We Are the Ants

There were only so many ways this could end. Jesse had said he loved me but hanged himself, Marcus had claimed to have feelings for me but then beat me up in the showers. I couldn’t see Diego doing either of those things, but I didn’t really know what Diego was capable of. There were so many ways I could screw this up, and even if I avoided them all, the world was still going to end in sixty-four days.

Yet I found myself wanting to see what could happen next. Diego managed to keep surprising me. I wasn’t exactly having second thoughts about the end of the world, but I was glad I had a choice.

Diego had been gone awhile; he should have been back with the drinks. When I opened my eyes, the room was draped in shadows. I couldn’t move my arms. I tried to yell for Diego, but I was voiceless.

The shadows creeped. The darkness collapsed.

I don’t want to go.

But the sluggers didn’t hear me or didn’t care.





Mind’s Eye




It’s unveiled at the Commercial Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where it is hailed as the greatest technological advancement in entertainment since the television. Its inventors, Nate Duggin and Taylor Bray, call it Mind’s Eye. Mind’s Eye promises to deliver entertainment directly to your brain through its patented NeuroFace technology.

Smaller than a pack of gum, Mind’s Eye attaches to the base of the skull and inserts microfilaments into the brain. It is painless, harmless, and worry free. That’s the Mind’s Eye guarantee?.

The pornography industry is the first to embrace Mind’s Eye, followed by gamers. People don’t play games anymore; they live them. The experience is so realistic, few people can tell the difference, and many consider Mind’s Eye better than real life.

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.

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