Amerika

Across the city, strange but inconsequential things were happening.

Next to a downtown park Marlon Daniels, 42, scratched his neck idly and noticed that his body felt thirst. As he walked past the water main at this job, it occurred to him to turn the wheel, unleashing thousands of gallons a second of water into the sewers. Then he felt a stirring in his bowels and wandered off.

On the freeway Chris McNally, 23, suddenly found himself really hating his job. It started with a feeling of emptiness, then anger, and the two morphed into resentment. He looked at the back of the truck he was driving and, caught in a fit of pique, pulled over and dumped the entire load of thirty tons of sugar directly into the city waterway.

In one of the tall skyscrapers Dana Adams, 31, felt a sudden spasm in her midsection. Quickly logging out of her workstation, she casually slid out the security door and walked quickly down the hall to the bathroom. One stall remained open and she was quickly inside, feeling her bowels unleash the contents of several days worth of grilled chicken salads.

By themselves, these events meant nothing; taken together, they formed a pattern which awaited merely an event to connect its parts into a whole greater than their sum.

The sewers of the city came alive that night. A faint green glow, a more intense smell of decay, and quadrillions of bacteria linked up through pheremones, proteins, and electromagnetic symbols. It was not a conference, more of a mind emerging from the sludge.

This mind recognized the brutal truth: humanity was ruled by bacteria which manipulated its emotions by release of vitamins, hormones, and neurochemicals in the gut. The bacterial mind could command anyone by alternating emotional and bodily stimuluses, provoking reactions from the primitive human monkeys.

To bring itself to full power it had commanded water and sugar to meet with the bowel movements of millions in the vast sewer system, creating a computer in which each transistors was a microbe. The result was thousands of times more powerful than even the most functional human-designed AI machines.

That night, the bacterial mind decided that it was time to bring the humans under full-time control so that it could use them as a constant source of nutrients. Energy, food, and power would flow to the bacterial mind like brown water rushed through the concrete tunnels in the bowels of the city.

***

In the outer suburbs — place of desolation and absent home — Darryl Harris was putting the finishing touches on a blunt he was rolling from old candela leaves and a mixture of ditch weed and some crondo his buddy Jake grew on the flat part of the roof above the dormer of his bedroom window where he could keep a big plastic bucket out of sight to anyone but helicopters.

Darryl described himself as an apathist. That is, he saw nothing holy about life at all; it was a series of sensations that could be somewhat regulated but would never really change. School was boring, jobs were boring, and shopping was boring, so he minimized those and spent most of his time smoking weed and playing video games.

An apathist, he reasoned, had accepted that apathy was the nature of life, or at least that the basics of life would not change. He cared about a few things, like rolling this blunt to perfect, because it was part of the 25% of his life experiences that he could alter, so apathy was not called for here.

His day job at the recycling center? He phoned it in, or rather, spent most of the day on his phone. No point filling his head with whatever ugliness his bosses cared about unless they made very specific demands and made it clear that rewards or punishments would follow.

As a result, Darryl had learned to reject most bodily sensations. Rage, hunger, lust, loneliness, and sadness had first bedeviled him but now were unknown to him; he controlled his experience, and so he buried them under layers of apathy, even to his own comfort. If he could not change it, he was not interested.

With his blunt completed, sealed with a fine layer of agave and molasses, he blew down its length. A strange compulsion to go outside and mingle with others flitted through his mind but his filter, rigid like a light switch, recognized it as not his will and therefore flicked it away.

***

“Spontaneous outbreaks of peace and goodwill interrupted the human world today,” said the CNN anchor, digging deep in his distant liberal arts education for the right mixture of bittersweet symbols and paradoxical contrasts, “juxtaposed with confusion as humanity realized that singularity or enlightenment of our biology has come to pass.”

The camera panned as his voice-over droned on, showing people dancing in the streets, cooking food and giving it freely to each other, and mingling in happy conversation. Rabbis talked to Nazis; the rich held hands with the poor; the strong drank with the weak, and everyone was finally equal and equitably peaceful.

