skonen_blades

Yes. The aliens came down and harvested the human race. Yes. We asked them to.

That was the plan all along. We just didn’t know it.

Our basic nature was installed in us by them. We were set down on this planet to evolve until overpopulation and to invent the technology necessary to start screaming our position into space. The language wasn’t important. Giving off radio and television waves was the sign that we had reached fruition.

We did it brilliantly.

The aliens, all green teeth and dimensional tentacles, saw us show up on their routine scans. We were a delicious, ripe apple. This galaxy and others like it are merely orchards for these creatures. They are farmers and we are genetically modified planet boosters.

We pulled most of the resources out of the earth already. That’s why the aliens collected the cities. All that glass, steel, copper, iron, concrete and gyprock. All processed. All ready to go. They harvested the minerals and oil, too. We had even dug the holes for them already. The Earth has ice-scream scoop craters all over it now from the aliens’ machines reaching down and picking up every single town. Those holes have been sprayed with fertilizer. In five years, they will all be jungle. Future generations won’t even know they existed.

We were very efficient parasites. We overloaded the planet with our biomass and started crying to the heavens. Then we were culled and smashed down to the stone age again.

And of course, our meat is prized. The enormous flying thresher slaughterhouses that collected us were the final nightmare. That’s why there are so few of us left. Enough to start another breeding program here to be sure, but the population of earth has gone from billions to a few thousand.

In a way, we’re lucky. The dinosaurs were the first experiment but they were killed by a meteor. Probably for the best since they’d had millions of years to build a radio but never did.

We, on the other hand, must have exceeded our presets. Because of that, they’re setting us up for a round two, I think. We get to do it again.

How do we warn the future generations? How do we tell them not to breed, not to innovate, not to invent, not to think? We want to start a religion that will celebrate meekness, to idolize servitude, to live simply, and to shun technology. But I remember that a lot of religions before the harvest were already trying to do that and they failed.

Maybe if I made an image of death that looked like a farmer but then I remember that my image of Death had a scythe and that makes me think that maybe this isn’t the first time we’ve been culled.

Maybe the wave of humans before us already tried to do what I’m trying to do now.

This is why we never got any responses to our messages into space. Those messages are silenced as soon as they start talking. There are no conversations. Only yells that are cut off.

If I could go back in time, I’d tell the people of earth to shut up. To stay quiet. To quit beaming our entire lives at full volume into space.

All we were doing was ringing the dinner bell.




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They stood on level sixteen of the meat building, waiting for their order of sharkbeef.

This vat boutique specialized in hybrid delicacies and Kay was hosting a birthday dinner party tonight. The invites and accepts scrolled across her vision as she looked down at her son. The store prided itself on having curious antique items for the customers to handle while they waited. He was engrossed in something.

“What are these?” posted Adam. He was six years old today. “They look ancient. What were they used for? They look heavy enough to be weapons.” He turned it over in his hands while his pupils irised wide, scanning through several spectra and mags to see if there was something deceptively complex under the surface.

There wasn’t. He was looking at a book. He’d never seen one before. He had yottabytes of information in his cranial cavity just like everyone else but like his parents always said “It’s about asking, not having.” He had perfectly decent search engines installed but like most children, he just wasn’t that curious about the past.

“It’s a book.” Kay said. “It’s how humans used to record information when we stored it externally. Sort of like a baby internet. You remember that from your history downloads?”

“Yes.” Adam lied. He never paid attention to his school feeds. There were so many other cool things happening with his friend’s challenges in the socials. Pretty Renee from crosstag was finally paying attention to his scores.

“I know you haven’t.” she said with a sigh. She remembered being so curious at his age and wondered why he wasn’t. She took the book and opened it. The title had rubbed off but she recorded the first few lines into her eyes. The results fluttered through. No exact matches. Must have been a small publishing run with little to no success. Looked like a collection of poetry. She scanned it in to the general knowledge Linksys, tagging ownership and viewing rights to see if there were any challenges. There weren’t. It must have been quite obscure.

“It was a painfully laborious process and in real-world costs, entire forests were given over to these methods. Businesses made money off of them. Government sponsored storage facilities kept entire buildings full of them.” She searched. “Ah. Libraries, they were called. Like our file system names.”

