Elliot Oti

It was morning. The sky was partly clouded, the temperature just bearable in short sleeves. I sat at a wooden table next to the veranda railings and looked out at the scenery. As seemed to be common in these parts, aside from keeping the grass short the grounds were largely untended. The only other building visible from where I sat was a wooden hut some distance away. The landscape consisted of patches of short grass, rust-red dirt paths, and the odd clump of what passed for trees here.

The wind quickened and the sky grew dark. In the space of minutes it was clear that it was going to rain. The first raindrops sneaked in under the veranda roof and brushed my arm. I briefly debated taking my drink inside but the air did not get any colder. Instead, I shifted my chair slightly back from the railing and watched.

Within minutes the light shower had turned into a furious downpour. There was not much wind, and what looked like a wall of water fell down vertically. The grass and dirt turned rapidly into pools of reddish mud.

There was a sudden, sharp crack like thunder. It was quickly followed by another one, and then yet more, resulting in a sound like a stream of firecrackers being set off. It came from a cluster of trees some distance off. My surprise turned into fascination as I watched the trees firing off salvos of what seemed to be sparks along the spines of their thick, waxy, fern-like fronds. They were discharging spores high into the air. I could see the dark ejecta being shot forcefully into the sky, howitzer-like.

The discharges continued almost incessantly for ten minutes. At one point the racket the trees were producing was deafening. They were pounding burst after burst along their spines upwards into the pouring rain, filling the air above them with black powder, and littering the grounds around them with split open grayish pods. One pod actually landed on my table and I looked at it briefly with mild curiousity before throwing it back into the rain.

The din diminished at about the same time that the rainfall began to lessen noticeably. As is usual in these climes, within minutes the skies were dry again and the clouds had passed, leaving flooded fields behind churning with water, sooty gray pods, and reddish mud. The air smelled fresh and clean, but I knew that within an hour the ubiquitous muddy odour would reassert itself.

Over the years he had learned to micro nap while driving. He would settle into an easy speed of around a hundred an hour, on highways that were not too busy. For hours on end he would continuously alternate between dozing off for a second or two, and then waking up up for a couple of seconds, to automatically and half consciously scan the road. If corrective actions were needed - braking, or avoiding veering onto the shoulder, he would slide briefly into wakefulness, do what had to be done for as long as necessary, and then sink back into micro sleep.

It never bothered him. As the years went by he found he could dream while driving. At first he would dream that he was driving, sitting behind the wheel of a car similar to the one he was in while awake, driving on a road similar to the one he was on while awake. He found it increasingly difficult to tell when he was sleeping and when he was actually awake, which steering manoeuvre or braking action was taken in dreamland and which on the road. After a while this also ceased to worry him. Whatever he did seemed to work just fine: if for instance he dreamed he had to ease off the gas in order to match speeds with the car in front of him, it invariably turned out to be the correct manoeuvre to make in reality. His subconscious had grown so skillful in weaving the traffic conditions of the road he was driving on into the storyline of his dreams, that he could essentially steer the car while deep in REM sleep.

He never had an accident, never received a ticket.

I walked into the dark, warm, musty hallway. It was slightly cooler inside than out in the harsh midday sun. There were a number of squatters who lived in the stairwells and hallways. In rags or torn clothing, lying on meager bundles of their possessions or on straw laid over the bare, cracked, concrete floors. Their number was indeterminate: most faces were constant from day to day, but there was also a small but steady turnover: people left, new ones came.

It was quiet in the hallway. The three I could see seemed listless and robbed of their energy. Just before the stairwell lay a young man. I had difficulty judging his age: anywhere between fifteen and twenty five. He lay motionless, as if asleep, but when I got closer I saw that he was awake. He had once been muscular but now verged on the painfully thin. He seemed to have no energy at all to do anything other than lie there and breathe. No talking, no fidgeting, no movement.

Further off were two men sitting upright; they had been talking quietly and desultorily but stopped when I passed by. My presence seemed to take away what little animus they still had for conversation. I could not shake off the thought that one or two squatters, especially the young one lying down, were so close to death that the odds were somebody would not wake up the next morning.

