted through Life’s great bouts of self-destruction, when the Grim Reaper has seemed close to assuming complete hegemony over the great course of events. I search for comrades, sniffing out the chemical traces they inevitably leave as they go about their dirty business. And when I eventually find a brother, Lucifuga, he has amazing tales to tell.
      He tells me he has traveled far-and-wide, well beyond the Flatlands and the Great White Mountain where I have lived all my life. Accidentally, earlier in his life, he’d been magically transported on a Great Conveyance that had traversed the Great Oceans, leading him to discover that the Earth is immensely vast, just as it has been alleged—to some reluctant disbelief by some of us—in the myths and legends of our Forefathers.
      “Listen!” Lucifuga says to me as he concludes the telling of his amazing journeys and adventures, his voice full of awe and wonder still, as if he could hardly credit what he is about to share with me. “You won’t believe this, but the Great Disruptors…they’re in serious trouble!”
      I frown deeply, mandibles incredulously agape, as if I haven’t heard him right at all. How could this be? Their Science, their Technology, their great ape Brains had given them Mastery of the Earth, had they not, as if they were really made in His image after all, with great omniscience and omnipotence to match? The Great Disruptors—they were invincible, weren’t they? At the very pinnacle of the Food Chain with nowhere else to go but farther up still, where the Laws of Natural Limit held no further sway. Like gods, they were surely Prometheans Unbound.
      “It’s true,” Lucifuga insists, “their end is nigh. Come, let me show you.”
      Lucifuga leads me out of the Flatlands and beyond the Great White Mountain, although I am loath to leave the only place I have known. As we progress, I expect attack at any moment, but none comes. At first, we scurry through a long, dark tunnel, having to take immediate evasive action whenever the Deluges come, although it’s well known we can survive submerged for extended periods of time unscathed, perhaps the inherited adaptive trait of a long-extinct fishy ancestor, Lucifuga surmises. Chemical analysis immediately tells us both that there’s sustenance to be had from the content of the fouled water; but there’s no time to stop and feed, Lucifuga insists.
      We press onwards, then soon turn upwards; but, rather than the Blinding Light I am expecting, there’s only a dull, grey, glow overhead, pock-marked here and there by globes of fiery light, flaring high into the sky. Although I cannot see it, a spectral assay I conduct indicates that the dazzling light is an intense orangey-red. I look at Lucifuga. His face confirms what I already suspect. That there are some parts of the visual spectrum that do not bode well, and we have just found one of them. We finally emerge above aground through a metal grating, and I am astonished at what we find awaiting us there.
      “God Blatta me!” I exclaim. “Where are we? What has happened? The Great Disruptors, where are they all?”
      “Oh, they’re still here,” Lucifuga says, “just far fewer than before, and sick with some horrendous plague. Look over there, and you’ll see what I mean.”
      I look in the direction his right front leg is pointing. At first, I instinctually make to flee, but quickly realize that there is nothing to fear. Ahead, there are a half dozen Great Disruptors, but they look anything but great, anymore.
      They are either entirely prone, perhaps dead, or crawling listlessly on their hands and knees — if that’s what you can still call the grotesque specimens — afflicted no doubt by some serious injury or some wasting disease. All are gaunt, poor skeletal replicas of their former glorious selves. Whatever clothes still hang in shreds from their stick insect bodies are filthy dirty, soaked in their own bodily excretions. One or two of them moan for water, most likely, but they can barely articulate the words since we detect next to no sound whatsoever when they weakly move their chapped and swollen lips. It must be exceedingly hot, I conclude, although, of course, I am perfectly comfortable within my own carapace.
      “What in the world…”
      “I don’t know,” Lucifuga confesses. “On my travels I saw some warning signs of such a possible catastrophe. Sometimes the ports we visited would have their docksides in partial flood, or smoke would be choking the harbors from raging forest fires all around. At other times, some places would seem utterly bereft of life, except for the inevitable Great Disruptors, that is, and even they would be wearing unusual coverings over their heads, as if they had wildly mutated for some reason. Given the coughing fits that they had sometimes, I assume something had happened to their ability to breathe.
