The Dawn of Post Humans (A Short Story) Part I

The medical leaflet says:

Zeronon: Humanoid painkiller, containing AXZ agent and Pendatholyne ² and…eh…other components, of course, which I no longer remember. I didn’t read the leaflet. I only remember a chemist reading it aloud to a casual customer. Snippets of information must have slipped unconsciously to my mind, but now I am trying to wrench them free to comprehend my current situation, involving the zeronon medicine along with the creature digesting it.

“Tell me, what must be enhanced?” The creature asked me again.

A short look at Kaabuus the mighty digester (this is his name) can lead to untrue conclusions. As in his gigantic mass of rippling flab, human bodies’ parts bob up and down, coursing their way through a viscous ocean of flesh and fat. The mighty digester might appear as if eating humans. Yet, he is simply reverse-digesting the Zeronon medicine.

At the cellular level, Zeronon painkiller is no more than a condensed mass of human cells in small tablets with doubtful results as to soothing any humanoid pain. The AXZ agent and Pendatholyne ² were added to the leaflet as a deceitful advertisement when the product continued to collect dust in every galactic pharmacy daring to sell it.

To what extent human fate was doomed by the progress of universal pharmaceutical industry is not a farfetched question as the remaining samples of human race were ruled out from the catalogue of endangered species and poached to extinction—the last human contributed unwillingly to the launch of the first and last prototype of the Zeronon drug.

In a world were medical breakthroughs are the norms, it isn’t uncommon to use any material for the sake of progress. Sacrifices were made and perhaps will continue for a long time.

Yet, a post-human life is not impossible. I am myself a prototype, ninety nine percent close to what humans used to look like. For the others-I mean the other prototypes-they are still being manufactured within the mighty digester.Thus, a new fate awaits them.

“What must be enhanced?” he asked again.

The tone is firmer than before but no words form on my lips. Keep stalling, I tell myself. Beneath my tongue I struggle to gather an answer scattered like a defeated battalion. My naked eyes are watching a situation lying beyond the descriptive lexemes of all human languages—a situation gaining a weight impossible to magick away.

It took Kaabuus, The mighty digester, what it took him to absorb humanity, to plan radical changes at the DNA level, to plan a miscarriage, a delivery, or a vomit out of his flab of a progeny of whom he doesn’t want to be the sole parent. Kaabuus wants an accomplice and it just happened to be me.

END OF PART I