In Sanity
by Gregory Bernard Banks
Last night, I killed the world…
I awoke to a glorious new dawn. I climbed out of the pile of musty blankets I’d amassed in the basement of my childhood home and ascended the steps nervously, worried that one sudden move my break the spell. My heart raced, exhilarated by the fantasy-come-true of the night before, but afraid that it was all just a glorious dream. The ghostly death-cries of my victims still lingered in the air like ambient noise. Dawn’s crimson glow seeped into the house and tinted the sky as if the blood of humanity had splattered the sun.
I clapped for joy when I saw that my mother’s body still hung from the dining room chandelier, an appropriate bane for the bitch who had valued that antique monstrosity more than her one and only son.
“Failure!” she’d dubbed me. “The bastard spawn of a man who wasn’t worth the toilet paper she’d used to wipe my toddler ass.”
I can’t remember a day in my life in which “Mommy Damndest” hadn’t berated and demeaned me for my Father’s inadequacy. I paused, drinking in the blessed silence that had finally fallen over my reborn world.
“Ding Dong, the Wicked Bitch Is Dead!” I screamed with a Cheshire grin splitting my unshaven, pockmarked face.
The stench grew stronger as I neared the open front door. It wasn’t exactly the smell of Death, like the one which clung to my mother’s dangling corpse in the other room. This scent was earthly and sweet, like a moldy, wet forest after a heavy summer storm. Decomposition and decay had become a pestilence under my tutelage, an impossible weapon made real from the depths of a brutally sane mind. I know history will paint a different portrait, if any had been left to write it down or even read it, that is. But it had been in the most coherent moment in my life, as I napped in my research lab after yet another sleepless night of research, that it had come to me. There was only one way to free mankind from its vile and wayward path.
“What do you see?” that other voice in my head, tinny but clear, asked.
“And then the landscape rippled like melted clay…” I whispered in reply as I stared at the wake of my diabolical handiwork. The Nanos had done a devastatingly efficient job, reducing the entire human world into a homogenous goo in under 24 hours. They had multiplied and spread, microscopic locusts that swept the Earth like an invisible tide, tearing the world apart atom by atom, reducing all synthetic material into a sterile, molecular mound of formless, gray matter. While I programmed them to only target the non-biological creations of mankind, I’d known that most of humanity would fall as collateral damage, a realization that made my plan all the more ingenious.
“I hadn’t really slaughtered mankind,” I said aloud. “They were just collateral damage.”
“How do you feel about what you’ve done?” the voice asked.
I ignored the question as I closed my eyes and listened to the voices of my nano-babies as they sang my praises as the man who’d brought cleansing to a tainted world. All of my life, from my mother’s incessant condemnations, to Cassie’s callous rejection of my affections, cruelty and villainy and greed and jealousy had pervaded the world. And I, a nothing in the eyes of my own species, had proven vastly superior. The meek child of an alcoholic trailer trash tramp and a wayward son-of-a-bitch who hadn’t stuck around long enough to see the birth of his accidental spawn, had elevated himself to the rank of a god.
“Do you feel any remorse for what you’ve done?” the voice asked.
Why should I? I thought in reply. The world is full of hypocrites and fools, people who care little for themselves, let alone anyone else. God’s greatest experiment had proven a colossal failure. All I’d done was bring the project to an early and decisive end.
I wondered if Cassie had perished in my Armageddon, or if she were still out there, somewhere, suffering and slowly dying in the wake of my wrath. I giggled. Had she thought of me as she took her last breath? Was she currently mired in a pile of the goo as her struggles proved increasingly futile as terror’s noose tightened around her throat? Did she feel regret for the scornful act that had led to the destruction of all that she knew?
“What’s your last memory…before all of this?”
“Peonies,” I replied.
I can still smell them as Cassie stood in the park the day I’d confessed my obsessive love for her, poured out my deepest desires in a torrent of words meant to woo her into my bed. We were lab mates, interns at one of the best research facilities in the country. It was fated that we end up together. Surely she could see that.
Instead she’d gaped…almost looked horrified, as the words flowed from my lips. I’d grabbed her to pull her close, but she fought to pull away. Everyone stared at me after her slap stung my jaw, shattered my dreams, and destroyed any chance I’d had of saving my soul.
The vision before me faded briefly, and I glimpsed Cassie in a lab coat and glasses, standing beside a balding man with a digipad in his wrinkled and age-scarred hands. They both stared at me like a lab rat in a cage, sometimes gesturing in my direction, other times nodding or shaking their heads. Their faces were grim, their demeanor subdued. Padded walls closed in around me. I thrashed about as I envisioned white-clad brutes bursting into my home, wrestling me to the floor, stuffing me into a straightjacket, and dragged me away. I babbled like a lunatic as my mother stood in the shadows of the doorway wailing incessantly, leaving me all the more grateful that these were just nightmares, and that in reality I’d made sure that I’d never have to hear that godawful voice again.
“Doctor Swinn!” I cackled at the man beside Cassie. He’d stolen her heart from me, duped her into loving him as the superior man. But I’d shown him–shown them all. I hoped that my little Nano saviors had singled him out, taking their time digesting him. I imagined his screams as they slowly ate flesh, sinew, and bone from the inside out…
The nightmare faded. The sunrise returned.
“Such a lovely sunrise,” I said aloud.
It was the most beautiful morning I’d ever seen. The tranquility of the newly cleansed planet brought tears to my eyes. I wondered if God would curse me for my arrogance, or thank me for acting as his proxy and raining deserved death and destruction down on his sinful children?
No matter, I thought with a smile. If he gives me any lip, I’ll just kill him too…
Posted on March 23rd, 2011 by admin
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