      “But then, not too long ago, all the warning trends seemed to come together, feeding on each other as if in a perfect storm, and everything, literally everything, changed overnight, as if the Lord had flipped a great Cosmic Switch, resulting in all this.”
      All this, so to speak, was a deplorable mess — at least compared to the Mother Earth we had once been bequeathed. Of course, the Great Bequest had always had its moments of Great Extinction, nature “red in tooth and claw” and all that, but what was before me now was grossly beyond the pale, something, it now appeared, only the Great Disruptors could have engineered with their Big Brains and their equally Big Ambitions. What had they done to annoy our Lord and Maker? Plenty, it seems; after all, hubris knows no limits. Thank God, at least, that our sort doesn’t know what such Hubris is.
      So, what we didn’t fully know in our minute-brained, woeful ignorance was this: that you can’t have your cake—or whatever passes as a tasty treat in your neck of the woods—and eat it too; not unless you’re a super-efficient recycler like we are, that is, and, tragedy of tragedies, the Great Disruptors weren’t, they didn’t think they had to be, especially after they’d been handed all those Promethean gifts like fire, inventiveness, and seemingly boundless cheap energy. They had been so clever that they had completely bypassed wise and had moved straight head on into ignorance—of the most self-destructive kind. As Lucifuga so pithily put it, the whole sorry sage beggared belief.
      The trouble is, you see, you can be too smart for your own good.
      Granted, it’s definitely smart to figure out how to get more from your ecological niche. Indeed, even Lucifuga and I would say “yeah” to that, would feel impelled to, no doubt about it. After all, life is consumed by the struggle for survival so that you’ve the time and the good genes to get your replicators into the next—and then the next, ad infinitum—generation, like a perpetual motion machine that needs boundless energy to keep it all going. But, it seems, there is no such magnificent machine that can defy the Laws of Nature, that can forever put off the day of Entropy’s eventual comeuppance. And that’s where the Great Disruptors went wrong—thinking, religiously believing, that they could. God, they’d proclaimed, or at least Scientific Man, had promised that it should be so.
      You see, as soon as you beat Entropy once—or at least appear to in the cosmic short term—you might be tempted, if you’re self-conscious and inquisitive enough, to go for Gold again, as if “winning” is all there is, that life “is like a box of chocolates,” not a bad treat among them. But, like a hamster inside a wheel, you can’t stop running—until you actually do, that is, and then you may as well just drop dead, just like the Great Disruptors.
      Their miscalculation was classic, thinking that more of the same was a true no-brainer. And what was this same? In three short words, it was what they benignly called “unlimited economic growth,” relentlessly chanted like a Sacred Hymn, as easy as 1-2-3 or A-B-C—or, most likely, as GDP.
      The elixir was a doctrinaire belief in “Frontier Economics,” a heady mix of unlimited resources and unfillable sinks for waste products, just like on the Great American Frontier where (at one time perhaps in its very early days) you could just up sticks and keeping moving West — forever! — if you ran out of stuff and you were starting to wallow in your own filth. But what such brave, irrepressible Pioneers didn’t realize was that the Frontier itself was on, in essence, a spaceship of sorts—the planet Earth orbiting in space—wherein resources were limited to what the astronauts had on board with them and used much faster than the Sun might replace them, and wherein whatever mess you made you pretty much had to take it with you.
      And that’s where the Great Disruptors eventually found themselves in 2038: stuck on an increasingly crowded spaceship, running out of resources, and rapidly filling up with toxic waste and choking on the befouled air they breathed and with limited time to even think of the next generation of technology that might save their asses. Pace a certain Elon Musk and his flights of fancy about escaping to Mars (of all places!), the Great Disruptors were “floating in a tin can…where there was nothing that they could do.”
      They were Stuck: they were the willful engineers of their own Overpopulation, of the Sixth Great Extinction, of the Great Eradication of the Primeval Forests, of the Fouling of the life-giving Air and Water, of the Depletion of the Fertile Soils, of the Changing of the Climate, among a growing list of other Mortal Sins—or perhaps they were Immortal ones, too, in a way.
