Bathroom Monologue: The Infection World

It was the infection that changed the world. Everything was dead for the longest time – no one realized this, because they were all busy being dead. They drifted around stars, and bubbled in seas, and the majority of everyone blinked in and out of existence on idiotic quantum whimsy.

Then something went wrong. The wrong parties rubbed against each other, stray chemicals colluded, and before anyone could vote on the matter, life swam under the sun and clouds. This nightmare immediately began devouring the dead – drinking other chemicals until it reproduced to be fat enough to swallow them. It ate the dead, and when it reached a pathetically small number, it ate itself. They climbed from the water and weren’t even dry before they began killing each other wholesale, and they ate other living things, and they ate dead things they’d killed, and those things that had always been dead became unfashionable, and were thus kicked, tread upon, shat upon, scooped up, shoveled, piled, constructed, burned and exhausted.

In the blink of a cosmic eye, life climbed onto other planets. From shore to shore, from star to star, and there was nothing the dead could do about it. They were muted and petrified while life animated and analyzed. Life immortal? Life in other universes? What mechanics would pry apart the fabric of space, render time’s tail vulnerable to tug upon, and allow them access to everything else.

The dead could do nothing but lie there. They were inert, which meant they were helpless to the colonialism of this monstrosity. If only they could do something to stop life. If only something lurked on the other side of rainbows and invisible spectrums that could undo life. And so the dead did one thing: they prayed, after their fashion, to whatever was beyond the gaps, or whatever wasn’t. Perhaps whatever wasn’t was the answer. They couldn’t know. They were dead.