Making Lemonade

Chapter 1

(More likely than not, is going to be also the last chapter in this story. Not only the first.

That's the plan, at least.

To be honest, I have failed some now and them. In that sort of plan. That's why this is a plan, instead of a promise)

This is the tale about when the worse thing that could possibly happen to our main character happened. About how that turned into the best thing that could possibly have happened to our hero. Did it really? This question ends our journey, today. By the way. Our leading character and hero is humanity.

There is a prologue, as old as history of war. About the distasteful events when we learned to poison small rivers and other sources of fresh water with corpses. On purpose. That’s the pre-history of biowarfare. For the benefit of my stomach and yours allow me to jump to 2047. October first, specifically. That’s what we know as “Day 1”.

Historians may debate forever if the virus was liberated on purpose. If it escaped from a lab by accident. The virus was a bioweapon, there is no argument to raise doubt about that fact.

A vaccine existed. Also, a cure. Good for the early stages in 100%, and more than 70% effective after that.

Everything was under control of someone. Until both the vaccine and the cure failed.

Surprisingly, because no mathematic model has suggested that could happen.

About 19 months after Day 1. That happened. Then, no one was able to predict anything, anymore.

Whatever technical name the virus had it was dropped in favour of the more marketable “Zombi Virus”. Since it had been a cherished trope in fiction for a long time. And what we had in our faces looked a lot like the movies.

The infected became irrational and violent.

Immune to pain. Stronger, faster, tireless, beyond human limits. Hungry. Cannibalistic, by strong preference, but not above attack any land animal they could catch. They devoured those preys with their bare hands, and teeth. And those teeth would now grow again if lost, what was a significant improvement on the original design of humans.

Still, not one good enough for most of us overlook the negative aspects that accompanied the condition.

Chance of contact by air was small, but it existed. Contact with any body fluids transmit the disease always. Water supplies could be contaminated.

Looked just like the movies, at first glance.

For surprise of no one those people who used to say they would “love to see Zombie Apocalipse” where no where to be found. No one ever had said that! Go figure.

The authorities of all countries reacted faster and more rationally than those of fiction.

Fiction helped, I presume. The real people behind every decision had imagined what they would do in a situation like that many times before. Evident mistakes and farfetched tropes had been separated by distillation from those few smart ideas that could work, in imagination. And in some cases that imagination was educated by basic understanding about how actual biology usually works. The exercise of fantasy do not solve all problems, but it is one step better than being confronted by something that you never even considered in a (bad) dream.

The spread was contained, lost urban areas surrounded and for research.

We lost 12% of global population, dead. Violent, gruesome, deaths. Still, not all that bad as far as “Apocalypses” go. Those infected but contained had hope of treatment.

More properly, we had that hope for them. They only seemed to hope for a way to jump on defenceless humans and eat us. Or, that being impossible, to devour any other animal. Just not fish, curiously.

Treatment worked, unfortunately it affected the capacity to grow new teeth. Well, one cannot have everything.

Them, 19 months later, came the bad news. The apparent cure stopped working. The vaccine we had developed after it also didn’t worked anymore. They failed about in the same time.

Making matters worse, the virus was now mutating in unfamiliar way.

Some infected from that moment on grew larger and stronger. We started finding cases of zombies with powerfully corrosive saliva, able to consume metal tool and eat through steel doors. Processing the metals, gradually integrating them into their systems. What resulted in larger and stronger zombies, blessed with bones as strong as steel and muscles capable to put to shame most hydraulic presses.

War tanks on two feet, heavier, faster and stronger than any animal with similar mass could ever be. Playing by the rules of biology we had taken for granted until that moment in History.

The average zombie was not like that. Albeit, all of them were changing into something stronger, faster. More efficient in absorb and process oxygen.

Some developed sonars, night vision, faster legs. Some got hollow bones and membranes that allowed them to slide through the wings like ugly flying squirrels.

All of them continued hungry, all the time. All of them craved still for human flesh above all else.

Unpredictable, deadly. The plague spread.

Most organic mass on the planet, except aquatic life, ended consumed.

By luck and by destiny a few immune individuals managed to find each other, in that chaos. Despite all odds against them. They build isolated communities.

Thousands of them around the globe.

For 600 years a few of those communities persevered.

