#mutant bug

31 Day Monster Challenge - Day 23

Mutant Bug.

It was meant to curb malaria.

Perhaps you might have heard of the screwfly solution. Modify male insects to be both impotent and irresistible so the females mate with them rather than spread their genes. But life is never that easy. Things always change and malaria is clever enough (in the cleverness of systems) to ride a new host.

And even as a failure, we were still left with the mosquitoes. See, we meant the attraction to be sexual. Turn the mosquitoes into a mating ball and have them rut themselves to death like an antechinus. But something went wrong. They like each other, but not like-like each other, as the kids say. They swarm in black clouds like starlings in ribbons across the sky and come down like a stinging haze on the populace. We have alerts now for when the mosquitoes swarm. Doors locked, windows shuttered, no one leaves their houses. Whole playoffs have been cancelled due to swarms, and I’ve even heard about military operations shut down when the black specks alight on the horizon.

There’s another thing, but I’m not so sure… You remember what I said about the cleverness of systems? Systems are smart. They find the most efficient way of accomplishing what they are set to do. See, humans are so interconnected, their interactions have formed clever systems. Not beneficial to humans mind, that’s part of why we need to work harder to combat global warming, but much smarter than a single human will ever be. A flock of crows is smarter than a single crow. A pack of wolves is smarter than a single wolf.

And when you put together mosquitoes, insects that aren’t normally pack animals?

I hope I’m wrong. I hope these swarms are just temporary and they’ll drive themselves to extinction. I hope the bug zappers and insecticide coating our buildings and extermination teams will eradicate this menace completely. I hope the reason the swarms are laying off is because we’re pushing them back, and not because they’ve learned what the yellow suits and the acrid smell and the glimmering sheen mean and are planning their next movements.

I hope we have this plague under control. I hope we haven’t unleashed a new monster.

Another one where I sort of gave up. Any plot I considered attaching to this seemed too much like several of my previous. This was inspired by an actual proposed plan to modify mosquitoes to curb malaria and also a bit by the aesthetics of 28 Days Later.