The man watches the children play through the translucent veil of innocence and joy, which for just a moment hides the desperation, anguish, and anger looming before him. (His name, like everything else now, including these words, is unimportant.) These children are too young to know their likely fate and too innocent to understand. His blessing is his age, for he can live only a few more years. He will welcome death. How strange that its time and manner, a looming dread just two years ago during the height of The Plague, are now irrelevant. He has no wish to journey into this unreachable future, the future these children will know. He will be spared that horror. But his age is also his curse. He laughs to himself. "Wisdom may come with age, Mr. Wilde, but my curse is that age hasn't come alone."
As he watches the joyful play of the children, unnoticed from just within the trees at the edge of the clearing, he remembers what it was like just two years ago. The Plague had ravaged humankind in a matter of months, taking his wife just before a vaccine was found. He had held her as she drew a final, feeble breath—but only in his dreams. The armed hospital security guards prevented him from being there in those last moments. Everything else is gone, but he relives that nightmare of her dying alone every night.
The vaccines worked as promised, but the distribution proved to be more complicated than the new administration had thought. Rioting had also broken out over who was to receive the first doses. There had even been isolated incidents of vigilantes hunting down and killing anti-vaxxers. These complications were cured as the vaccines became more readily available, and eventually, the virus was brought under control. Life started to return to a pre-plague normal. Masks were still being worn, though, and had become very popular and much more comfortable, effective, and even fashionable. The vaccine rendered them unnecessary, but they were now like a child's safety blanket after a trauma. The world's economy was strengthening, and the new administration concentrated on health care, energy, and climate change. Hope was rising like the first spring dawn after a dark winter.
He had played a small part in developing one of the vaccines before his retirement, and it had once given him a feeling of pride that he'd been part of the solution. (This, too, now made him laugh.) He knew his contribution was minimal. He'd been a member of the Delta Research Group, one of three teams responsible for duplicating Alpha team's findings, clearing the way for the final development of the vaccine. When production and distribution were fully underway, he'd decided to accept their retirement offer. He sold everything and moved out here to his little vacation cabin hidden away in the mountains. His wife had hated the isolation, had refused to even visit the rustic cabin. The land and sky held no memory of her, so her spirit could only rest in him, not in these surroundings. He was safe to hike the forests or sit at the clearing's edge as he did now, knowing that the trails and the deer and the sunset held no painful memories of her.
During that last week at work, he'd read a short paper in Nature Biotechnology by a Washington University doctoral student on global fertility rates, based on data gathered by the CIA for The World Factbook. That part caught his attention: what was a grad student in synthetic biology looking to glean from CIA data? He had shrugged and continued filling his cardboard box with the memorabilia that now made up the eclectic decor of his spartan little cabin.
His isolation had at first been a scientist's idyll. The little-used campground on the far side of the clearing where the children now played had electricity and was abandoned for nine months of the year. He voluntarily looked after the grounds during those nine months of quiet in exchange for the use of the freezers and complete privacy for the three months the camp was occupied. He lived like a hermit in his tiny solar-powered cabin, with more savings than a hermit could spend. He donated a few computers to the camp, along with an exceedingly expensive satellite service that allowed him nine months of blissful journal reading. The freedom to study and explore any topic that piqued his curiosity was exhilarating, a feeling he'd not had since being an undergraduate.
A crow's caw jolts him from his reverie. The children have abandoned their play and are looking up at the ridge to the west. He looks too but sees nothing from his vantage point.
Before his satellite Internet connection permanently went down, he enjoyed keeping up with the increasingly good news weaving its way through the Internet. It was refreshing to see science getting more trust and recognition now that the vaccines had been so successful. Climate change was high on the new administration's agenda. The public seemed to be welcoming it as a distraction from the horrible memories of the recent past. Science "reality" shows were even starting to appear, like Aurora Borealis — Light of Wonder! The weekly one-hour show chronicled the adventures and discoveries of the research icebreaker vessel Aurora Borealis operating in the Arctic. He loved the irony of a "reality" TV show suddenly being jolted off-script to confront the reality of their unexpected discovery.
