At what point does a parasite go from being nothing to something we have to kill?
Is it when we can feel it?
Is it when we are wounded by it?
Or is is when it develops enough sentience to argue for its life?
These were the questions asked of us when we found that our city was a living, feeling being. Our legends called them giants and never mentioned when they stopped walking among us, only that they had once and gradually became no more.
Its head is tucked under its arms, what we knew as the south and west hills and the great valley between them. That's where its voice came rumbling from, shaking the ground and killing eighteen people in the process who either fell to their deaths or were so distracted that they drove into pedestrian-heavy paths.
It begged us to leave, said were killing it slowly. Apparently it was stuck, wedged so deeply into the ground that it would likely die soon regardless of us, as it continued to grow into a space that was already starting to suffocate it.
We certainly weren't helping it die in peace, not with the way we dug into its stony skin to build houses and roads or our non-stop movement and noise and the general chaos that our lives created for it. We were the fleas whose heads remained after the bodies had been plucked off, slowly rotting into its flesh and leaving infectious sores in our wake.
In our panic, in our cruelty we just ignored it. We pretended it was rogue earthquakes and not the broken cries of a creature whose skin we burnt and salted on a daily basis. We never gave much thought as to what we'd do when it eventually died.
Our city is a rotting corpse and the flies are coming soon.
Is it when we can feel it?
Is it when we are wounded by it?
Or is is when it develops enough sentience to argue for its life?
These were the questions asked of us when we found that our city was a living, feeling being. Our legends called them giants and never mentioned when they stopped walking among us, only that they had once and gradually became no more.
Its head is tucked under its arms, what we knew as the south and west hills and the great valley between them. That's where its voice came rumbling from, shaking the ground and killing eighteen people in the process who either fell to their deaths or were so distracted that they drove into pedestrian-heavy paths.
It begged us to leave, said were killing it slowly. Apparently it was stuck, wedged so deeply into the ground that it would likely die soon regardless of us, as it continued to grow into a space that was already starting to suffocate it.
We certainly weren't helping it die in peace, not with the way we dug into its stony skin to build houses and roads or our non-stop movement and noise and the general chaos that our lives created for it. We were the fleas whose heads remained after the bodies had been plucked off, slowly rotting into its flesh and leaving infectious sores in our wake.
In our panic, in our cruelty we just ignored it. We pretended it was rogue earthquakes and not the broken cries of a creature whose skin we burnt and salted on a daily basis. We never gave much thought as to what we'd do when it eventually died.
Our city is a rotting corpse and the flies are coming soon.
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