The Empty Cage

From the Desk of Mark Tipton, Ph.D, Eng.D,

R&D Micron Pharmacuticals

We are not responsible but we are not innocent. I am not asking for forgiveness.

Our company goals have always been altruistic ones. We wanted to find cures for rare diseases that other pharmaceuticals found too unprofitable to pursue. We mass-produced common medicines so that their low-price points would bring affordability to the marketplace. We researched testing parameters for diseases that were previously undetectable until they were far advanced. We felt good about what we were doing here. We wanted to change the world. Look at us now.

I can see on my security screen that it’s a beautiful day outside. It seems so innocuous. The sun shines normally as if it’s not overlooking the burned remains of a once vibrant city. The air around us seems mostly clear now but the invisible subatomic particles are most definitely moving rapidly, continuing their destruction. The inviting pools of water have strange biological agents in them, the ground is covered in chemicals. Any humans that are still left are hiding in bunkers or makeshift shelters. I can’t imagine any other life forms out there.

I remember drawing a heart in the sand on my first date with Sandra. She was taken somewhat aback by my confidence that we would be married someday. I had no doubt. Thankfully, I managed to convince her of the same a few months later and our lives ever since were blissfully wonderful in every way.

I had purchased a heart-shaped locket for the anniversary of that day. I found it in one of the antique shops Sandra is so fond of. The locket was made out of white gold with delicate little gold flowers encrusted with even smaller sparkling stones. It was someone’s heirloom once. The woman who sold it to me said there was a backstory to the necklace but I wasn’t interested in hearing it at the time.

Now that I have a lot of time on my hands, I’d be curious to know more about the necklace. I wonder about the last person who wore it and where she stood in with the cascade of events that led to biological warfare and radiation devices being randomly detonated. I hope she had peacefully left this world before all the devastation began. I spend hours thinking about many things I had never even considered before, the connections and the strange coincidences.

My wife and I had met a surf-themed restaurant along the California coast. I was there putting together sound equipment for my friend’s band because his crew was short-handed that day. Sandra was there waiting for a date that never showed. Had two other people shown up for their promised obligations that day, things might have turned out spectacularly different.

I wonder now about the ways others could have intervened in the events that evolved towards our imminent demise. Our planet wasn’t destroyed by one great happening but thousands of sometimes unrelated acts of aggression and unrest. They all intersected at a point of no return. People liked to pretend was one great apocalyptic act or place the blame on someone else but that is not the case. In all the great upheavals of human history, it is never one thing, as much as it tried to be framed as such.

Were there people who stayed home when they should have fought back? So many people were unhappy about the way things were going when the riots started and the fanatics started torching everything. Maybe if others had been more aggressive in quelling the hordes of extremists this could have all been nipped in the bud. Maybe if just one person hadn’t shown up where he was supposed to be a progression of events that followed may not have happened or may have gone another way.

Perhaps if one of the people with the keys to unlock the nuclear devices hadn’t shown up that day the delay might have led to reconsideration by all involved. Maybe if the man dead-set on unleashing a virus into the water supply had gotten a flat tire or been incapacitated with the flu the National Guard could have gotten to the reservoir in time to protect it.

So many people were involved so it would have required an equal number of accidents to get in their way. It may be a little unreasonable to think such things were possible but some of us tried.

My colleague had ties to the leader of the extremist movement. He was a bit simple-minded about her vitriol. No one ever seems to think people really believe the hatred that they spew.

“It’s all just for attention,” he told me. “It’s the outrageous claims that get on TV. She just wants to sell her books.”

I can hardly look at the man now. We are trapped in the same facility, trying to survive on the canned goods myself and a few others knew to stockpile when things started going haywire. Thankfully, it’s a large facility and I have many ways to avoid the man I once admired but now feel both contempt and sympathy for.

