There’ve been thousands of plagues in recorded human history. Tens of thousands we can never know about because there wasn’t writing yet, or their texts couldn’t survive the ravages of ages, or because an entire civilization died out before someone could translate their record into words folks understand today. History’s like that. A scroll written upon, scraped and whitewashed then used to record the new feudal lord’s lies. The academical name for such a text is a “palimpsest”.
Sometimes we can rebuild ideas lost to vanity and rot, much of the time they are as recoverable as fog on a bathroom mirror, once you shut the hot shower down. But this plague was different.
The plague of boils, the plague of leprosy, the plague of coughing until your lungs pop, they’re all terrible for any given individual, but they did not exactly change the ways this world works.
People die of all kinds of awful things all the time. The pain of surviving those sorts of horrors are quickly papered-over by a grim meathook reality of surviving the every-day “new normal”.
Our minds become palimpsests, a body’s drive to keep going, spreading white-out on the pain. Life goes on because that’s all life knows how to do. A couple generations of breeding and the folks who believe themselves in control have all the serfs they need once more and once again.
For labor, for cannon-fodder, for beating up in the streets for the feeling of power they all need.
But this plague didn’t work like that at all. It did not make limbs fall off or double you over in pain until you died or liquify your eyes or anything from a heavy-metal album cover like those.
The plague that broke the world as anyone had ever know it didn’t kill one single human being directly, though it led to many deaths indeed. Not one weeping sore, not one snotty nose. All it did was force those infected to always tell their truth as they understood it. No one understood why a disease would do such a thing to a person. Magical, bioengineered weapon, aliens, who knew? Frankly, in the chaos that ensued, there was little time to coordinate the research effort.
The monsters were compelled to admit they were monsters and everything fell apart soon after. Even the well-meaning people who’d convinced themselves the monsters played for the ‘right’ teams and whose ends justified their monstrous means had to hear their idols cruelty laid bare.
Could no longer pretend digital codes were forms of exchange. Could no longer pretend there were some groups of people better or worse than the others. Could no longer feign ‘certainty’.
Interestingly, eventually a class of leaders full of confidence rose again and cowed the largest mass of human beings back into order again. We congealed back into followers because folks thought, huh, they couldn’t be lying. Unless they had a cure and could lie about the lies again.
And of course they did.
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