Lady Gaia blew the sleep sand from her dust encrusted eye.
Rippling verdantly she turned, serene in what she felt
and why.
Intrigued she watched as her leaf-locks
dis-re-dis-reappeared
in pixel squares. She raised a brow and thought, ‘That’s
weird’.
She sought Ra’s malady-monger opinion.
He squinted and told her to stop thinking
about string theory and quantum bunkum
and try to get more sleep.
So she ignored it as best she could,
although she began
to feel strange.
Her friends were kind enough not to mention
her face was becoming quite changed.
Malodorous gases clouded her vistas,
she developed orbital detritus.
Even poor Luna’s surface wasn’t spared;
a sad case of environmentitis.
Jupiter came concerned for his friend
and of the terrisy he might catch,
raised the alarm and Lady Gaia
to Ra was swiftly dispatched.
With somberly professional flair
and a touch of harsh halitosis
he pronounced what she was scared to hear,
a terminal diagnosis.
“I’m sorry, my dear. It is clear you have caught
an industrialized case of the humans.
There are things we can try, but to you I can’t lie;
The prognosis is millennia not aeons.
As a titration resource I’ll give you a course
of anti-anthropotics.
It’ll slow them a while, come back when you feel
a definite change in your tropics.”
So Gaia took the microbes with great sad apprehension
and loosed them through her fleas and on her water’s surface
tension.
The first wave seemed to go quite well
and the tooled-up apes retreated
in the face of the poxy buboes swell
and their fruitless attempts to treat it.
Gaia felt buoyed by this seeming improvement
and decided to contact direct
these creatures hell bent on destructive denuding
and persuade them this path to reject.
She consulted humble Roodrelac
The universal mediator.
(his heroism know no bounds.
We’ll discuss his story later).
He inspired her with native thoughts
of harmonic shamanism.
Persuaded her to try his spores
To help improve her vision.
She’d never felt so overwhelmed with new connections
formed
A flood of shared experience and a flickering sense of
divorce.
She returned to Ra: “I’ve found a way! I’ve heard it
really works!
I can guide them through my inner strength and corrupt
their own networks!”
“What quackery! It’s never proven. It’s just the placebo effect
The truth is some planets have natural immunity, or some
we’ve come to suspect.
It’s a treatment nearly no one survives and the physical
costs are most dreadful.
It’s still being tested, it’s not even licensed. It’s
hippy-dippy and experimental.”
“Go on.” Said Gaia, her eye a whirl of desert storm sand concentration.
“They say that within them is coded a course of ultimate
auto-extinction.
Apparently if you encourage their enhanced neuronic
evolution
beyond the pace of their cellular form they will drown in
their self-made pollution.”
Gaia looked shocked.
It hadn’t occurred that she’d have to get worse to get
better.
She wanted to weep
But the glittering hope in her core
Wouldn’t let her.
Now she has fifty year checkups with Ra and he’s writing
a ground breaking study.
Proving conclusively the treatment was real.
We wouldn’t want to prove him wrong.
Would we?