I considered going out and buying a crate of soft drinks to distribute among the squatters. Liquids and sugars would surely help some survive a few extra days, I thought. I did not know if hunger was the only problem facing the squatters: typhoid and autoimmune diseases were common as well. Soda would do little to help that. But it was an expensive, inefficient way to offer help, almost insulting - offering cake to the starving - and would mark me out even more than was currently the case: foreign appearance, healthy, lodging with my father in an apartment in the building. Though most inhabitants of the stairwell lacked the drive and energy to rob or harm me, I had no desire to attract fitter denizens from outside either. I knew also that my father would not assist in this endeavor, inured as he was to the suffering around him which he was in any case powerless to assuage in any meaningful way, even if he had the desire to. Going out with cash and walking back with consumables would mark me on the streets as a prime target.

I climbed to the first landing and knocked on the door of my father's apartment. He opened the door and let me in.

I walked out into the courtyard. The night was damp and chilly. I could see my breath condense in front of me. I walked across the stone tiles and leaned against a chest-high granite wall. I looked upwards. The sky was dark blue, covered in patchy swathes of translucent clouds. There might have been a full moon hidden behind the clouds but I could not see it. The stars caught my attention. They looked wrong. They were orange. Constellations of larger orange stars hung fixed in the sky. Between them, like tiny bubbles in a stream, clusters of smaller stars flowed, jewelled frog spawn caught in an invisible current.

"The stars look wrong" I said to X. "They're much too close. Some are moving too fast. These aren't stars"

X grunted, not particularly interested.

I watched as two swarms of thousands of tiny orange points eddied around fixed clusters of stars. They seemed almost autonomous. Like cosmic creatures, or piloted vessels. Like a swarm of fireflies.

I hurried on. X was already a dozen steps ahead.

I brought my newly bought computer home. I wanted to test the graphics card, so I placed the computer on a table next to my small portable colour TV and connected the television to the TV-out port.

I switched on the TV. The picture was clear, though the sound was poor. A reporter was interviewing a bedridden man in a dark, dank room, lit primarily it seemed by the light the gopher was carrying behind the cameraman. The man was in his late twenties or early thirties, with dark ungrayed hair and a rapidly receding hairline. He appeared to be in considerable discomfort and clutched his blanket close about him. The camera zoomed in on him, and I could see rivulets of sweat pouring down his face. The reporter was asking him questions, which he answered, but he did not seem completely lucid to me.

The cameraman must have noticed something, for while the reporter was talking, the camera zoomed in on the man's pillow. In the poor light it at first looked like the pillowcase was greyish with some kind of floral pattern. As the camera got closer, however, I saw that the casing was drenched in sweat and stained with streaks of dark, damp mould. Something, a slight movement caught my eye, and must have caught the cameraman's eye too, for he brought the focus to bear on the top edge of the pillow, just under the man's neck.

To my considerable disquiet I saw four or five maggots wriggling mindlessly on the pillowcase, and realised that underneath the blanket the man must have had humid bedsores infested with them, without a doubt causing his obvious pain and distress. I wondered how long he had lain there untended, and why he had been so poorly taken care of.

What would a world where humans are cannibals look like? I'm not particularly interested in ritualistic cannibalism, or cannibalism of enemies etc, but a world in which humans are consumed for their meat as we would consume cattle.

• Probably a shortage of large mammals, no domesticated animals
• Humans would be a main source of protein
• No domesticated animals means slave labor
• Possibly humans kept in similar conditions to cattle as well
• Humans as cattle would be in the more "civilized" areas
• Less civilized areas would essentially be opportunistic barbarism

What would people evolve to be, if it goes on long enough?

• Slight preference for exo-cannibalism i.e. eating people outside one's clan
• Homo anthropophagus children are particularly vulnerable, therefore would grow and become independent much faster than homo sapiens
• I don't think large social structures will survive very well. I think the city state will be the largest unit, abstracting away the messy business of direct cannibalism into human husbandry
• Mostly the family, the clan, the village as social units
• Humans might evolve into smart, canny sociopaths
• People in city states would be seen as more effete than the country folk

Other behaviors

• Poisoning oneself to make the flesh inedible (leading to methods of treating poisoned flesh like we do cassava, or hakarl)