Starved for Power

How she loathes the night when children are allowed to clog the streets and sidewalks once the sun goes down. In the same way as her own colonies of troops crawl over the territory and devour it, these miniature people are everywhere. Some of them are even disguised as creatures meant to resemble her, as if Her Majesty's large, intimidating insect body could be replicated in the form of a costume.

Queen Meeba watches, propping herself up against a tree, with three of her four sets of legs crossing her body. She has a sense of the immensity of Operation Eat Earthen and of not completing it. She wants to move up the ranks. She feels all the waiting has entitled her to it, but waiting is not working.

What do humans know about delays in rewards? Just look at these children getting treats for no reason.

Door to door, they go, like tiny beggars collecting sackfuls of garbage as though it were treasure. They laugh and talk excitedly, smiling with caramel stuck to their teeth. They compare the weight of their bags and pillowcases full of treats, and the smell of candy corn is heavy in the air. A ruckus is made that's only heard on Halloween.

With one long antenna drawn back like a skilled archer's arrow, Meeba zeroes in and stabs one acorn after another, bringing them back up rhythmically to her mouth and eating them whole. If it's healthy, she must devour it. It's her assignment--both hers and her swarm's--to deplete the earth of its food supply. Whatever is meant to be swallowed into the ground and reproduce itself must be consumed as though it had never existed.

The oak leaves cleanse her palate, and the blades of grass beneath her feet aid her digestion. If you are what you eat, Meeba would be good, pure and truly royal, but her agenda is laden with malice. She seeks to destroy humanity by robbing it of its real nutritional sustenance. Yes, she carries herself with all the glory, gloss and nobility that good health can provide, but her heart wants nothing but to starve the world to death.

"It's light work for me when humans are trained from such a young age to eat what will surely put them in an early grave."

She watches parents and guardians take their charges by the hand and lead them from house to house. She sees the invisible chains around their ankles, linking them together like prisoners of their cravings. Meanwhile, Meeba's exoskeleton glimmers in the moonlight and is as hard as diamonds.

"Let them eat cake!"

It's of little concern to her. Her work affects the true nourishment that the earth provides. She and her hordes are here to devour all that makes the world thrive with good health and long life. Candy can't stand in her way.

"The time will come when there won't be a pumpkin left on the planet to carve," Meeba vows. Crops are showing signs of depletion, and vegetation is getting scarce. The brows of many a farmer are furrowed.

She emits a sound that draws scores of her underlings to her side, and together, they leave the neighbourhood and swarm the night air with their presence until they're in the Sahara Desert.

"Clean it up!"

Meeba orders them to scavenge any living vegetation and close their plant borders for good.

Circling the globe, the insects swoop down to rest for a time on productive areas to complete their task and then rise up to the sky once more to seek out fertile ground elsewhere. What's been planted is infested. If it has grown, it's ripped up by the roots, and if it's feeding a living being, it's swept away by an insatiable and hostile hunger. It's as if Nature has turned a blind eye to those who relied on it for their care and keeping.

One food shopper raises his voice in panic and protests as prices rise. The food supply is diminishing so rapidly that the grocer can't keep his shelves stocked. A news broadcast reports that devastation is hitting more areas than the world can handle. The insects are to blame. The only thing that can be learned about them is that they are responsible for eating everything given as good food and for its production. The insects are so fast that they can only be seen as swarms settling down briefly, then taking off, leaving nothing behind. They are stealthily gobbling the food of the earth. All that's left is what's in people's houses, and that's dwindling fast. What remains is the junk. The processed food. Whatever is man-made and has no nutritional value. This is what the population is living on.

Fast food restaurants remain open all night, and they are hiring people to work around the clock. Factories that make candies and pastries without an iota of healthy ingredients are working nonstop to produce everything fake and not fit for human consumption. And this is a perk for the superbugs because not only will people die of starvation, but also from sickness and disease. The powers of hell have it all figured out. And men are foolish enough to make it easier for them. It's become Halloween permanently, and even children are suffering. People are lethargic, lazy, unable to focus, fat and brain-fogged. Patients who normally would have been released from the hospitals are now dying in them. And none too soon because the beds are needed for the steady influx of new patients with new complaints and bad-food-related illnesses. No one escapes. Not even the exhausted doctors.

Meeba longs for world domination through unrecoverable famine. It's been her all-consuming desire for millennia. She's been in training for so long that she began to think she would never receive orders from her Empress to execute the plan. Meeba fretted over the way people were waking up to healthy eating, saving the planet and cutting out more and more SUGAR. She despised it and loved watching the world devour it by the pounds year after year, only to watch in horror as the trends began to shift in their favour. She couldn't understand the waiting, but she trusted her leader.

