The Seed - A Story

I think it was yesterday, but I am not too sure. I was talking with my cousin who had come visiting me; not really talking, but grazing various issues, as you generally do when you have made up your mind to go but are not really sure when.

All of a sudden he said that we human beings think we are on top of the evolution tree, but it is not a fact. He opened my eyes, really. Because he followed it up by saying, if all the cell phones failed, and the airplanes crashed, we will find it very difficult to survive like this.
We are all getting more and more dependent on medicine to survive. Suppose something happened so that the medicines can’t be distributed properly, or some madman took over the world, and outlawed the production and distribution of medicine, what will happen to the human race?

He says that about ninety nine point nine percent of our genes won’t be passed on, however selfish they are. The only genes that would get passed about would be that of the madman, who would ensure that he got the proper medicines for him and his children.

So the most selfish gene survives, I said.

That is wrong, he replied. The medicine of the present day is not like that in the past. Knowledge of that sort is not easy to come by. It needs a large pool of people to maintain the health of the unfittest Homo sapiens. In about three of four generations, the children of that selfish dictator, he said, would mount the thermometer on surgical cotton, and worship it with a garland of capsules. Then the great God, Hippocrates will fail, and humanity will be wiped out.

What about the selfish gene? I asked him, it ought to survive. It always knows how to do that.

May be, said my cousin, who is an avid reader of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, you should listen to my story.


SEEDS

Molwick, the Archdeacon of BleeterWelterLabs, frowned. He didn’t like what he saw before his eyes.

There, very much before his eyes, lay the mold of Spirofyfum CocciLunge Bettisplurgyta. It was of an unusual odour, an odour he hated to inhale. There was some contamination, and the malodorous mold seemed to sneer at him, what with its pale purple spores.

Molwick need not have frowned, for within a month, scientists all over the world of the Planet Cymbal, joined him in frowning, and their frowns did not clear sooner than that of Molwick.
For in Bingerland, suddenly all milk turned into reddish curds.

In Matawabe, those who ingested the grishorn fruit were disoriented, as if they were drunk.

In Gerbsland, the green fields of the crop Pylliopiran, displayed astonishing behaviour. When the distant Microwave Towers of the Pleizaidy Power Plant discharged the surge of Power in a boom not audible to human ears, the Pyllopiran Flowers turned towards Pleizaidy, and bobbed about in the winds as if rocked by some urgent song.

All perplexing.

The Archdeacons of the Planet Cymbal, held animated conferences, visited one another, published reams of papers and bound them in volumes that were consigned to the dark, cavernous stacks of the university libraries.

They went some way further, only when some bot like structure landed smack on top of the telescope on Mount Mrkaclkrin Observatory, and before the astonished eyes of their Astronomers, grew into a thick film which reflected light.

Their knowledge received a fillip when, some hours later, the radio antennae of the Temple of Lord Bhuyrava grew spores which improved the audio reception by an unimaginable extent.
And when the latest version of xPod was released, the mystery was solved.

Jules Frigherz Lai, who in the city of Kertynhia, had bought his xPod after standing in the head of a queue of 75000 people for a very patient 223 days, had run out of food and water and was in a dehydrated state. However, he was the first to get the xPod in his city. Demented with happiness, he stumbled out of the store, waving about his jewel of xPod to frenzied cheers of adulation.

His face was on every channel and he had his three minutes of fame, during which, speechless from hunger and thirst, he displayed the full gamut of emotions, as hundreds of questions were thrown at him, and lights flashed from hundreds of cameras and he heard the whirr of hundreds of video recorders.

When Jufer, as he was popularly known to his friends, got home, he assembled his deliriously admiring friends, and plugged the xPod to his PC.

But alas, after playing the theme song and label of xPod, the screen of the PC dissolved to display waves of dots washing over its tiny pixels.

Jufer received good-natured jeers. He and everyone knew, the xPod had been infected with a virus.

Rashij Bhuchara, who was the hardware man among them, took off his sweatshirts, and sat down to rewire the PC.

And after a long time of fifteen minutes, when Bhuchara switched on the TV, mayhem broke, and spread over Planet Cymbal within six hours.

For in that xPod, which had been infected by the mycrypod of the latest version of the iPod that had been embedded in the brain of a teenager in Planet Earth was a Cymbal Shattering News, which the youngster, in a belated return to sanity, had downloaded from the BBC News.

When all the Archdeacons of Planet Cymbal gathered together with the intelligence they had mustered from the infected xPod, they knew this:

Planet Earth was located in a galaxy many a mile distant from them.

The Planet Earth had been driven by technology and insanity.

The inhabitants of Planet Earth realized their insanity only when their doom had grown very near.

And in a grand act of insanity, egged on by PProffessor RRichhard DDawkkins, who had in turn been egged on by MMastter RRichhard DDawkkins, Grand Dictator of the Selfish Genes, the Scientists of Planet Earth had decided to protect the Selfish Gene.

They had liberated the Selfish Gene from the casement of human body, and put it in a Mill of Gene Replication, where protected from the vagaries of human will and divine weather, it spliced and replicated the Selfish Genes, and spewed them into space, and continued to spew for all eternity to come.

Entrenched within tiny, invisible bots, the Selfish Genes had traveled and had found a home in Planet Cymbal.

This the learned Archdeacons deciphered, and when they had deciphered and their knowledge was complete, they all gathered together, and with an informed public, took the only choice available to them, and took it unanimously.

Seven days later, the citizens of Planet Cymbal washed themselves clean, and after inoculating themselves with suitable antiselfishgenes, they all crowded into suitably scrubbed airships, and though with a heavy heart, but with a nimble feet, abandoned their beloved Planet Cymbal to the machinations of the Selfish Genes.