Tag Archives: Pandora

There are moments where we are all contemplating it, what if I was alone in the neighbourhood (get work done), what if I was alone in this mall (no queues), what if I am alone in this area (quiet), the list goes on and we have all had these moments. Nothing bad, we merely needed a moment. Yet some have a much larger need. Eco terrorists, extremists and so on. We also have a good degree of extinction movies and my issue is that in these cases (with a few exceptions) it is glued together on the premise of the averting hero. One such exception is Contagion by Steven Soderbergh. It is a clinical view of how bad tit could get and 10 years later we see COVID, the movie is a little more pessimistic yet all the markers seem to apply and it got me thinking. What happens when an eco terrorist sees his (or her) species become extinct, how angry could that person get? So what happens when that person decides to do something about it? Governments make the claim and they are getting us nowhere, but this person sets a new premise. As such I got to think on how that person could succeed. I took the DNA of one woman, one man and one female Bobono and I came up with a new spliced DNA (see image), this is as good as keynote would give it to me and as I have no access to Mathlab, this will have to do. It is merely a premise to a story mind you. 

This DNA virus would be 100 times more efficient than COVID, eradicating 96%-98% of the entire population, but in a stage where we pretend it could happen, what if it plays out, not unlike a story that Dutch writer Anne de Vries wrote in 1951 in her story of Journey Through the Night which is a WW2 story. I loved that book when I was a kid, it was a great book to read and the settings stayed with me. Now it is not in four parts, but three. The start of the unleashing, the ravaging of the disease and the aftermath. A story that gives us close to a decade (or two) on how it all unfolds. How the disease is left to the greed driven and left to the academics, the eco terrorist had done its homework and like the chest of Pandora, someone ends up opening it. Yet nothing happens and the people looking at it find nothing and that was exactly how it was intended to be, the five boxes are sent and four end up getting opened. The infected are unaware of what they had wrought and as they travel from place to place they become the infectors, from 5 spots we get to 25, then 125 and close thereafter close to two million infection spots, the point of no return has been reached and as people go on with their daily life people start getting sick, but at first there are no indications of what is wrong. Cases of Bloom’s and Werner’s syndromes get out of hand, they are moving from one in millions to one in 10,000 and there are other changes as well, explosions of cancer cases all over the globe and it takes a while before someone decides to look into genetic testing. The deed is done and as people are transferring it through touching things, through handshakes and other means, the population is infected before anyone has a real clue what is going on. So whilst we look at some crowd images and wonder ‘Who would be this stupid’ (well, they obviously), we start seeing that it is already too late, the eco terrorist got his or her wish.

As we see stupid people panic and others in the dark on what is going on, we see a much larger stage for part 2, how governments are in hiding, how politicians try to get to that isolated place, all whilst they cannot tell whether they or a family member is infected, as cities die off over the term of years we see the move into part three where the few surviving members are wondering how to survive, a planet with all the goods there reduced to a population of 253,000,000. Suddenly the tailor, the doctor, the farmer and the butcher are worth their weight in gold in any community. 

And that gets us to part 3 which I cannot yet tell as I have been focussing on part 1, the issues leading to part 2 are clear, the parts in part 3 less so. Yet the foundation of a story is set, the foundation of a premise exposing the useless factor of a stakeholder is naught. So whilst we look at some source giving us ‘how a narrow focus on air pollution limits can backfire’, as far as I could tell, none of them took a look at the EEA report from last year and took a hard look at the 147 locations causing 50% of ALL pollution, so can anyone consider that premise? 147 is a real number, an environmental agency gave us that and the media ignores it. They do not attack it, they do not question it, they ignore it. Why is that? And is it then any wonder that someone will think “If 98% of all the people are dead the pollution goes away as well”? It is the premise to a larger story, one the stakeholders do not want to hear about, because in the end they are merely unofficial lobbyists to those who decide where to spend their money and where to keep their profits. 

A stage we enabled and now that it is here, too many are in doubt of what to do next. Me, I merely write stories, like I come up with new games, new TV series and new movies. My mind is creative what others do with it is not my concern.