It started off so admirably. People around the world banding together, facing a common enemy each asshole could agree was more of a threat than their neighbor. Friendships were tested. Bonds broken and reforged over the blazing embers of combat. Then we won. That was it. Everyone go home. If you were enemies before then maybe go back to doing that.
War’s over. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t fight here.
No one wanted to say what those things had been, but it was hard to ignore. I mean, back in the Gulf War, we weren’t exactly precious about double-tapping a camel jockey who wasn’t definitely a combatant, but at least those fellas had eyes; and limbs. I get it, no war is necessarily good, but facing these pulsing miasmas made shooting home grown humans seem somehow wholesome.
As a species we never fully established that it had been a true war. Some people thought “invasion” was a good catch-all label, but those quivering phantoms seemed all but oblivious to our tanks and battleships. They would wander, several feet off the gound, through the various theatres of war only occasionally causing brief and violent pops of destruction along their paths. Some classified footage of the Battle of Panama apparently showed one of the creatures gently undulating like a jellyfish directly through a submarine and then flinching when the vessel detonated. It was like they didn’t know they were killing us, or that we were even there.
Some hippie nut-jobs said the M.B.s (or meebees as we soldiers called them) were a sort of large scale collection of oversized, deadly white blood cells that had originated from the earth’s core; that their lackadaisical rempage was the autoimmune response of a dying world. We figured as long as we could shoot, slice or burn them that was our necessary knowledge covered. Who cared where they had come from? But I was saying about after we won.
It wasn’t a victory that brought the world together. The fighting and surviving had done that. Winning the “war” seemed to have created a void in each person that slowly ate away at their minds until recounting war stories weren’t just their only happy moments, but their only lucid ones. It was like our very past had been infected and only our memories of the meebees were safe from deletion by disease. When the first new history book to contain the events of the meebee war was published, a public hungry for details on the only moments of their lives that had mattered were only slightly shocked to see the meebee war was the only event discussed.
Some people vaguely remembered some very important documents being signed near North America’s East coast and that another “person on person” war had been involved. There were also tales of a South America, though East and West America were never discussed. We all started passing tales like notes in a grade school class. We weren’t sure why we were being so coy and secretive, but discussing anything not directly related to the M.B.s felt dangerous; like something was keeping a record of what we chose to pass on and its disappointment and retribution were to be feared.
It’s hard keeping records of something like this since the whole issue is the gradual rotting away of knowledge, but the last bit we’ve been able to hold onto is that something is out there across the water. Too far to be seen or heard, but many of us feel the memory in our bones even as our minds fail to recount it. Someone may even be standing on that opposite shore right now, squinting into the fog and wondering which side of this ocean will forget the other first. The sad thing is it doesn’t matter. None of it does. Whatever those overgrown amoeba did to us stuck and it’s not coming of. We’re done. I’d like to say humanity had a good run, but even if the meebees hadn’t sleepwalked through our most fearsome military technology and infected all our minds with their indifference, people were never going to go the distance. If it hadn’t been this it owuld have been something else and someone else would be writing this letter. Anyway, I hope this finds you well. I should reach you before the next half moon, wind permitting, and I think we have a lead on another pre-M.B. repository with functioning data slates.
I hope this is all worth it. It’s for her really. When she grows up the only thing I want here to forget is why, as she says, everyone always seems to be frowning, even on their birthdays. I’m going to go check on Darryl. He was supposed to cinch that sail, but I’m hearing a lot of weird sounds coming from the deck. When I get up there he’s better be dead or knee-deep in pirate treasure. I’ll drop this in the usual spot and await your signal.
Remember stay safe, stay vigilant and never forget. . .