"Don't worry, Meeba dear." She waved her wing as though to allay Meeba's concerns. She was far too impressive to be bothered with them.

"Your time, my Queen, has come."

The Empress of Darkness had kept reassuring her, but she was a little irked with Meeba's growing impatience. While Meeba irritated Toxia, the Empress couldn't help but look at her underling affectionately and notice that her increasing anxiety was but a mere reflection of the times beginning to coincide exactly as planned.

What Meeba hadn't been told was that there had to be a slight shift in what the world had known about what bad food was doing to them. There had to be an improvement if the plan was going to be successful. The human population had to enjoy prolonged relief if the Powers relished any satisfaction other than the demise of their targets. But this corruption was a rank higher than Meeba's. She would have to earn her new level of evil.

Now that Meeba had begun the work, she was finally seeing the long-awaited destruction she'd always dreamed of. She loved it. Her antennae were lit up with sensors from kilometres away, and she scoped out anything green, organic or edible.

"Forward, march!" She would command, and minions would obey. It was intoxicating.

"Meeba! I must speak to you," Toxia announced one day. "I have special orders for you. Return for further intelligence."

Meeba lifted herself effortlessly up from the arid ground and, with outstretched black and whirring wings, flew back to the hive. Should she be worried? Or excited?

"Has my work been to your satisfaction?" Meeba, who was gaining experience but still working her way through the thick of such a delicate operation, asked the Empress her question with a hint of insecurity in her voice.

"Yes, Meeba. I'm very pleased!" The Empress smiled wickedly at the Queen, revealing not one or two rows like those under her, but three rows of dentition in varying degrees of sharpness as her smile grew larger and uglier. Incisors, canines, and grinders were all on display for Meeba to admire and bask in their brilliance. She anticipated the words that would pour forth from that mouth--words meant specifically for her!

Toxia circled her lair in deep thought, measuring how best to bring Meeba into the awareness of the crowning achievement of Operation Eat Earthen without alarming her unnecessarily.

"Have you noticed anything peculiar about the village of Longyearbyen in your travels?" She turned her head to the side, keeping it low to watch Meeba's reaction.

"Peculiar? No. It was a mere pit stop for lichen and wildflowers. The grasses and tundra are no more. We left it beautifully barren. The reindeer and arctic foxes are teetering on the brink of extinction. With the marine dive we undertook, the Earth should be rid of polar bears for good!"

Meeba beamed at the memory that flashed through her mind. The small town of Longyearbyen, land of the Midnight Sun, was closest to the North Pole.

Here was the sickening display of the all-powerful tilt of Earth's almighty axis. The extremities of polar day and night kept all eyes fastened to the small town. The aurora borealis, waving and flaring outlandishly, was a hideous exhibition that the planet boasted of. It had majestic glaciers and mountains that posed little to no threat to the armies of eaters. But the oceans were laden with marine life that could potentially be used as food, so the plankton was decimated. Whales, seals and walruses would not survive. It was a personal victory for Meeba.

Toxia listened with pleasure. "Excellent start, my Queen. I am most proud of you!"

"Start?" Asked Meeba. Her dorsal vessel beat against her exoskeleton as panic started to set in. "But there's nothing left, my Empress."

"Au contraire, Meeba, my dear. You missed the pearl in the oyster."

Pearl? Oyster? Didn't we forage the oceans throughout? Toxia must be mistaken! Meeba went through the mental list of data in her decentralized network, scanning the world's surface and drawing a blank as fear started gathering like a storm over the Pacific.

"Your Empress, your Hi-Highness, could you please elaborate? I don't th-think I understand," Meeba stammered.

"It's not so difficult, my dear. You flew over the Seed Vault, that's all."

Meeba heard the word "seed" and managed to squeak out a feeble "What?"

She felt weak in each of her four pairs of legs. Her antennae began crossing over themselves uncoordinatedly and beyond her control. Seed. The word evoked thoughts of growth, nourishment, replenishment, food...FEEDING!

Emperess Toxia sighed. She looked at the trembling Queen and, rather than doubting her, she stood on the faith she'd always had. If such a small area as Longyearbyen could house the Seed Vault, the veritable back-up plan of the world's food supply, surely Meeba had the ability Toxia was silently giving her credit for. She'd invested so much time in Meeba. She didn't have any more to waste on this sudden lack of confidence. The training would pay off. She'd made sure of it. Meeba would see this through. She was caught off guard; that was all.

"I was hoping you'd see it more as a challenge, Meeba dear." The words were contemptuous, but they were heard. Meeba straightened up and gave the Empress her full attention. Toxia pulled up a map of Norway on the cave's wall and, in real time, showed Meeba the corner of a building jutting out of a mountain, covered in a thick layer of snow. It was small, rectangular and easily overlooked. Meeba had missed it, but it's why Toxia believed she could finish the mission.

