Knowledge is usually a curse.
It's a strange cycle. The less you know, the less you care to find out. But the second you get a taste of an answer; you can't stop looking. You start wanting to know everything.
I've spent a lot of time thinking that maybe humanity is just a glitch in the system. If you look at every other creature on this planet, they seem programmed. They have a set of instructions: eat, survive, and reproduce. That's it. They don't ask for a deeper meaning because, for them, there isn't one. They fulfill their purpose and they die.
So why are we different? Why has no one ever stopped to ask the most important question: why were we the only ones who broke the mold?
It feels like an anomaly. We were probably supposed to live within the same boundaries as everything else, staying inside the lines of the "matrix" assigned to every living thing. But we broke out. We became curious. We pushed until we could see what was hiding in the shadows of the unknown.
"Are we alone?"
That's been the big one for as long as we've had the words to ask it. But lately, I've been wondering about the alternative. What if we're not alone? What if there's something out there that knows far more than we ever could? Something that has been watching us this entire time, just waiting.
What happens when we finally satisfy our curiosity and find it? What comes next?
The Safe Heaven.
That's the name they gave to what's left of us. It's where we crawled after something beyond our understanding finally showed itself.
When they arrived, science was worthless. We had nuclear silos and atomic warheads, but all that fire was powerless against them. They didn't fit into our laws of physics. They existed outside the ordinary.
There was no warning. One day the sky was clear, and the next, they were here. Maybe our constant exploring and shouting into the void finally caught their attention. No one really knows. All we knew in those first few hours was that we had to run. We couldn't fight back. Mankind was simply too weak to face the unknown.
Most people call them "Parasites." I call them the Apocalypse.
The world is changing, and the society we built is gone for good. Something has come to end the story of us. Maybe we were finally deemed a virus in a perfect system, and whatever was watching from the start has decided it's time to hit delete.
My name is Asher. And this is how it all began.