After the explosion, everybody began to mill about, comparing notes. Some folks tried out their pet suspicions on others, attempting to ascertain whether others were, in general, more or less perceptive than themselves. It became a kind of game, suddenly… where everyone was floating theories. Vocal advocates arose, and soon complicated debates were emerging alongside open physical violence. Factions began to appear, and they armed themselves. Wars broke out. Then, as if that were insufficient insult, profiteers showed up, and happily added their peculiar poison to the cocktail.

And when you were born, you were baptized in this sewage, right along with whatever ‘holy water’ you might have been dipped in. Would have probably been easier and more honest if they had dipped you in offal. You might then have at least acquired some peculiar bacterial symbionts along with a taste for the culture that would become the ornately magnificent enemy that would rapaciously impress its thrall upon you and all you adored without remorse, or even awareness.

At least then you’d have understood that the flavor of tomorrow wasn’t utopia, but blood and shit. At least then it would not have been so confusing when the unicorns turned to crap, and the fangs of the parasite broke right through the projection to sink themselves fatally into the heart of everything you ever loved or hoped for.