Climate change has caused Arctic permafrost to melt at ever-increasing rates. During a routine analysis of thawing samples, the Aurora Borealis uncovered an unusual bacterium from samples estimated to be 25,000 years old. The Borealis scientists assured the audience that these particular bacteria were harmless. They describe an event in Siberia from 2014 where melting permafrost had released a 75 year-old strain of anthrax, killing a child and 2,300 reindeer. This was completely different, the scientists explained, and very exciting: the samples contained new life forms never before seen. But just to be safe, the Borealis data was transmitted to the CDC and other agencies for more rigorous analysis. No one made a connection between the discovery of the ancient bacteria and the show's abrupt cancellation. And how could anyone have made the connection between the bacteria and the doctoral student's research on fertility? By the time the puzzle was pieced together, it was already too late.
One of the camp directors has appeared and hurries the children into the main building. From this distance, it's difficult to see precisely what is happening. A man with a long gun walks slowly towards the adult, perhaps a woman. His gun is pointed to the ground, and his slow movements seem unthreatening: probably a hunter getting his bearings. He must have been what the children had seen on the ridge. But the woman seems very distraught. As he gets closer to her, he slings his rifle and makes a quick slashing movement across her neck. She drops to the ground and soon stops moving.
"So. It must have started," he thought.
As a scientist, his mind craves to know: which one of the many scenarios for the end of civilization was playing out beyond this personal purgatory he's found, this temporary respite from the hell closing in? What he's just witnessed seems to point to a variation of a survivalist scenario: behavior honed through the decades since the cold war, where it was foolishly thought that one could survive a nuclear holocaust if one were prepared. Only, this was the apocalypse that ultimately no one would survive, leaving only anger and rage at the waste, the futility of everything touched by Man. He isn't a sociologist; he wonders if what he's just seen is a predictable reaction to a situation that, in reality, has no personal impact on anyone currently alive. The anger and rage are for those yet to be born. Perhaps someone will do a study of male anti-choice terrorists and how it relates to this societal breakdown. He begins to scold himself at the pure madness his scientific mind has proposed. Those yet to be born? He smiles, then chuckles, then drops to the ground laughing uncontrollably until there's nothing left but tears.
The tears wash away his temporary madness. He still believes in science. He still hopes that scientists are working on a solution to save Man, but this seems unlikely. The doctoral student in synthetic biology was able to show that the fertility rate in humans living along coastal areas was near zero. In the search for a cause, she discovered that a mutated form of the COVID-19 virus was present in all women living along the coast. This previously undetected form of the virus, which caused no physical symptoms other than infertility, spread rapidly inland. At that point, the scientific community came together, desperately searching for a cause and a solution. He was able to track the early progress before he lost his connection to the outside world. The vaccines proved ineffective against this new mutation, and the development of new vaccines has failed so far.
The bacteria contained in the samples found by the Aurora Borealis included ancient genomes closely related to the COVID-19 virus. Over the years, as the permafrost melted, the ancient bacteria leached out into the groundwater and air, eventually finding a human infected with COVID-19. The resulting mutation rendered the original virus harmless to humans—except that the infected, a-symptomatic human was now infertile and exponentially more contagious. The mutated virus affected both sperm and egg. Although not fully understood, this made reproduction even by artificial means impossible.
All of this is moot now, of course: there are no newborn babies. No human has yet been found that isn't infected, even in the Amazon. Unless a solution can be found, no human will ever again be born.
He imagines many people have stopped working, which means food and goods would be increasingly hard to get. Governments tried to maintain control through the military, which helped for a time. Still, the military is made up of people too. Eventually, society began to collapse, just like the communications satellite he relied on for news from the outside world. The only thing left to him is the serenity of the forest and the curse of his analytic mind.
The man now watches perhaps a dozen people slowly entering the camp. Some have weapons, but as the children scurry from the building, no one fires. Since manufacturing has no doubt stopped, ammunition would be precious, he thought. The children who run into the men, through their panic and terror, are quickly knifed to death. Those who escape into the woods aren't pursued. The men were there to loot for supplies. As he gets up and turns back towards his cabin, he knows it's just a matter of time before he's discovered.
Evening is settling in on the warm afternoon. He breathes deeply, letting the sweet forest air fill his soul. With each calming breath, he allowes more and more of his analytical mind to drift away until his sacred science is nothing more, nothing less, than the brilliance of the sunset. All knowledge, all history was never anything more than beautiful, transitory ripples on the sea of time.
Email: Tom Loper