You’re Not a Cockroach
( "messy bed" by hosullivan is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. ) As you awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, you found yourself NOT transformed in your bed into a gigantic insect. You were still yourself. The only one, in fact, who was. Everyone else had become giant cockroaches. You thought at first it was just your family. Then you looked outside, at the streets teeming with human-size bugs, and thought maybe it was just your neighborhood. Then you looked at a few webcams online and hoped it was just your country. Then you went through every live news feed you could and concluded it was everyone. As far as you could tell, everyone in the world had become a giant cockroach. Except for you. No idea why. It just, apparently, is.
You don't seem to be in any danger at least. The cockroaches (the people?), despite being five to six feet long, aren't ravenous beasts or anything. They just move around, going about their lives. You're not sure whether they can understand you when you talk, if they even perceive you as what they used to be. You just generally leave each other alone. You try to learn as much as you can while the power plants still work and the Internet's still on. The event seemed to happen in the middle of the night, 2:45 a.m., based on what you see. That's the point where all activity stops, everywhere. You can't find a single social media post, a single video, a single forum topic, a single meme--nothing at all past that point, except for webcams that were left to stream. A few of them show it as it happened: someone would be talking about something or other and suddenly, in a flash of light, they're a cockroach, abandoning their laptops.
Power lasts for only two more days. You anticipated this. You'd read all about what to expect when civilization collapses. While the majority of it turned out to be entirely unsuited to the current situation, you at least knew things like how to make a fire, create a shelter, dress a wound, and cook a meal. Your bag is packed with survival gear, food, bandages, disinfectant, some over the counter medicine and a notebook. You put it on and go off into the world. You're looking for answers. Why is everyone else a cockroach? Why are you not? How can this be reversed? It's somewhere out there in the world, you think, a reason for all this.
( "Ghost city - Empty streets" by Malik_Braun is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. ) You walk, bike, and sometimes (though only short distances before you hit some sort of roadblock) drive. You travel to abandoned government offices, full of moldy records and sterile labs. You travel to military bases, stuffed with weapons and overrun with crabgrass. You travel to holy places, and are filled with their silence. Nowhere do you find answers. You do find some interesting things, at least. You read through documents at the White House and learn which presidents had to undergo exorcisms and when. You find a giant mech suit in a naval yard, and have a little fun with it doing jumps. You discover the Vatican has already had the Holy Grail for a few hundred years at least. But nothing about the mass transformation of the entire world population into cockroaches, with the exception of you.
Years pass. Society moves on. Everyone, despite being giant insects, apparently are still intelligent. They were just, well, very surprised and panicked when they initially woke up that morning. Once they had time to calm down, things started to proceed. Since their old human mouths were out of the question, everyone figured out how to communicate using their new insect bodies, eventually relying on a combination of jaw clicks and wing vibrations to convey meaning. They didn't have hands anymore, so they couldn't use any of their old technologies, but they could they could manipulate some basic tools using just their legs, and with that created new technologies. Their digestive systems had changed, and that led to food changing too--restaurants began to open serving piles of what seems, to your mind, rotting garbage.
In just a few years, society had fully recovered. Not unchanged, though. Everything at this point is built for cockroaches. It's tough for you to get around because you can't stick to walls. It's tough to find food you can eat without getting sick. It's tough to even communicate, having to rely on crude pantomime the majority of the time. And it's beyond tough--it's practically impossible--to find work. You've moved back in with your family in the meanwhile. Well, more you just kind of showed up and all the roaches in the house (you're pretty sure this was your house...) seemed to let you stay. You've taken up residence in a small room upstairs. Life is, you have to admit, kind of depressing. There's no one to talk to. Nothing to do. The roaches don't really interact with you at all. You're just kind of there to them -- something they tolerate. Of course, you think, you could also be just projecting your feelings onto them since they can't communicate. Either way, it's not nice.
( "What Is A Cockroach Good For?" by Cockroach Facts is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ) You watch life go on. You can't understand a thing they're doing but on the news you see roaches huddled in stock markets, roaches running marathons, roaches walking down the red carpet, roaches debating in Congress, roaches flying drones to bomb other roaches thousands of miles away, and other signs of what, by some definitions, one might call civilization. This is all on a TV that's about two feet off the ground, in order to be eye level with roach viewers. The entire world is passing you by. You're never in danger, really. You're just not really part of the story anymore. Even as an extra. It's all roaches now. Or, more accurately, the people who became roaches. You wish, so hard, every night, to be a part of it. You always wake up, knowing you're not.
Until, as you awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, you find yourself transformed in your bed into a gigantic insect! Earlier this would have been the cause of much distress, but now it is for celebration! You take your new roach body out into the living room, where your family is sitting. They're just like you remember them. Human. They have the news on, everyone hunched downward to see the TV. Everyone who was a roach, apparently, has become human again. And as a giant roach, the only one in the world now, you sit and you think and you wonder why.
