Beyond the plague-damned world…
(1) He awakes. Something is knocking at the sky, trying to get in.
She lies beside him. She hears nothing other than his breath, his heartbeat, the warm pulse of blood in his veins. He rises with a curious sense of unease.
An endless golden day. He paces barefoot from the shade, across warm sand to the water’s edge where ripples dash themselves across clusters of weed populated by small maroon crabs. They rotate sensory dishes to observe him, before scuttling into the safety of moist weed cavities. The world has no end.
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(2) Dormant for a billion years, a random particle-drift infiltrates the air-scrubbers. Circulates on breathe-in breathe-out cycles. To eventually be inhaled. Lured on throbbing body-rhythms to the warm nutrient flow of seminal fluid, to bask in its potassium-rich testicular organic-bath, revived in spontaneous cellular division to multiplication and growth. A black slug-worm. Then two.
In order to proliferate it acts upon its host, increasing sexual desire that will result in ejaculation into further hosts. Swarming within its tight scrotal incubator in its millions. On the return flip there is love… and a lover. Two carriers. On Earth there is love, and there are more lovers. In the madness of an induced global orgy the Scrotum-Worm spreads around the world before its presence is even identified. Because humans are always driven by the reproductive imperative. Then the worm begins to modify its host’s spermatozoa to better serve its needs. Evolving from parasite to symbiote. Into a fused devouring hybrid intelligence, with each grotesquely deformed gonad slapping soft and wet, squirming, coiling and slithering with a million black worms.
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(3) The sterile orbital habitat alone survives uncontaminated. It is sealed and isolated as a human last-chance refuge. With artificially inseminated uncorrupted embryos reared free of all social contact.
He awakes. Something is knocking at the sky, trying to get in…
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
‘VOICES FROM THE FIRE:
DUMPSTER FIRE PRESS’