Evanece

Dr. Kee tugged on his beard, deep in thought. Rarely was he ever not. He did not like thinking this much. He did not have to like it, he convinced himself. If it was one thing to have survived all these years of development, of… exchanges to the human body, it was emotion. And Dr. Kee did not like that either. In fact, he had dedicated the latter half of his career, his life really, to eradicating human emotion.

The Final Frontier of Evolution he dubbed it. Dr. Kee developed the majority the life-prolonging advancements for the now common, albeit mostly synthetic human body, therefore he kept the banner to the point and unapologetically so.

The ironic fact his motivation — his emotion — was the very thing Kee sought to end was, to anyone who asked him, motivation itself. It was not lost on him that he wanted to finalize his life’s work by removing what gave him reason to currently keep living. But he could not just remove human emotion. There were still laws, still humanity to consider. Kee hated it, hated everyone, hated himself more with each day he lived.

Kee was tired. He was old, though no one could tell just from looking at him. He was particularly tired of being old. Tired of what his own accomplishments failed to, well, accomplish. The weight of not having the result he cared so much for, after four centuries now, was becoming insufferable. No one ever remember what you did, they only criticize what you are doing. Once this was over he could rest, truly rest. Lay to rest the lies and centuries of manipulation. And put to rest what’s left of human—

"This has to be thousands of years old,” Maye said aloud, interrupting Kee’s private sulking. Maye was a colleague of sorts to Dr. Kee, if you could call excavating what was left of Earth for 230 years collegial work. A younger woman, according to The Centurion Standards, the 332 year old professional had worked alongside Dr. Kee more as a friend and steady head than a grunt. On this project however, both were not only appreciated, but critically necessary.

The drudging of millennia-old ash, dust and gravel indiscernible from the human remains that melded itself into the landscape, both organic and not, was far from the lab duty they were used to back home. The current city the two slowly combed through was once nick named for its size of fruit, or at least Maye believed it was something like that. At the city’s center was a vast portion of untainted wilderness, she had learned, that was of particular interest for Dr. Kee. Why he only looked here recently she did not know and he would not say.

The ground they combed over was now a flattened, grey blanket of ash, mirroring the sky. Off in the far far distance, perhaps 3 or 4 miles or so by Maye’s estimation, there was life budding. Her incredible, if not wholly unnatural eyesight could at least make out the color attributed to life this planet was once known for. Or, at least, one of the colors it was know for, over 4,200 years ago.

This expedition, as far as it was from home however, was not a single, multi-century stent. To Dr. Kee and Maye, however, it still felt like one. After being alive so long, minutes became hours, hours to weeks and weeks became decades… or were the months simply days?

Time was more relative than ever here on Earth.

What kept ruining Kee’s life’s work, however, was a constant, if not predictable, drag. The prior race of humanity destroyed this planet with emotion. They would do the same elsewhere — like home.

It was human nature after all. If everyone could just stop—

“Here,” Maye said, after examining the object she removed from the dusty ground. “Look.” She lifted the Earthen artifact for Kee to see. “Few thousand years old, I assume, maybe more.”

“In which years?” Kee responded, without turning to look. “Earth years? Saturn years? Light years?” Dr. Kee asked with as much indifference as he did cynicism. Great, I’m a bitter old man, now. Only good for—

“That one is a distance,” Maye responded, factually. Unblinking, she held the trinket, covered in enough grime as to be indiscernible from any other grey rock that littered this obliterated land. Indiscernible by any other eye, save hers, which was designed in particular to discern the unmistakable signature of elemental gold from everything else.

Maye never was one to pick up on heavy sarcasm, or light sarcasm for that matter. Perhaps too engrossed in her work was to blame. Everyone that got to know Maye, however, suspected she simply could not understand humor, as if that gene was turned off somehow. She smiled occasionally, this was true. Yet for some reason, as soon as she began her work alongside Dr. Kee she became as cold as the stone she studied on Earth.

“And yet, it’s measured in time. So which is it?” Kee said, irritably. Still methodically tugging his beard, he looked to the ground at nothing in particular. Where had he learned that? Was it an attribute of inheritance or another product of emotion?

Dr. Kee wasn’t quite exasperated, at least not with Maye. Sometimes he simply forgot she wasn’t the bantering type, not after what he had proclaimed to have “fixed” in her. Self proclaimed that is, since he could not publicly announce the procedure, let alone allow Maye to find out.

Oh, how he was tired. So tired of it all — the work, the delays, the secrets. He was numb. Most the time he wasn’t even actively searching the ground while he walked. He simply made the thoughtless effort for another ashen step, staring as if straight through the planet to the other side.

