ficlets100 - number seven.
001. Guilt
002. New
003.Solitude
004. Content
005. Tale
006. Distort
007. Luxury
008. Listen
009. Party
010. Scent
011. Storm
012. Lessons
013.Apology
014. Relief
015. Breeze
016.Fading
017. Passion
018. Stay
019.Rain
020. Within
021.Dread
022.Revenge
023.Time
024.Perfect
025.Eyes
026.Bloom
027.Beginning
028. Bath
029. Object
030. Lost
031.Pride
032. Death
033 ( Read more... )
The humans were devising something. Well, they were always devising something, being the ambitious little beasts (not-beasts) that they were, but this was different.
Humans didn’t change. They adapted, they advanced, but they didn’t change.
They didn’t leave Earth behind for long, either.
Maybe his first clue was when they began to call Earth ‘Terra,’ when they spoke of history less and less and simply emphasized how wonderful of a planet it was. He’d lurked outside out an open-window school (at least they still had that- someone with red hair would be proud) before, mostly out of boredom - it was hilarious, that the humans were trying to restrain themselves to a single area, although it wasn’t as funny when Viral realized he was as close to an animal as these people would see, outside of the zoo - and heard stories of how perfect of a world Terra was; he’d sat back and thought on the twisting desert, the raging tundra, the blood and bones and skeletons buried everywhere, the fallout and the death, and wondered if Earth was going to be so great, why weren’t they going back?
They would go back. Because they were human, and no human left Earth for long. Being the third, fourth, fifth, tenth generations away from Earth didn’t matter.
Maybe his second clue came when they’d stopped having children the ‘natural’ way. The planet they’d taken root on - Ataraisa, Tartasia, wouldn’t Yao find that amusing, something like that - had become fully mechanicalized by then, and so Viral was stuck to keeping in alleyways, meshing in with the rest of the - very few - homeless. Those homeless disappeared gradually, too, although he personally never cared enough to find out what happened to them. Maybe that had been a mistake.
But what wasn’t a mistake was noticing that families no longer resembled each other- pregnant women disappeared- and “Love is our power, it makes the world go round!” was sung in his ear, and he twisted where he stood, jagged claws and dirty fur bristled, knocked a trashcan over - and no one was there.
Perhaps he should have started paying more attention, then.
He paid one ear to the screens projected around the city, had to think on why what the man talking on them didn’t sound quite right- realized the language had changed during the time he hadn’t been paying attention, had to think for a while before understanding it again.
That didn’t mean he would give more than half of his mind to conversations.
He was bored, always so bored, and the outlaying mountains were only interesting for a decade - everything past that was clouds, though whether the world really ended or if they were put there by the people (by the government), he didn’t know. And so he wandered, and he wandered, and he became a legend again, caught whispers of that monster with the golden eyes, and so he finally decided to listen with both ears. And at first, he thought he heard “maternity check,” but that turned into “maturity check,” and he wandered back into the heart of the city on a cold, bright night, wrapped entirely in some snatched bedsheets. It was an odd look, when they had those ‘heated jackets,’ but it wasn’t odd enough for people to give him too many looks- even the more interested ones tended to turn away when they got close enough to smell him. Which was fine. He prowled, he lurked, he skulked (he counted the number of synonyms for that he could come up with and in how many different languages), he-
Ran head-long into a runt.
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They would always be stupid, naked monkeys. That wouldn’t ever change.
“Who are you?”
He paused, thought about answering, thought about even hearing what the weak boy was asking. But he did hear, pondered on that ‘who’ and not the ‘what,’ and he answered, “Viral.” Didn’t care enough to ask what the other’s name was - took another look at those wide red eyes (when had humans gotten that color?), bared his teeth in what he dully remembered was a ‘smile,’ turned and left. It was that easy to turn from the people who’d left their own home planet behind.
He wondered when he had begun to think of Earth as Terra, but it was a short train of thought. There just wasn’t a point in listening, in thinking - not when nothing would change.
But all of those clues had to lead up to something.
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