keyword: inhibition, title: letters from the evolutionary war in misc. flash fiction

I couldn’t tell you the full chemical name, I can’t even write it, let alone pronounce it. Tetra-hydro-morpho-something. I’m no scientist, I can’t pretend to be. Most called it its marketing name “Anhilase” and if you’re reading these words, we failed at using it to save the world.

The idea our capacity for cruelty is a genetic aberration left over from animal days, useful in times of individual survival, actively destructive in our exponentially interconnected world, it’s just common sense. The idea we could affect the permanent inhibition of cruel hereditary reflex, to where even descendants would be divested of that hateful appendix, however, was a bombshell.

Using it on death-row killers, people driven mad to violence by violence, was first and expected, nearly everyone liked that. Except for the families who felt like it took their vengeance away, of course, but that’s part and parcel about what it changed. Shedding the madness in us that reacts to loss by lashing out instead of just feeling sad, as people of course still do after even Anhilase.

The problem was when cops tried it and realized they couldn’t cop anymore. When CEOs found it slipped into drinks and were expelled by their boards after moves to provide humane working conditions and living wages. Just a couple of pranksters and the corporate structures of Amazon and Wal-Mart were reduced to smoking shambles. The underpinnings of our society were interwoven within a tapestry of outmoded selfish cruelty. Anhilase prohibition was a Constitutional amendment within days. Gun-nuts saw their comrades dosed and suddenly take sledgehammers to once beloved-tools of self-fulfilled-prophetic existential threat and, in the face of losing the assurances of cruelty, oh dear Christ, were they scared. Which, I’ll admit, made me smile.

The irony was, though, those now without that defunct twinge for cruelty couldn’t be vindictive enough to force the cure upon others. Even to save their species, they could no longer be mean enough to take the free will of someone else’s world-scouring sickness away. And that’s where we come in, where I come in. This damned human race quickly splitting into camps of demons and of angels, there were those of us just a little bit cruel. Humane enough to see this had to end, bastard enough to do the job, just devil enough to end the idea of devils once and forever.

If you’re reading these words, I have been absolved of the vestigial vicious self-righteous rage billions of cycles of Darwinian fittest-survival codes into my bones, as I have always longed to be freed, shot to death trying to spike a major reservoir with Anhilase. If you’re not, I received reprieve with my own dose after the fact but either way, I will finally be cleansed of this hatred.

Blessed and cursed by being only a little bit monster, I suppose it’s my fate to either be among the last cured of bestial cruelty or to die in the trying. Either way, it’s over now, thank Christ.

Last updated September 01, 2019