Maye cut her eyes, incredulously. She was, after all, still capable of discerning irritation, of emotion. She said nothing at first, placing her attention back on the filthy item in her hands. If Dr. Kee was not going to look, then she was going to clean it off further before she stored it away for the long trip home. Gold, after all, was more appealing to look at than a rock.

“Oh, my God.” Maye exclaimed, suddenly, if not plainly. “Oh my God, oh my…” she trailed off in a whisper to herself. The distress in Maye’s voice warranted Kee’s attention, snapping him out of his self induced daze. Distress meant emotion. And he had taken emotion from her, save the innate fear of death — a necessary compromise given the task at hand. To hear emotion could only mean…

Kee turned abruptly. Lifting his head for the first time in what seemed like hours, he was greeted with a twinge of pain in his neck. Unfortunately, that pain went completely ignored as Kee caught sight of his partner.

Maye stood frozen, confusion overtaking her expression. As her left arm was now sagging flesh, as if melting from the elbow, down. Upon further inspection, Kee realized her hand had turned a purplish red. One of Maye’s finger tips were already ashen.

Dr. Kee wanted his work to be finished, but that was not the same as wanting it to be over. He was standing face to face, unfortunately, with the fatal truth it was. Kee could see the gold, heart-shaped locket still swinging from a chain in Maye’s other hand. The locket was open, a drop of grey blood falling to the ground.

This trinket was everything Kee was looking for. And everything he feared. And yet, he knew it was all over. He had no chance to hate himself more than he already did for not indulging Maye when she first proffered a glance. They could have avoided all of this if he simply focused.

Kee was out of time — save for the time to hate the only thing responsible for his lack of focus. His body instinctively flushed the heat of rage to his face. He hated emotion.

4303 YEARS AGO

Recorded Year 2039 - Earth

The pair of soldiers sloshed the 8 foot long body bag side to side as they carried it in synchronized steps to the pit to burn in the heart of New York City. The black bag was more like an oversized pouch of water, making it more difficult to cary without dragging along the ground. Four hours ago, there was rigidity enough to handle with relative ease. Now, the two men struggled to take care not to rip the bottom on a snag.

The rapid progression of the disease, if you could call it that, was not only a threat to the people contracting it, but to the ones that had to deal with the aftermath. There was no cure for anyone that had it. Worse, there was not time enough to develop anything to prevent contracting it. Even secondary contact was almost guaranteed sentencing.

The disease worked slowly at first, but “slow” was not a descriptive term used for very long. Quite rapidly, the disease evolved and began to dissolve the host before they died, rather than after. Granted the quantifiable line of “before death” was always true, the difference now was, like a virus, the host could physically burst while still consensus, like adding too much yeast to dough.

Unlike a virus however, contaminated matter remained fatally alive no matter how long you left it. Rain made it worse, as it carried fluid containing the evolved bacteria into storm drains, water reclamation, rivers, eventually bottled water. It was a logistical nightmare for humanity to track, let alone source where it came from before it was far too late.

Disintegrating the corpses in a fraction of the time it took to even respond to symptoms, the threat was now responding in time to contain the corpse before the bodily fluid leaked beyond the skin, into the ground. Once symptoms arose, it was critical to remove the threat of that person’s existence.

Only the threat of existence creates a nightmare in itself. Self preservation, ironically, is ultimately what caused humanities collapse. Since people didn’t have an innate drive to turn themselves in to be burned, they found themselves dissolving into insanity, putting the thousands unfortunate enough to exist around them at a promisingly equivalent fate.

The worst and final straw to break the camel’s back that was human life on Earth was when the bacteria developed an unapologetic malignancy towards all things carbon based, not just humans. Many of the standard protections and contamination protocols were no longer viable. None of this, of course, was countered fast enough. 17 days, after all, was a pace not even the world itself could keep up with.

By day 14 of the outbreak, Central Park was a living nightmare of smoke, fire and ash — not all due to burning. On this day, sealed the fate of two-thirds of the world’s population. By day 15, two-thirds of the Amazon Forest. By day 5, however, humanity collectively caught the hint and broke into global panic.

Many of the world’s military and first response fates were sealed early on, such as the two soldiers dragging the body bag. They never noticed the trail of fluid until the bag broke entirely. In an instant, the mostly dissolved contents splashed across the ground. A closed gold locket washed across one of their boots.

17 DAYS PRIOR

Not for the first time Dr. Kee thought he was becoming as cold-hearted as his cadaver experiments. For the sake of his son however, he was determined today was a day for something to live. As he strode into his next patient’s room in the private lab, a glance at the floor told him he had failed. He immediately called his son at NASA.