Beyond Redemption

The war in Ukraine has confirmed my belief that as members of the human race we will never be able to suppress our brutish tendencies and that civilization is merely a veneer that hides our true nature.
 

About a year ago I wrote a 30-page story entitled Vermin Control, in which The Creative Force decides to exterminate all of humanity by making them smaller and smaller until they are shrunk out of existence. Henry, the protagonist, meets the Creative Force, which reveals itself to him in the guise of Gudd and Sutton. He pleads with them to stop the process but fails to dissuade them.

In this extract they give their reasons for deciding to wipe our verminous species off the face of the earth.

“Instead of learning how to resolve conflict through peaceful means, humans concentrated on using science and technology to invent increasingly lethal military hardware. When the Second World War broke out it became clear to Gudd and I that the human brain was now hard wired to choose force above negotiation and compromise when in dispute with those perceived as the enemy. When you used science to invent and produce the Atom bomb as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction we were forced to acknowledge that the species was set on a course leading to self-annihilation.”

“But after the horrors of the two wars we did try to reform,” Henry said without conviction. “Surely the establishment of the United Nations Organisation was a step in the right direction?”

“You know how ineffectual that enterprise has been. Since its establishment that organisation has been helpless in preventing the Cold War, the Arms Race, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as a long list of other deadly conflicts around the world that includes several genocides.”

“I think that’s enough about their predisposition to pick a quarrel and resort to violence. Cut to 1980.”

“Right. I know you can’t wait to hit him with 2020, Gudd.” Sutton swirled the ice in his glass and took another drink. “By 1980 the nations of the world were as far from being united as when the UN got going after the Second World War. Not only that; we were dismayed to see that utopian socialist ideas were being abandoned as a ruthless form of Capitalism took hold in the West and was spreading fast. It was clear to us that the Communist countries would soon succumb to the materialism and selfish individualism of the Western economic system. And all the while you were making great strides in Science towards the development of ever more lethal ways of killing one another.  We could not but conclude that as a species you were well on the way to a final conflagration terminating in your own demise. That’s why we decided to pull the plug and leave you to it.”

“I can’t honestly disagree with you and put up a defence. But what caused you to change your minds when you revisited us 40 years later? Why can’t you leave us alone to die out as a failed evolutionary experiment?”

Henry was looking at Gudd, who appeared more than willing to put this representative of Homo sapiens in the picture.

“When we left in 1980 it was with a sense of disappointment and betrayal that felt something like humiliation. On our return we were shocked at the degradation that has taken place over four decades. Disappointment turned to loathing and then rage.”

“Rage? I thought you said you had given up on us? Were you secretly hoping we might have been mending our ways?”

“Not at all. We knew you were incapable of intellectual and moral improvement, and even though you were further down the road of mental and spiritual decline, we weren’t all that surprised. What shocked us was what you were doing to the planet. We had hoped to find that war and disease had already begun to reduce your numbers. Instead, the population had proliferated from four and a half billion to nearly eight billion, and that was in spite of the almost certain probability the new additions would be born into miserable squalor. It was as if you had never heard of birth control. You had chosen to disregard the increasing burden being placed on a finite planet already struggling to sustain your insatiable needs. You continued to grow out of control like a metastasizing cancer.”

“A metastasizing cancer?” said Henry. “That’s an appropriate metaphor. I suppose what you are saying is that a cancer will continue to grow until it has killed its host?”

“That is how we see it, Henry. To save the host we are going to have to zap the cancer.”

The full story, which is set in Pearly Beach, is available as a Word document for free on request.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.