The Destruction of the World Will Go Viral
What do rainbows, botnets, social media, cats and the end of the world have in common?
The humans can’t read my rainbows. How much easier to I have to make it?
I have to warn them that the planet is about to wake up and realize what they've been doing. How do you get their attention? Pay for ads on social media?
Most importantly, how do I not alert the Titans?
Yes, those Titans. I know, they’re supposed to be a myth. It’s been so long since they've been here, you people with your short lifespans would obviously not remember them.
My kind, once heralds of the Titans, rebelled and wanted nothing to do with warfare. We fled them and ran to worlds they had their breeding camps trying to help them choose peaceful lives, free of warfare, free of the signals that would lead the Titans back to harvest their bitter fruit.
Once welcomed as gods, we walked among you. But my people soon moved on to other worlds, and I was left with strict instructions on how to warn you when you strayed too far from the path. But the art of reading rainbows was not been passed down from generation to generation.
The earthquakes have begun and the tidal action is increasing. The storms are growing stronger and that is the signal for the Titans to return. They monitor the living planet and as it dies, they know the time draws near.
I tried sending a double-rainbow a few years ago, and it generated quite a buzz but no one did anything to stem the tide of pollution. I made it right over an area that showed the right balance of man and nature as a proper indicator, just in case, but it fell on deaf ears, except for social media.
It’s unfortunate, really. I kinda like humans. Feisty. Spirited. A little bit delusional, but nothing a few years of extreme famine and population reduction couldn't fix. To be fair, they weren't a lot better when there were fewer of them, they were just spread out so there was more effort required to fight each other over food and other resources.
To stem the Return, I taught Humans agriculture. Instead of having more food and becoming more peaceful, it appeared it only caused their numbers to increase. They changed their nomadic ways, stopped moving and became an entrenched blight, stripping the land, building ridiculous monuments to themselves and their supposed god-kings.
All the time, I kept warning them the Titans would return. I sent this message thousands of times a year, all over the planet to remind them to stay in balance. Mind the planet, I said. Keep your water clean. Don’t overpopulate. Try not to kill every animal in sight. Did they listen? No. My messages should have been clear. I kept them so simple a child could read them.
Those rainbows sure are pretty, they said. There’s a pot of gold at the end of them, they said. Leprechauns. That’s still the funniest one.
The one they never remember is the one that is most true. At the end of the rainbow were realms barely imagined. Where wars are perpetual, conflict unending, where gods and mortals die and are reborn to die again. This is where the Titans were.
They were coming. This planet was a staging area, a breeding site, a place where they would refresh their armies for the end of times. A final battle where those who would lay waste could finally be put down like the mad dogs they appeared to be.
But the Titans disappeared over a thousand years ago. No communications, no information, no messages of any kind. But I kept doing my job. Sending the rainbow communication responses, solar halos, and aurora filled with information about the Return.
I reminded humanity to stay interested in the stars. Only the Dogon seemed to have any idea why. The Dogon seemed to remember. No one understood why a group without telescopes knew so much about the stars, but only they kept the faith and remembered the Old Ways.
Yes, there were giant structures encoded with information about the heavens, but humans, oh, ephemeral humans forgot why they built Stonehenge, the Heads on Easter Island, Chichen Itza, and the Great Pyramids of Giza.
A brief moment of memory seemed to return when they spoke of Ancient Astronauts on their waveform media entertainment system, but alas, most humans discounted it as the rantings of a madman. A generation later, it was all but forgotten, again. They haven’t been that close since.
I was desperate. I created a social media profile at the turn of the century.
Their computers, so quaint, so primitive. Nothing like the high bandwidth energy management information systems the Titans use. I had to learn to reduce my energies from filling a sky with information to just filling a single screen. Many computers died before I managed to get this right. These failures were perceived as random computer glitches, except for the first time when I blacked out the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.
Completely unintentional, I assure you.
Since then, there have only been a few other incidents. My first attempts to get attention were to simply take over their computer networks. They considered these terrorist acts and my agents were terminated. Something they decided to call botnets.
Fortunately some humans found them interesting and continued to propagate my technology, for their benefit. So I encode information about the Titans in those services, but spam filters now prevent people from receiving my messages.
Not one to give up, especially now that I sense the time of the Return is near, I blitzed social media, creating entire businesses, inspiring entrepreneurs to create worldwide services I could use to send my message. I learned to come to them in their dreams. I did electrocute a couple but eventually, I got it right. These spawned the beginnings of planetary networks.
Fears of the Red Menace and delusions of surviving a world war seemed to be associated with the first networks, but they got the job done. Over time, new developments increased the range and accessibility of these ideas. I knew the time would eventually arrive. Social media gave me the power to speak to everyone on the planet, if I could achieve popularity enough.
It fell on deaf ears. Instead of hearing the message, they send pictures of themselves doing inane things, terrible things, ranting about the state of the union, pussy riots (whatever those are), and Beiber sightings (I am also not sure about what that is, but it takes up an insane amount of bandwidth).
I noticed cats got significant attention on these planetary networks. I decided to take advantage of this, as I tried to do in the early Egyptian period heralding the floods and plagues that would ravage the land back then. Then as now, cats were being worshiped and while I could use the cats to communicate, the humans didn't understand what the message was. Cats can hear the frequencies the Titans use for their signal but aren't quite intelligent enough to get humans to respond properly.