“This stuff is just about biblical,” he said to his co-anchor once the mikes were dead. “Wonder what is going on. Must be some kind of corporate promotion, or maybe solar rays.” But he was wrong on both of those counts. The celebrations continued into the night.

A week later, what had previously constituted “the new” had become obsolete. The conflicts of the world had ceased, replaced by the brotherhood of man. People were getting along with their neighbors. Racial animus was dead and class warfare a thing of the past. About all they could do was report on The Miracle, as it was being called.

Outside of the shared consensual space of human consciousness, something more important was occurring: the people sharing food, drink, and sex were equalizing their gut microbiomes. The bacteria that now loaded their bowels fed a constant stream of oxytocin and dopamine into their brains. This pacified the humans.

Beneath the city, the bacterial hivemind rubbed its hands and chuckled.

***

For an apathist this period of time would have been intensely lonely except for the fact that an apathist rejects all impulses that are not his own. Darryl neither joined the throng nor imbided the microbes that seemed to be spreading through analingus and sodomy as much as dancing, conversing, drinking, eating, and sleeping together.

His mind rejected all of this. He still had to perform the 75% he gave to the herd, going to work, paying bills, giving his parents money for rent on the small apartment above the garage where he lived, and shopping for enough food, beer, weed, and video games to make it through the night.

He also rejected any idea of future. As far as he could tell, he would loop through this process until he died. You work, maybe marry and reproduce and work more to fund it, and then you had time you could make your own, but the rest was just white noise. His life was filled with garbage activity so he turned off his brain except for his unapathetic “me time.”

On his way back from the recycling center, Darryl stepped over a couple in the throes of lovemaking at the base of the stairs that led up the far side of the garage to his door. He fired up his battlestation and joined a game, but found fewer people participating in wanton violence than ever before. Someone began playing “Imagine” on a piano.

At this point, the apathist encountered the first crisis in his life since he had begun discarding sensations and desires in order to survive his fractured home life, tedious schooling, and monotonous employment. For once, he stood out as an apathist and began to feel paranoia. Consequently he made plans for escape.

The transfer to another recycling center on the very edge of town went through smoothly, and he was able to load his possessions into four large boxes and hire an ubertruck to take him there. He left a note for his parents on the kitchen table, but he had not seen them for weeks and saw no evidence of them except a half-dozen wine glasses in the sink.

***

His new home was a rusty trailer. Darryl stayed away from people. Since he had no need for affection, he dodged the hugs. He did not share the food. He shopped late at night, and generally rode his bike everywhere to avoid contact with others. His only social life was online through the borrowed wifi from a nearby tire shop.

Working outside at the recycling center, he almost never encountered other human beings. When he did, they seemed even more alien than usual to him in their pacifistic state. The world had gone mad again and it was of no interest to him; he could not control it.

Passing by the office to clock out for the day, he heard the secretary in the main office say: “I hug people because it makes me feel good, and they feel good too, which makes me feel even better. I have no enemies, only friends, and the future is nothing but love, love, love!”

Darryl felt a cold sensation pass through him before his apathism flicked it away. On his bike ride back to the rusty trailer, he reflected that this woman had encapsulated a greater form of apathism than even he could understand. She did not care for others so much as want to improve her own mental state by feeling good. It was apathism on steroids.

He went online and his game server was empty of others. He screwed around for awhile, but he reflected that for him at least, history had stopped. Nothing was changing; no one was doing anything except getting along with each other and doing their jobs diligently and repetitively.

It was as if humanity had ceased.

This did not bother Darryl in itself; in fact, if he had degrees of happiness, he would be happier because people were so engrossed in their own good feelings and sharing them with others that he could be apathetic unnoticed. The hugging was starting to creep him out however, and he recognized that his apathism did not stop this because he sensed a threat.

When he had been young, silence in his house signified something terrible. Parents fighting, watching loud television, drinking, or yelling at telemarketers meant he was ignored and therefore safe. Silence meant that someone might be thinking of him and getting ready for an Intervention or at the very least, to use him as a scapegoat punching bag.

