(2025)
First of all, congratulations on your promotion; I hope you've had time to celebrate already, because old Omar is going to rain on your parade right now.
If you're reading these words, it means that I'm dead. Hopefully I've died a hero's death in the war against the Maggots and not by slipping in the shower. (Or, it means that you've opened this envelope without authorization, in which case enjoy your next six decades in a high security prison, I guess.)
I feel I've got a pretty good idea who you are. No, I'm not telling who; would be pretty discouraging if I got it wrong, eh? But I know you're from the Security Board, and everyone there is good people, strong and honest and willing to do what must be done. True defenders of humankind – brings tears to my eyes, no, honestly, it really does.
I'm going to do the worst thing I possibly can: I'm going to destroy any sense of mystery or wonder about the damn things. I also may or may not crush your soul in the process. I hear the leading guess these days is that aliens seeded them on Earth to sap our strength and morale. But we're showing those grey-skinned green-blooded bastards what Homo sapiens is made of, eh? We'll come out of it better and stronger than before, won't we?
Yes, yes, I made them, of course. Come, surely you suspected it already: would you be here if you weren't at least that smart? Yes, I'm sure some conspiracy theorists guessed it correctly. So? An equal number will say that they are holograms, or yetis in a costume, or a plot from you-know-whom. For any possible story, there's someone who will believe it, and some were bound to get it right. No, for God's sake, don't try to shut them up! That's still sending a message, unless you crush everyone, and you will not be able to crush everyone. Save your fire for the real enemies, you know, the ones feeding human children to their larvae, not the ones venting their mouths on what's left of the Internet. Most won't even hear about it anyway; I hear the Web Authority is finally getting itself into proper shape.
It was stupidly easy to do it with the technology of that time, to design an arbitrary organism, program its behavior like you'd program your safehouse door, and scatter the eggs all over the world; good thing that tech is all under the control of the Security Board now, eh? Imagine if any crackpot could get access to that!
I came in possession of that technology when I was in the old Board, way back when we still took orders from the UN, and the worst thing we watched for was another Ebola superstrain. Surprisingly easy to use, these gene-editing kits; any terrorist worth their anthrax should have been able to create the worst plague in history with those. I've always held that most terrorists are fundamentally unserious people. Hooligans who think molotovs and balaklavas will get them laid.
Anyway, I could do one better. I had access to enough independent, unsupervised calculation power that I could feed my machine any genome and simulate the development of a complex multicellular organism. Cut and paste sequences, add mutations, recombine, simulate again, and cull. Repeat a few million times and you can even control their behavior, to a degree.
A few minutes of input every day, and in a few years I was done, walking out of the lab with a canister of the most dangerous babies in history.
Our species is a goldmine of complexes and phobias. Violence, illness, sexual violation, vermins, parasites, foreigners who talk weird, things that are almost but not quite people... Hence I started with a roughly humanoid body, then broke it to make it crawl like a rat. I made their hide slimy and crusty, with mangy patches of fur, as if they were suffering from every skin disease on Earth. Finding the perfect face was a challenge – I almost took a hint from the Rising Sun and left it blank – but I found a way to make it split open like a vagina dentata, and that was perfect. Really, I would call it the greatest work of art of our century, though I'll understand if you disagree.
I had to think of the smell: a nice exudate of skatole, putrescine, and butyric acid. The sound: I made their vocal organs human enough that they babble and giggle, but not so much that you'd ever be reminded of actual children. I admit I cut corners on the larvae: anything more elaborate than a big caterpillar would have been more trouble than it was worth. You'd mess up the whole ontogeny, see.
I made them small, just after the metamorphosis, to climb and skulk and crawl through half-opened windows, but I took away any control of size. The more they eat, the more they age, the larger they become. The biggest I've ever seen, in Smolensk, tore open a van with its hands. It's just expedient, you see, the stealthy ones and the brutes, why pick one archetype alone? I think they actually become a bit cleverer, too. It's part of the appeal – you get to blast your way through hordes of minions, and also to take out the big figures, with all the care and challenge it takes.
Ah, their reproduction. I'm quite proud of how I set it up. But as always, mommy nature did most of the work – I cribbed it from certain marine worms. The Maggots are all hermaphrodites who can inseminate each other, all of them carrying that nasty-looking bone spur to fight and bugger each other with. And how they fight! Because the loser is knocked up by the winner, and ends up being eaten by the larvae, from the inside. Much better to be a dad than a mom, then, no? Born from ravishment, murderers since their first breath! No mother's love to make things complicated – no Maggot will ever say, "please, I have a family!". No media handwringing over war crimes – if anything the larvae are more sickening than the grownups. What Maggot is ever innocent, with a system like that?
Just enough care for their offspring that they would throw crippled prisoners into the collective larval pits, not so much that they wouldn't gobble up a few whenever they feel peckish. I made sure there's an overabundance of larvae: it's called r-strategy. Only the bloodiest survive. That's the way you like it, no? Would it make you feel better, if you saw a Maggot take a bullet for its children? No, it's all cattle to them, they're all cattle to each other, not like humans, not like us. We suffer to help each other, we do. They're so nimble, the smallest adults; the places they can crawl in and hide hungry larvae! Were you with us already, when we cleansed Dubai for good?
Now, as to why go through such bother with each meal, digesting preys that kick and struggle, taking time to, ah, practice their fencing skills... well, if they didn't, they could eat many more people. Would you want that? Of course I wanted them killing as few people as possible, while making the biggest show about them. They kill a lot faster and cleaner when they're not out in the open and no one's watching, ever noticed that?