      You see, according to our Holy Scripture, in the Beginning, or at least on the Sixth day of Creation, God had said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” which was fine as far as it went, and assuming God to be a benevolent kind of fellow. If only he’d have stopped right there! But he didn’t; he just had to keep on going, running with a thought that—at least in retrospect—soon became the equivalent of a Pandora opening a Box full of future trouble, especially since the Pandora in this case was a scheming little devil, too big for his boots, and just too clever for everyone’s good—a veritable Curious George but without the endearing humor.
      No, God’s image became too expansive by half. Here’s what He said next: “And let them (the Great Disruptors) have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth [including, of course, yours truly].” Dominion, no less; unfortunately, words have consequences, as they say, and oh boy did they just. But He didn’t stop there; he just kept piling it on, blessing the Great Disruptors and encouraging them to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And then, He signs off before taking his well-earned day of rest by congratulating Himself on his achievement: It was Good, He said to himself—very Good. Talk about rubbing salt into wound!
      But in the End though, I guess we could say, it wasn’t so good after all. The Great Collusion between God and those whom He had made in his image had done exactly the opposite of what we might have assumed had been His original Plan all along, assuming we put the best possible spin on those hallowed, holy words of His, that is.
      But who knows? I wasn’t around too much longer after Lucifuga had shown me the wretched state the Great Disruptors had gotten themselves into, so I didn’t have a chance to find out. But I did die, thankfully, what they call a “natural” death, peacefully, in my sleep, in the fall of 2038—or should I say “Fall,” if you get my drift?
      In the end—my end—the Great Disruptors had no hand in it whatsoever, not even the great novelist Kafka, who’d gotten closer to the truth about us and them than he might ever have imagined with that classic tale of his! Poor Gregor. Plus ça change, plus la Métamorhose. No, I evaded the Great Disruptors to the bitter end, although it’d been a darned close thing at times.

2084
In Paris in 2015, the Great Disruptors had grandly promised—sort of—that they wouldn’t, but in the end they inevitably did.
      In a little less than half a century, they’d finally turned their home into a complete wasteland, totally uninhabitable for most of them, especially their poorest members who died a horribly wasting, then an anarchically-violent death, as if they were in a Bruegel or something—you know, that horrendous Triumph of Death thing he painted. The few Great Disruptors who survived were forced to spend all their lives in climate-controlled cells; they did, that is, until even they ran out of resources, ran out of cash, ran out of anywhere else to go.
      As a last ditch effort, they’d tried to mimic us, believe it or not to try to learn something from Nature for once! But for all their science and technology, their new prosthetic carapaces couldn’t keep up with the all the Disruptions they’d caused. And no matter how palpable their slide into environmental destruction became as the years went by, they could never get themselves to abandon the addiction that plagued them most: instant gratification, their abject spinelessness before the God of Short-Term Interest, today’s gain for oneself coming at the expense of long-term sustainability for the many. The Great Disruptors even had an ancient proverb that advised against such folly: “Don’t cut your nose to spite your face,” but it’d made no difference. They’d slashed away at just about everything, noses being the least of such worries. Our sort, though, we’re still using the same old brown, waxy suit we’ve always had, and it has kept on working just fine, like we had listened to Nature rather than ignore her warnings, her long Lamentation.
      How can I know all this, you must be wondering? I’m long dead, aren’t I? And it’s literally only 2018 right now, 2038 and 2084 still being far into the future.
      Ah, Time—the Great Enigma. What is its Measure, for your sort as opposed to mine? Does it only go forward, or can we retrace its unfolding in our dreams, our myths, stories, and legends? Is it cyclical or linear? Perhaps curvilinear, at times? Can it speed up in its relentless passage as well as slow down? Time is slippery, and perhaps in the end of little cosmic consequence. Conceivably, there might be dozens of dimensions and parallel universes that make up the Great Mystery of Reality, most of which we cannot know in the neurological state we enjoy here on Earth, that infinitesimally small blue dot floating in the vastness and the timelessness of what you call Space. Perchance, indeed, my molecules may have recombined into another Being entirely by 2084, inhabiting an entirely unimaginable Terra Incognita, from whence I am looking down on your future selves—what remain of you—like an omniscient God in Heaven.