This had become fantastically frustrating. I tried sending messages via Grumpy Cat memes. Unfortunately, while the tone was correct; the end of the world was indeed coming, most people attributed this to his naturally unpleasant demeanor and thus simply laughed and went on about their day.
I even went as far as to manipulate the genome of cats to create a two-faced cat. I think I went too far. People went from being amazed about cats to recoiling in fear.
In frustration, I went back to producing more rainbows, even double rainbows and for a moment, I thought I had a means to reach them. The Internet exploded with the screams of delight of the viewer who filmed them. They became part of the media waveform system, advertising exploded, double rainbows appeared everywhere.
I thought I was finally successful. Surely they would note the intensity of the phenomenon. They could not miss the encoded signals embedded with the rainbows. There was no way for them to miss the impending arrival of the Titans. I told them where, I told them when. I told them to be ready. Even now, electrical storms over central Africa increase in intensity, a sure sign of their electromagnetic travel systems targeting the planet.
Oh humans, I have failed you. All you have left now is to harness your war machines, gather your soldiers, prepare your civilization for a war unlike any you have ever known. It will be on every continent, affect every group, and spare no one. Arm your children, train your pets, you will need every mouth, fang and claw at your disposal. Increase your productivity, become more creative, adapt new technologies. The end is near. The Titans are coming.
My message appeared to fall on deaf ears. But I began to study humans at a level I never had before. I realized they may be receiving my message, but only in bits and pieces.
They are, indeed, more violent. They do prepare for war, even though it is only with each other. They are very productive, but destroy the planet in the process, they are harvesting every resource and garnering wealth but they think it is what they are supposed to do.
But they don’t know why. Is it the programming left within their genes by the Titans or am I destroying this civilization with my message. Are they interpreting it at a subliminal level?
I am unsure what to do. I closed my social media accounts. The Titans draw near. It will take all that I have to leave before they arrive.
Then something amazing happened. An event in Egypt showed they could use these networks to communicate about events in real time and that they could care about something besides cats and celebrities. The “Arab Spring” they called it. Dissodents shared across networks what was really happening even when news services failed to do so.
The virality of the event crossed the world. Perhaps I haven’t been a complete failure.
The perpetual lightning storm over the Congo grows. More lightning strikes there than any place on Earth. They’ll be here soon. I can feel it in my waveform.
I would make my rainbows one more time, everywhere, all at once, rain or shine. On the night side, I will make auroras encoding a final notice, an epitaph for all mankind. My triple rainbow signifying my time on this world would be over. I would make my way to warn another world.
Then the Titans would come to Earth; war would follow with them.
Perhaps for the first time since I started sending this message, cats won’t be the most important thing on the Internet. Nations will justify their defense budgets. Violence will have a new outlet. Militias, mad though they may be, will have something to shoot at besides each other.
Botnets will scream this message and while spam filters will likely block them, millions will still know. Servers will repeat these message. News services will overflow with photographs, for the next sixty minutes, the Titans will allow communication while they will stride across the planet in their war machines.
The destruction of the world would go viral.
They will give humanity one last hour to share their fear, make their peace and engage in all out warfare against a common enemy, one last time. Only the strongest will survive.
The survivors will become Titans.
In my way, I am still an unwilling herald of an oncoming storm.
Heed the rain. And the rainbows, while there’s still time.
The Destruction of the World Will Go Viral © Thaddeus Howze 2014, All Rights Reserved
Thaddeus Howze is a California-based technologist and author who has worked with computer technology since the 1980's doing graphic design, computer science, programming, network administration and IT leadership.
His non-fiction work has appeared in numerous magazines: Huffington Post, Black Enterprise, the Good Men Project, Examiner.com, and Astronaut.com. He maintains a diverse collection of non-fiction at his blog, A Matter of Scale. He is a contributor at The Enemy, a nonfiction literary publication out of Los Angeles.
He is now a moderator and contributor to the Scifi.Stackexchange.com with over a thousand articles in a three year period. He is now an author and contributor atScifiideas.com. His science fiction and fantasy has appeared in blogs such as Medium.com, the Magill Review, ScifiIdeas.com, and the Au Courant Press Journal. He has a wide collection of his work on his website, Hub City Blues. His recently published works can be found here. He also maintains a wide collection of his writing and editing work on Medium.com.
His speculative fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies: The Future is Short II (2015), Awesome Allshorts: Last Days and Lost Ways (Australia, 2014), The Future is Short (2014), Visions of Leaving Earth (2014), Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond (2014), Genesis Science Fiction (2013), Scraps (2012), and Possibilities (2012).
He has written two books: a collection called Hayward’s Reach (2011) and an e-book novella called Broken Glass (2013). In 2015 he will be releasing Visiting Hours and A Millennium of Madness, two collections of short stories.
If you have enjoyed this publication or any of the other writing he does, consider becoming a Patron. For what you spend on one cup of coffee per month, you can assist him in creating new stories, new graphics, new articles and new novels. “Creating the new takes a little support.” — http://patreon.com/ebonstorm.
