What if...
The first thing every human on Earth declares war on is Death.
We’ve read the mangled stories that have come back from the deep dark web of secrets that no ear can unhear, the pool in which all true writers play, the void of unbecoming in which any possibility could become real.
What if those Tumblr theories about humans being from a Death planet aren’t just idle theories, but the duplicitous drippings of a consciousness bigger than all of creation, the drops too small too catch in any net, no matter how fine, and too quick to be stopped.
What if those dormant thoughts waiting in the back of the collective consciousness actually are the dying thoughts of an entity too vast for our minds to understand in any coherent way, so we make up all these stories that just flicker around in the backs of our heads and neatly explain the things we can’t manage to explain ourselves, with all our science and philosphy, and all our considerable powers of reasoning and ability to justify anything with a half-decent reason?
What if those ghosts, the dark thoughts that simmer underneath the surface, those who buck the system, cause havok and harm, are because of this darkness?
What if this darkness had a name, and a face, and an address. How would you react to being told that the reason for everything evil that humanity had done was living on this Earth, had a house in a nice neighbourhood, went to work three days a week, and was currently planning how to kill the entire Universe?
Wouldn’t that excite your natural latent warlike tendencies enough to declare war instantly and unthinkingly?
What about if you lived in a country constantly in a state of tumult, sharing the fear of war, of trigger-happy monsters in positions of power, of Doomsday scenarios triggered by glitches in a system that was designed to protect us and instead is collapsing around us like the steel jaws of a trap?
For declaring War is an important step of realising what it is to be human. And acknowledging Death is another. Being born into this world is traumatic enough, without the tragedy, the sheer unending agony, of being born without your soul. So perhaps the new generation have figured out this game better than we did, and maybe, just maybe, there’s a way for humanity to pull out a last-minute save.
And maybe, just maybe, that will start with humanity declaring War on Death.