Sunday 6 November 2022

Haunting the Extremophiles


We aren't 'destroying the planet'. The planet will still be around long after we render it uninhabitable for human bodies. And life will survive too. In hydrothermal vents beneath the ocean live the extremophiles Pyrolobus fumarii and Pyrococcus furiosus, some of the oldest forms of life on Earth, organisms which thrive in conditions of impossible heat. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, millennia after we wipe out the world which could support us, an ancestor of these creatures will crawl from the polluted seas onto the scorched shores we have left behind. 

They will be haunted by our ghosts, our remnant omnipresent consciousness, our stone-taped traces. To them, we will seem like the Great Old Ones. And what will disturb them about us will not be chitinous or squid-like features, but our repulsive mammaries, the uterine matrices that formed our now-disembodied minds, our glandular inheritance. 

As they burn our bones, compressed to coal, for light, some among them will shudder at shapes in the fire: a wet red hole pierced with ivory, which screams; a head crowning, smeared with its caul; the sucking nightmare of a human kiss.

And they will be revolted.

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