The same silence hung over this society like curtains of mist.

Darryl reflected that he had few good options. He could not get to someplace rural enough to both earn a living and escape the madness, which seemed to be worldwide. He thought himself uneasy, since he did not really “feel,” because nothing seemed stable, only caught up in a trend that looked more like mind control than actual peace.

The world made a choice for him. The next day he smelled smoke halfway through his bike ride, and coming around the bend saw his rusty little trailer was enclosed in flame. A group of people were standing around watching, while drinking and kissing and fondling each other.

“It just seemed out of place,” said one person. “We had all this extra gasoline, so why not just have a bonfire?” The group surged with laughter, and Darryl turned his bike and headed back to the interstate. He had a cashed paycheck, pocketknife, lighter, Gatorade, and four grams of middling-quality weed.

***

As an apathist, Darryl realized that his comfortable life had come to an end. He had been made an outsider, which meant that his 75% obligatory tedium was going to go up. He considered suicide; he raged; finally, he went to where true outsiders go — Home Depot — and by sheer accident of lazy narrative ran into a professor in aisle thirteen.

Jarl J. Angleton, 37, looked at Darryl carefully. “You aren’t one of them,” he said quietly.

Darryl shrugged. “Never have been. What are they?”

“I’m a professor of microbiology. The human gut biome has been altered in a statistically unnatural way; it makes COVID-19 look like an old growth virus. I have been engineering a virus based on the common cold that will obliterate the new bacteria, but I need a way to spread it around.”

Darryl thought for a few moments. “Food truck,” he said finally. “They can’t stop consuming. They like good feelings. Let’s make some tacos with weed in the sauce and dump in your virus, then give out the food. We can probably just steal enough money to fund it since everyone is blissed out.”

The two bonded quickly because, as Darryl quickly learned, Jarl was an apathist too. His research excited him and he liked playing with his two kids, but otherwise, life was a mechanical process. He had missed out on the lovefest unlike the rest of his family who were zombified into Kraftwerk levels of robotic interaction.

Using a test culture taken from a toilet in the university, he carefully cultivated enough of the virus to produce a few hundred gallons of test solution. Darryl hotwired a Uhaul, went to Costco and stocked up on goodies, then spent the night modifying the vehicle to be a taco truck named El Chupacabra while Jarl made an oily, THC-infused sauce.

“Let’s end this Babel Utopia,” snarled Jarl, and they put the truck into gear.

***

The main challenge they both faced was acting normal. Neither were technically autists, but in revulsion at their oversocialized civilization, had become withdrawn and transactional in their interaction with others. They practiced by watching television and pasting insincere depthless smiles on their faces.

Because people were blissed out, the low prices and happy feelings made them buy up a horseload of tacos every hour. Darryl worked harder than he ever had before, and people thought his recycling center uniform was ironic hipster gear. “Yeah, I know, I love Tool too!” he would say.

The oily sauce, thick beans, and low-grade Costco stew meat ground up in an old woodchipper quickly made people defecate, and soon virus-laden feces was flowing into the sewers. Darryl drove between cities where they used Jarl’s membership at a national gym chain to stop for showers and toss some iron around.

When they hit their tenth city, Darryl had the brainstorm to go to the international airport there and park out front. The blissed-out mental moths did not challenge them because people were happy buying tacos. Eventually these got on planes and carried the virus to other corners of the world.

Soon darkness came back into the human experience and surprisingly, people found they missed it. The wars and debates gave them a sense of history again, and many of them resolved to do better now that they had seen that Utopia was in fact like being drugged, insane, and stupid at the same time.

As far as Darryl and Jarl, they both realized they missed sharing activities with other human beings, even if they could not handle anyone but themselves and Jake, who had gone back to growing weed on the roof. On the wings of death, normalcy returned to a world that had made itself apathetic with joy.

Tags: apathism, fiction, microbiome