Generations of people immune to the virus. Living most the time underground, hiding, taking as little risk as possible. Groups of a few couple thousands each. Each community unsure if they were the last normal humans alive.

The zombies turned against each other, when they could no longer find human flesh, and even other kinds of flesh became unavailable

Mindless beasts. Killing with their own hands. Eating each other, fighting, fucking, breeding, hunting and eating each other a little more. Starving, deadly predators since birth. Mothers devouring their own babies when those didn’t show the sense to escape fast enough after take the first breath.

They do not age. Each one accumulates mutations over time. Passing them to any descendants who happen to survive birth, and mother’s hungry.

By blind luck, or perhaps destiny, some zombies infected in Day 1 were still alive 600 years later.

Those where the strongest zombies on Earth, since the mutations have a consistent inclination to improve the organism in one direction or another. Accumulating useful characteristics over time. As if the bioweapon had a mind of its own and the purpose of sharp its cutting edges into more efficient versions of itself.

One of those elder zombies developed conscience. Human memories came back gradually, language helped organize the mess of centuries of bestial memories.

Gradually, painfully, the hungry was tamed.

Others followed, as if an alarm bell had started.

Around 30 years later, after the first five awaken find each other, this process started for me.

We build a new specie, the titans.

You can say we are a branch of humanity if you choose. Or you can place us in a different category entirely. There is much debate about which alternative is better. Which one makes more sense.

I walked by many details of this story. How some few other animals got infected as well, dogs particularly often. How we managed to rebuild farms, get cows, pigs, goats to multiply and spread through the continents. Rabbits, chickens. I am not mentioning many other details. Some are obvious and you can deduce by yourselves.

Nowadays, we are the best dreams of humanity. Manifested in flesh.

We are ageless. The weaker among us is over six times stronger than the stronger human. Like the super-heroes from comic books draw before Day 1. Each one of us has supper-powers most others do not have.

Our society has rescued science and technology from where the past humanity had dropped them. To advance it again, and rebuild infra-structures of energy and logistic in global scale and beyond.

Now, 200 years after that first circle of five. We have cities on Mars and on the Moon. Orbital Space Stations with larger populations than most nations on the surface of Earth.

Humanity is protected.

Some islands are now reserved for humans, the descendants of those first who where immune to the zombi virus. Largest of them being the British Islands.

The inhabitants of those islands are too fragile to share our cities with us. We have laws, forbidding us to enter their reserves, most of the time. Only agents trained to interact with humans can do that, and act as our representatives. In diplomatic fashion.

We still feel the crave for human flesh. You may never have realized that, but the moment you smell a human for the first time, you will. The crave is tolerable, however. Given determination, proper training and self-discipline.

Is not just to avoid accidents that we don’t allow humans outside their designated lands.

My first son born after my awakening reaches 6 years tomorrow.

I must carry the memories of 600 years as a bestial monster, forever. Until the moment when I die. What can be millions or even billions of years from now. My son, however, he and his generation, they will only know in person the world we have build for them. In the recent 200 years.

Their descendants will be born titans. Without the burden of the memories of those gore, disgusting, steps that tool us that far.

Generations born in the future will be the masters of power we can only dream about, today. Explorers of this Universe, beyond the galaxies we can identify and name.

All that made possible thanks to a bioweapon. A zombi apocalypse. Centuries of monstrous cannibalism.

So, that is the most perfect realization of human dreams and aspirations. Our society.

Is that so, really?

Or are we only fooling ourselves with that narrative of “human reserves” in islands. For the sake of protecting humans.

Protect humans, really?

Some say we are just in the early steps of a large project. To grow human population, and spread humanity everywhere. Multiply them until there is half a dozen of them for each one of us. So, they can be our most prized livestock. Existing as talking cattle.

Those who say that accuse our politic of hypocrisy.

There are those who insist that there is only one solution, morally acceptable. Only one way to shield humanity against that dark fate waiting for them a handful of generations from now.

If we don’t want them to end up as food supply for us, we must extinguish the entire human species.

Kill all humans, right now.

You are expected to think by yourselves. Not to accept easy answers.

That is the end of our conversation, today.

Then I ask you, one last time.

Are we really the definitive realization of the highest hopes and ideals of humanity?

True be told, I am not sure about that myself.