Adam was already bored. He hated shopping with his mother.

She went on. “It’s a form of meditation in some of the enclaves to read them. Taking in information that slowly is like eating a great meal over the course of days. Flashing a book in seconds still gives you the same comprehension but it’s not the same. Actually reading, using your meat mind, well, some of them say they feel connected to our ancestors by reading this way.”

She had to admit to herself that it sounded incredibly boring. But she’d never tried it. She turned it over in her hands like a curious animal inspecting a possible trap.

The shopkeeper came over with the sharkbeef. “Here you go, Miss. Creds received. Ah, I see you’ve found something interesting.” He said, friendly eyebrows waggling at the book.

“Thank you Jake. How much for the book?” she asked.

“Take it.” Jake replied. “Bring it back if you don’t like it.”

Adam sighed theatrically. Kay tucked the book into her bag.

“Okay, let’s go, kiddo. Your birthday dinner awaits. Thanks, Jake!” she said.

Tonight she would read in the bath like her grandmothers did. She was looking forward to it.




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My family became meat farmers in the spring of ’22.

Like a lot of city dwellers, we tired of the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. We sold our possessions, liquidated our assets, and bought a stake in Canada that was ready for reforesting. There was a lot of land up for grabs at that point. After The Crash but before The Rush as my daddy likes to say.

Mad Cow’s Revenge was followed by the Lamb of God virus. Avian Flu became gestational and starting skipping to humans, especially children and old people. The fish started dying near all the coastlines. It was like the Earth was trying to force us all to become vegetarians.

Drastic measures needed to be taken.

The bigwigs in the laboratories found that they could splice tree cells and meat cells.

We grow our meat now.

Entire forests of furry oaksteak trees point silently at the sky. Porkpine, elmbacon, and maplechops stand a quiet vigil. Long hair keeps the trees warm. Touching one is like petting a warm dog. Thick, red blood pumps slowly through their veins.

The lower branches are boneless and hang down like fat boa constrictors covered in orangutan muppet hair. The upper branches have elbows and reach for the warmth of the sun in the oldest dance of the earth.

The forests shiver in the cold.

When they’re harvested, they regenerate. The stumps scab over and the new meat starts forming in small lumps like an amputee growing new arms.

Tonight, I’m looking forward to some ground willowmeat and some fine cuts of sprucebeef. Daddy says that he's a cowboy and a farmer all rolled into one.

I enjoy the country life.




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I am a fraction of the human equation.
I am long number whose end is unknowable because of its place in the future.
I am rounded down for practical purposes for today’s formulas.

I was manufactured.

There are no more fathers. There is only one Mother.

I am processed meat.

The human factory of my birth is located in Missouri. I am a patchwork quilt body of rejuvenated dead flesh that marks me as a highly expendable worker.

The specifications my of birth factory’s product line were three: Tall, Male and Strong.

The automated collectors of the dead brought the corpses into the rear-loading rendering tubes at the Factory. There, the bodies were brought inside and separated into elementary components of tissue, fluid, tendon and muscle. Chemicals added elasticity and tensile strength. A youthful vigor was restored.

Like a sausage or a can of spam, these parts of the dead were reconstituted together into a human form by machines designed for the task, blurring with the bored speed of efficient programming. Staple gun retractors pulled tendons taught over heel bones and kept them tight with glue-gun biopoxy.

Sewing machines churned out templates of thin jigsaw skin by the acre to wrap us near completion.

No appearance specifications were included in our reincarnation. We came down the tracks the exact same height with skin like calico cats.

No two of us were exactly alike. Our eye colours were random from eye to eye. Hair sprouted from our heads at the whim of the random swirling flesh we rose from. Neopolitan morlocks. Shelley’s legacy. True Frankensteins.

We were grown for hazardous labour.

All Factories grew humans to order. The ones up North and on the Coasts grew humans for the general population and a pristine few grew bodies for the rich.

Monitored green jars of physical perfection grown for beauty, longevity and intelligence.

Not us.

There hasn’t been a true birth in two centuries.




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