Meeba didn't remember the Seed Vault. She remembered the location and felt warm and heady. She'd been on top of the world, literally and figuratively. She'd ordered the troops to take a knee. She had joined them for a time of wining and dining, inviting them to savour the meal with her as she'd been drunk with power at the apex of the planet and in the midst of her mission. They had feasted on the juicy, succulent tenderness of all teeming life. They'd drunk ocean water from a goblet. It had been laden with ecologically balancing bacteria aged by millions of years, and that would now be no more. They were savouring the fruits of their labour so far, here where the rest of the world was beneath them. She toasted to their success with the finest of life's libations. "Here's to annihilating the living blue marble and all its inhabitants!" She'd shouted, and everyone had cheered.

For Meeba, it was going to be the biggest write-off when it came time to report to the Empress, and as she relived the moment, her courage returned, and she doubted herself no longer.

In any war, there will be casualties and casualties were found everywhere on the face of the earth. And all over the world, scientists were scooping them up, dissecting them and studying them under microscopes. They were all seeing the same thing, and no one was making any progress or coming to any solid conclusions. Something would have to stand out sooner or later as the death toll continued to rise.

At the University of Florida, Dr. Ignatius "Iggy" Cole pulled out another snack cake from the well-stocked cupboard, unwrapped it, and started chewing as he continued to peer into the lens of the microscope. He hated the metallic taste of the cake in his mouth. His taste buds recoiled and had grown dull from the sugar. He wished he could turn them off completely. It was then that he had a flash of insight. He looked more closely at the cells.

The ingested material had made them healthy, even though they were inhuman. He began to write down his observations:

They are killing us, but indirectly. They are using the food we eat to make us suffer while they enjoy all the goodness of our earth. He made notes of his intuitions and continued to look. Our cells should look a lot like this, or very much like them. We're the ones that goodness is intended for.

He took another bite of the tasteless cake.

If they are depriving us of what belongs in our bodies, why don't we try to counterattack with what they're trying to destroy?

Why not try with what's in our bodies?

He looked away from the microscope and into the distance of his mind. He thought about the cells he was looking at and mentally compared them to human cells. Then he looked again to make sure, as if seeing for the first time what he'd been looking at all along. He then began to write furiously:

These cells don't have any receptors on their membranes for human immunities. Ours are weakened, but if we attempt to inject cells from our microbiomes so as to mutate the fed cells...

And so they did.

The initial experiments successfully yielded the first human pesticide. The fed cells were showing signs of severe DNA mutations.

At the World Health Organization's press conference, Dr. Iggy Cole and his colleagues delivered the news:

"We're not only bigger, but we're also better in every way. All they can do is eat, but we control. With our own human tissue, we have developed an airborne substance that will destroy this pestilence. With the development of Cell-Micromist-5, or CM-5, we will defeat them from within. Our own human bodies are the key components of our survival."

Champagne bottles were uncorked, and as the world and its atmosphere became thick with fog, people had smiles on their faces and laughter in their voices once again.

Once Meeba started noticing the devastation, she didn't waste any time high-tailing it back to the hive's bunker. Troops were systematically dropping dead. Surely any plans for infiltrating the Seed Vault were going to be aborted.

Meeba inquired of the Empress, but her response was calm and calculated, as if she'd already anticipated this.

"My Queen, we're already in."

Meeba was puzzled, a little angry and in awe.

"We infiltrated from without, when the seeds were harvested. They're only waiting for orders to awaken and activate."

How could she have doubted the Empress? The plan had been in the making for so long that its wisdom was almost too ancient for Meeba to fathom. Surely she would be promoted to a higher rank now. Yet the fog remained. It saturated the air. It settled. As the most harmless substance, humanity could continue, and food would grow again.

CM-5 finally seeped so far into the ground that it delved deeply into the hive, and Meeba, Toxia, and the Grand Sovereign Virulus himself were all killed. They were asphyxiated and entombed in the ground they came from. There would be no one to awaken or activate the troops that remained in the Seed Vault.

As the seeds were planted and exposed to the air, the fog would have automatically salvaged them during the planting. The earth was renewed to receive them and grow the world's food once again. Even if the troops had survived and had received their orders, they would have been soldiers incapacitated for life by a fog that was made with the cells of mankind.

Time passed. People got healthier, and the Micromist became more potent. The insects had taken a toll, but humanity had rebounded stronger than before. With a new food supply that came at such a great cost, those who lived to tell about the pandemic did so with a fresh understanding that good health is a gift and food will always mean survival on the deepest level.