You know that 'pop!' thing they make when they die? I did that too, a sort of pressurized swimbladder in their chest that bursts open when it breaks. I made killing Maggots satisfying in every way, I did. Were you with us, when we drove over a field of them in Paraguay? Afterward, someone confessed to me that it felt like popping bubblewrap. Maybe it was you.
Now mind, I might have enjoyed the process of design, as an intellectual challenge. I'll admit that much. But don't think for a second that I ever took any pleasure in the murders, the rapes, the tortures. When I forced myself to watch that first footage out of Copenhagen – I knew I had no right to look away, not I of all people – I was as sickened as any of you. Just not as surprised. (No, I didn't add a magical kill switch. If I had, I'd have used it on the second day. I should know, I went through all my own papers looking for one. We're not going to cheat our way out of this.)
Ah, right. "Why". I got so caught up in describing the process that I forgot the point.
Why would I do this? Oh, dear kid. And I say "kid" – Daoud, Miranda, Renfeng? – because if you're still asking that question, it means you can't remember what the world was before the Maggots. The old guard, Boris and Diallo and me, wouldn't ask it. Samira would never forgive me for it, rest her soul, but still, she'd understand. I know it's hard to believe, but our losses are so much fewer than the deaths we'd see, year by year, in the old world. Ten people acid-burned to death by cackling slug-monsters simply strike a much bigger chord than a thousand people dying in car crashes or of too many hamburgers.
Look, human beings are what they are. Of course I considered using my resources to make a better sort, some Humans 2.0 that would be stronger in body and spirit, smarter, kinder, more cool-headed, more compassionate. First, that's not easy in the slightest. Compassion is a lot harder to encode into genes than bone spurs. But even if I made it, then what? My little X-men would not replace old Homo sapiens without, well, let's be delicate and say: losing their moral upper ground. I'd have had to kill off most of humankind, or forcibly implant most women on Earth with my creations. I'm sure it will come as a relief to hear that I couldn't bear that. Would I, now? Perhaps I'd be able to stomach it now, but no, it would still be worse than what I actually did, it would still mean more death, more suffering.
So I decided to work with the grain of humankind rather than against it. And the thing is, look, we can do some amazing things. There's potential for real grandeur in us, and sometimes, almost by accident, a little spark of it comes out. It happens mostly when we're up against a common enemy.
A literal enemy, not a metaphorical one. Even global warming or the scarlet pox were not enough. Too abstract, too diffuse, too uneven in their effects. Some people would be hurt more than others, some would even profit; not like the Maggots, who give nightmares to every person on Earth. Too impersonal; humans just don't have much fight in them, without anger and spite to prod them on. You can't really hate bacteria or cholesterol, we're not built for it. In olden times we'd blame demons and witchcraft, but since demons and witchcraft aren't real, in practice we'd take it out on some poor bastard who happened to be there.
Far too many people have this notion that the universe owes them paradise, and that if we just get rid of Those Assholes ruining it for everyone else, then everything will be fine forever. Well, I had to remind these people that the universe is mostly a goddamn horrifying place, and that sticking with our fellow humans is our only hope. Or at least, at least! make sure that Those Assholes who've got to die are not some of us, just for once.
We've all seen fucked up things. Whoever you are, I've heard you sob under the shower or wail in your sleep or give up your dinner into a toilet. But don't tell me it never felt good to go into battle against literal monsters, with the full might of humanity standing united behind you, with priests of all faiths blessing your weapons, being called a hero in all the languages of Earth. A chance to vent all of humanity's basest impulses, channeling them for good, for something great. You, kids of the Board, are truly the best generation this species has ever seen; whatever comes up, you can stand on that.
What do you know about the scarlet pox? Who cares about it anymore? And yet, it killed more people in six years than the Maggot War in all its length. Hell, the Bengali floods killed more people in two months. They're historical foot-notes, now. You see what I mean? Would you trade the Maggots, an end to the whole goddamn thing forever, for one more Bengali flood? You shouldn't. It'd be a very bad trade. And guess what? There haven't been any synthetic plagues or deadly megafloods for decades now. Putting humankind on a war footing made that possible. We made it possible. Without the Security Board, you'd go back to that.
Objectively, the casualties just aren't that high. A few hundreds public murders per day, a city-scale disaster once every couple years. That's much less damage than humans used to wreak, let alone dear Mother Earth. As long as we stay under the million casualties per year, then it's a net win, and a big one. It's just that a couple people torn to ribbons kicking and screaming on live TV is more exciting than ten thousand quietly choking on phlegm in their beds. Do the latter not count as much? I'm not even sure they suffer less.
I can't quite tell how you'll react. Maybe you're screaming, crying, cursing, throwing up, breaking my stuff, damning me to Hell – too late, ha! (Feel free to throw around a couple things. Just not the glass dolphin, please. It was the last one made in Murano before we torched the island. A gift from the survivors.) What I'm sure of is that you're wishing I hadn't told you anything.
You're not going to blow the whistle. This is not an order; it's a statement of fact. Don't expect me to believe, even for one second, that you value "honesty" over the safety of humankind. You know well that our conduct in Seattle or Montevideo wasn't quite our proudest moment. And yet, whoever you are, you said nothing to people at large. Because you know full well that making some things public is not in the best interest of the war effort. The only evidence that the victims of the Montevideo outbreak ever even existed is here in my desk (second drawer on the right, key's in the sempervivum pot), and they will stay there.
So, why did I tell you anything? Huh. Maybe I do still place some tiny smidgen of value in truth, after all, after this, and I don't want it to be lost forever. Maybe I just want some company here in Hell. Maybe, someday, you will actually need this information to lead us to victory. You're wishing I hadn't told you anything. But I bet you're not wishing that I hadn't done anything.
"Primo humanitas", Your old friend, Omar Anderson
