We Are the Ants(56)

Within a year, people hardly have a reason to leave their houses. Mind’s Eye devices allow them to visit their friends, work, and relax from the comfort of their couches. Crime falls to its lowest levels in recorded history, while airline corporations and automobile industries across the globe collapse. People no longer need to travel to see the world.

On 29 January 2016 the South Korean government passes a law giving incentives to citizens who use Mind’s Eye for a minimum of sixteen hours daily. The program reduces pollution and conserves natural resources. South Korea becomes the model for the rest of the world. The first Mind’s Eye is introduced that can be used continuously, and it is quickly adopted.

Other nations rush to pass mandatory Mind’s Eye legislation, and in a matter of months every person on Earth is living in a fantasy world.





30 November 2015


I sat alone and watched the stars and dreamed of Diego. I saw the world from the stars’ point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely. It took so long for starlight to reach me in the sluggers’ ship orbiting Earth that some of those stars were already dead. When their light set out, we were younger, not even born. Our parent’s parents weren’t born. Humanity was still waiting to crawl out of the ocean and evolve. It was beautiful to think that starlight persisted even after the star itself had died, until I realized that humanity would vanish from the planet, the planet would disappear from the cosmos, and no one would remember we existed. No one would care.

Jesse was my star. He was gone—buried and rotting and cold—but he lingered. He sat with me in the transparent bubble of the slugger ship as I dreamed of Diego and watched the clusters of stars, other galaxies filled with other people like me and not, staring back, touching their lips and wondering if anyone would remember them. Spoiler alert: they won’t.

I blinked. I was in Diego’s bedroom, waiting for him to return with sodas; I blinked, and I was on the slugger ship. No sluggers greeted me; none poked at me or prodded my body with their strange alien instruments. The holographic Earth and the button were missing as well. I think I would have pressed it. I screamed for those slug-headed bastards to send me back, but they didn’t. When my voice was raw, I walked into the darkness and arrived in the star room, where I remained.

I wonder what preventing the destruction of Earth means to the sluggers. In all of the universe, are we unique? Is there something humans possess that makes us worth saving? Maybe out of all the billions of planets, music is unique to Earth. Or books. The sluggers have fallen in love with Kerouac and Keats and Woolf and Shakespeare, and hope I’ll press the button to preserve our literature for other alien races to explore. Then again, maybe we really are the ants. If I don’t press that button, the sluggers will simply collect a couple of breeding pairs and restart the human experiment on another planet.

It seems unfair that an entire civilization could vanish from the universe and leave no trace behind, while Jesse lingers on. It isn’t fair that he burned out, but his light remains to remind me of everything we had and would never have again.

But that’s the difference between people and stars. A star’s light still shines even if there’s no one to see it, but without someone to remember Jesse, his light will disappear.

Maybe I would have pressed the button when the sluggers abducted me from Diego’s house if they’d given me the chance. Maybe it was better that they’d taken me before things with Diego went too far. Maybe we were better off just being friends.

It doesn’t matter. Maybes won’t save the world.

? ? ?

The one thing I never thought to hope for was to not be awakened by a sandy kick to the ribs from a homeless man with curled, yellow toenails because aliens from outer space had dumped me in the middle of nowhere mostly naked again. I’d prayed to God for money and for my parents not to get a divorce, I’d begged Santa for a new computer, I’d even offered the devil my soul in exchange for a passing grade on my Beowulf exam, but I’d never thought to hope for something useful. Not until after the fact, anyway.

“Kid, you okay?” I peeked through my crusty eyes as a fungal zoo of a toe prodded my arm, and a grizzled, bearded face framed by ashy predawn light leaned over me. He reeked of piss and seaweed.

My mouth felt like I’d gargled used urinal cakes, and my cracked lips stung.

“Kid?” The man dipped nearer. His foul breath jolted me awake as surely as if I’d been electrocuted by sluggers.

“Where am I?” I asked instinctively, though the familiar sand dunes and sea oats were a dead giveaway. A cool breeze blew off the water, misting me with salt. Though it could have been any beach on any part of the planet, I knew it wasn’t. It smelled like home.

The old man cackled and coughed and hacked up a glob of phlegm that he spit into the sand too near my feet for comfort. “Must’ve been some party.”

“What time is it?” I asked. The sun was still little more than a vague promise in the eastern sky. “God, what day is it?”

“Bit young to be living so rough,” the bum said, and I wanted to laugh at the irony of being told off by a man who clearly hadn’t showered since Clinton was president.

“Just . . . what day is it?”

“Monday. I think.” He scratched his beard and tapped at the sky, mumbling about dates, trying to recall where he’d been yesterday. “Definitely Monday. Maybe.”