At all costs

©2019-2022 michael raven

Doctor Lamb watched the multitude of lights, sliding bars of color, numbers in red flashing like myriad blinking blind eyes belonging to Sauron and sighed.

“She’s dying, isn’t she?” asked Lamb’s assistant, Gary.

The doctor nodded, weary to the bone.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” he said. “But I suppose we need to act now or risk losing the mother. There’s still a chance she can carry on, but only if we pull the trigger and act immediately.”

“Does anyone with higher authority know? Shouldn’t we get authorization before acting?”

Lamb shook his head. “They’d just delay the inevitable with their arguments. It would take too long to see reason and we don’t have time for their bureaucracy. By the time they that it is the only reasonable course of action, it could very well be too late.”

Without waiting for Gary’s counterargument, Lamb keyed in a command line into the computer console that only he knew. Milliseconds after the the enter key was pressed on the keyboard, the caches he’d hidden around the globe released their contents into the air, nanobots attuned exclusively to homo sapiens. They miniscule bots were designed to enter a person and disrupt key protein strands within the brain and nervous system. Importantly: no one but Gary knew of their existence.

Six months later, the bots would self-destruct and free Gaia from the bondage of humankind for the first time in aeons.

---

Another, slightly modified flash fiction piece from 2019 using the OED word of the day: Gaia. File under: grimdark post-humanist.