The Plague: A Phantastical Speculation

I’m the first of my kind.

I mean, it’s been a long time since anyone was born like me.

Maybe by the time you’re reading this, there won’t be births at all—or only a very few, in an occasional pocket of the world that, by some miracle, hasn’t been touched by the Plague.

I was a miracle baby even then. I looked like my parents. I had my dad’s gray eyes, my mom’s straight nose, and a smile with a bit of them both. My hair was a little curly like my mom’s hair, but thick like my dad’s. When they looked at me, they saw themselves reflected back. It gave them constant delight, bewilderment, and surprise.

Maybe you don’t even know what I’m talking about?

Did you know there used to be a time, long ago, when a human dam and sire used to raise their own offspring? I know, it seems impossible to think of now. But it happened.

It was simple then—a man and a woman got married and, sometimes not more than a year later, they were raising their very own baby boy or girl. Many, many centuries ago, these couples would sometimes have more than a dozen children! Unbelievable.

Later on, though, they stopped marrying only one person for their entire lives, and married two or three other people over a few years or many years, and had kids with those new spouses, too. After the remarrying got too expensive and taxing, and all the kids came out of those divorces with too many problems, they just started having sex with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

Dropping the remarriage routine and the worthless expenses of long-time commitment—things became much more fluid and free. Even then, if they didn’t use certain pills to stop conception or kill the fetus before it emerged into the bright world, many of them still had children of their own, too—though often one of the partners would move on when the child was small, or even when it was still just a fetus. 

Perhaps my story is beginning to sound more familiar now?

Of course you’ve read about this next part—when they started taxing the married couples that were left (as they were the only “legal” families that existed) so that eventually it got to the point where no one ever got married at all.

It was a merry-go-round. And at each stop, everyone got off and got on a new gondola.

That’s when it began to happen. Well, two things happened at once—but it was the merry-go-round that started it all. Everyone started adopting other people’s children.

At first it was a beautiful thing—families taking in the children of parents who had died or couldn’t take care of them. But then the authorities started realizing: there was more to this adoption craze than mere goodwill.

Not long after the establishment of the steady and cheerful merry-go-round, the Plague first reared its head.

It had cunningly kept itself under wraps for a very long time. Its name was smothered and whispered, hidden and shoved into dusty journals and publications that nobody bothered to read, which allowed it to consume and rage and devour unchecked for a few centuries without anybody really noticing it. A foolish few tried to speak—and were savagely silenced, ridiculed into mockery and oblivion.

Before the authorities realized what was happening, it was too late. The Plague had lodged itself into our society, never to be cured or removed.

We don’t really think about it now…the fact that our world used to be different. We forget that we caused it—the barrenness and infertility. We went around on that merry-go-round so many times, that it broke.

At first it was only a few thousand who couldn’t have children. Then it rose to a million, until finally—no one could conceive or bear babies of their own at all. An entire generation disappeared before it could begin to twinkle in its creators’ eyes.

The adoption craze expanded into a war—rich, powerful nations fighting over the children of poor, distant regions. Countries still under the sway of dogmatic religions that promoted abstinence and fidelity to one person, or a few. Desperate for food and water, medicine or a roof over their heads, parents in these lonely places sold their children to brokers and traders, who sent them to adoption agencies, who gave them to others desperate for a child to raise and cherish and adore.  

Of course small minorities screamed and fought for things to change, to be different, but the waves of the Plague were too strong. If the rebels refused to succumb—their children didn’t.

The merry-go-round essentially stopped being a merry-go-round, then. And it became…

How to describe how things are now? Honestly?

Desperate…

Dying…

City after city brimming with nursing homes, and only a few dwindling day cares.

We’re all waiting to die. It’s only a matter of time before we run out of other people’s children to be taken down by the Plague, and everyone knows it. Still, they say, where there’s life, there’s hope! And that’s all still quite a while away. Medicine has improved, despite its inability to cure the Plague, and it does a pretty good job extending our lives as far as it can.   

There are several hundred thousand of us left who are young.

So, you’re probably wondering…who on earth am I?

I’m a human, like you. But like I said, I was a miracle baby. My parents never got the Plague, and I hope I never get it either.

A simple fix, really—only nobody wanted (or wants) to know about it. They’re still turning and turning and turning around that now-shattered merry-go-round.

You see, my parents got off the ride.

And you can, too.

If you do, there might still be a chance for a few of us. Maybe—who knows?—we can start the world again.