      Maybe that’s how I know these wondrous things. Besides, my sort has seen it all before. The Lucifuga’s Lament tells of a time, long, long ago, when much of Life was destroyed, not just once, but five times. And we always saw it coming, whether the mayhem was caused by a dominant species run amok, or had been the after-effect of the Earth going through one of its hissy fits, disrupted by some cataclysmic event, like a terrible, vengeful act of God. Regardless, we’d always just soldiered on, sticking to our script, knowing that we’d come through it all, perhaps better than ever.
      And the fact of the matter is my sort, The Blatta Boys, are indeed faring better than ever in 2084. We had a pretty rough go of it for a few decades, but, being Nature’s Great Exception, the Indispensable Species, we came through it all bigger and browner, scalier and waxier than ever. If the Great Disruptors freaked out at the sight us back then, in ’18 and ’38, when we were small and shy, how would they react now, I wonder? We’re as big as footballs and can run like the wind; and if the “yuk factor” is of concern, then we’ve got it in spades now!
      In 2084, there are mountains of rotting life forms, stinking in the relentless heat, and creating great nurseries for surging tides of maggots to squirm abroad in, as is their wont. It’s “Waste not, want not” now, and what we want is waste, and there’s plenty of it!
      We’re truly fat ‘n happy.
      In 2084, we have no predators; we’re the top of our food chain. The Sixth Great Extinction was truly the greatest of them all, the Great Disruptors saw to that. They proved to be, on the road to their demise, the gift that kept on giving to my great-great-great-great grandchildren, and to their multiple offspring too. They passed on the Creator’s baton to us, and we were the ones who became fruitful and multiplied and filled the earth and subdued it, although the ensuing “dominion” part didn’t really come to be as such, since we became pretty much the only “creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” The fruit flies, though, well they’re doing even better than we are. The sky’s full of them these days. As good as we are in dealing with radiation, those boys are even hardier. So, they emerged from the Great Disruptors’ thermonuclear World War III like multiplying rabbits popping out of a trillion magicians’ hats.
      But will so-called “intelligent life” make a comeback one day, you might well be asking? Probably, I guess. Looking back, it seems like its emergence is inherent in the evolutionary cards God dealt for Earth, the greatest teleological, one-way bet of all cosmic time. Who knows? But if it does concoct a return, maybe we’d all better hope it’s a bit less “intelligent” the next time, rather more wise, tuned in, and more cautious than those crazed apes who saw a weapon in every invention, another dollar to be had in every ecological opportunity. It’s said that God rested on the Seventh day of Creation; seems like if He wants to enjoy his rest in the future, he’d do well to let the Blatta Boys run the show from now on in.
      But whatever the case might ultimately be, as of 2084, World War III’s consequent Nuclear Winter is still hanging on, providing the final coup de grace to the Sixth Great Extinction. In a noncompetitive alliance with the fruit flies, we are home free and range free. We have no need for the shadows of the Great White Mountain and the Flatlands, anymore. The Winter has brought a blanket of thick grey clouds and curtains of shrouding rain; we have all the shadows we might crave, now.
      In 2084, we’re happy—like pigs in shit. The Great Disruptors, in their own misguided way, became our Great Benefactors. Could that really have been a part of God’s plan?
      Blessed are the meek, my old friend Lucifuga once said in that sagely manner of his, for they shall inherit the earth.
      I can’t say that “meekness” is exactly our chief stock-in-trade, but you know we’re pretty much live-and-let-live, by and large, and, at least compared to you-know-who I think you’d have to agree we’re not much of a Disruptor at all. We go with the flow and here we are: Masters of our Domain.
      As for the Great Disruptors, may they rest in peace—after all, there’s always a first time for everything.
      …
      Or not.