This building is something of a fortress with multilayered security and power from a variety of sources. It was designed to keep two different groups of people out - the extremists that wanted to steal what we had so it could be used for nefarious purposes and the animal rights people who felt what we were doing inside was nefarious enough.

The joke is on us, indeed.

I couldn’t believe what I heard when Jeffery came to me that day. He asked me for the Creutzfeldt-Jakob variant we had worked on. It had been dismissed and relegated to secure containment in the basement with the other biologically active viruses we had dismissed.

We had hoped to tweak it and combine it with our other experiment compounds so that it could be used as a cure for Alzheimer’s. The theory held some promise but in the end, all it did was give mild headaches. We had spent a fortune on this project and I knew the upper echelon wanted some way to salvage it.

I thought initially that’s what Jeffery wanted to do when he approached me that day. I don’t know what his thought process was and I was worried about him. Even before the world literally started burning, he had been spending days and weeks living here. I was already becoming distrustful of everyone, actually. Normal, regular people who you think are your friends can turn into psychopaths when they’ve been denied their modern conveniences for a while.

I made sure the variant I gave him was completely benign. I even managed to tweak it so that it could never be used as a delivery vehicle for an attached virus. If someone wanted to use it for something else they would have to put a great deal of effort into the project and only a handful of people were capable of doing so. Three of them worked in this facility.

A few weeks later Jeffery made a point to find me. We had all started to move into the facility, at the time we thought it was only temporary. My wife had been just been murdered; our house set on fire. I was clinging to the necklace that I had kept in my desk, waiting for our anniversary to bring it home. I thought he had come to express his condolences.

The man I felt partially responsible for the end of the world as we knew it, by association with the fanatic calling people to destruction, came by to say that he’d forgiven me and knew I was “just trying to do the right thing.” I had no idea what he'd been up to, I still can't be sure.

The world was on fire, he had invented the match, his girlfriend set the match, and as a result of that, I had nothing of value in my life anymore. Somehow, he thought I needed to be forgiven. Everyone truly had gone mad.

I understand that he didn’t single-handedly start the mayhem of our demise. As much as I’d like to blame his attention-seeking girlfriend, I can’t say it was just her alone. The human race liked to believe we were in control. We navigated our destiny and we guided ourselves but with everyone sharing those beliefs, anything that happened on a global scale was the result of thousands of independent movements. We could only hope that the motivators of all those movements were for our betterment and our advancement.

There was a time when I thought people were mostly good. I included those of us here in that assessment. We made drugs and treatments for the less fortunate. What were we really doing? We were just doing our jobs and trying to turn a profit at some point. Sure, some of our intentions were good, but was it enough?

Some of the others locked in our secure facility still have hope. They continue to work on scientific ideas that might help explain and may try to mitigate the depths humanity is capable of descending towards. I no longer can join them in such foolish optimism.

With all this newfound time on my hands, I’ve been able to truly consider what contemptible beings we really are. As I write this, I am surrounded by the now-empty cages of thousands of lab animals. Guilty of nothing nearly as awful as the things their more intelligent captors were, they lived in their tiny, barren jails being poked and prodded and yes, tortured. We gave them nary a thought because we felt the ends justified the means. We used their docile nature against them, the most gregarious of crimes attributed to humanity.

I can’t believe I’ve aligned my thoughts with those of the animal liberation people I once mocked. They were correct to question our unqualified right to dominion over the planet. After all, look at what we have done. Aside from my alliances with their philosophy, I wish we hadn’t been so successful in keeping them out. This could have all been prevented if they had done what they wanted, even though their motivation was for something different.

We are all suffering now. I can’t help but feel we deserve this.

My beloved Sandra is gone, as is my entire family. Anyone still here is basically alone. We have our alliances but it will never be as it was before. Our need to dominate has killed us all. There is no one thing, one person, one movement to blame. All of us share in this disaster. All of us could have done more. I am not asking for forgiveness.

All I ask of whoever finds this in the future, please understand that some of us tried. And most importantly, learn from our mistakes.