How the World Ends #37: Infanticide

The world ends when they are no more children left, the last of them having been murdered by their grandparents. Nobody is surprised.

The children are murdered by their grandparents as revenge for their obscene youth, and for reminding the elderly of their mortality and irrelevance, and for their awful weakness and need. They are murdered for their insolence and their unearned innocence. They are murdered out of envy, and fear, and cold hatred.

In public.

Everyone knows about it. It’s all over Facebook. People are initially shocked and appalled and then don’t do anything about it and then it just becomes another part of the ongoing horror. Just another thing to try to accommodate as you struggle to get through your day.

Because what can anybody really do about anything anymore, anyway?

It starts with billionaires harvesting their children and their children’s children for their blood, and their organs, and their bone marrow. For eyes and hearts and kidneys and stem cells, and thyroid and plasma and human growth hormone. For smooth skin and vigour and outrageous optimism.

And then, once the technology trickles down, everyone is at it.

Entire broods are raised for spare parts. For surgical options. For added extras that become essentials. They are treated as cattle, or as property, or as tax-deductible expenses. They are used as status symbols and for sentimental labour and as social media collateral.

Children are put to work as frontmen and women for brands, as incubators for new memes and dances and slang. They are starved and used as models, or fattened up to star in pornography, or tweaked and optimized to perform as athletes and actors. They are used to mine bitcoin or to appear as non-player-characters in video games, or to masquerade as AI agents and chatbots, real people being ultimately cheaper than artificial intelligence.

They are made to fall from high buildings for viral videos, or to jump (or fail to jump) skateboards over piles of burning tires for viral videos, or to be mauled to death by wild animals and hit by cars and killed in balloon accidents for viral videos, or to accidentally blow their faces off with homemade explosives made from simple household ingredients for viral videos.

They become the butt of jokes, and the punchline to stories that reinforce the fecklessness and waste of their entire generation. They are simultaneously scapegoated and made into sacrificial lambs. They are put in front of show trials and into stocks and laughed at and desired and envied and condemned.

Eventually, of course, they are replaced by computer generated versions of themselves, which are both more durable and more ephemeral, more easily manipulated and less embarrassingly alive.

At which point there are no reasons left to stop the slaughter.

So nobody does.

The last child is hunted down live on YouTube, cornered by a social media-radicalized grandfather and his local vigilante group – who formed a couple of years back to patrol their town as part of the nationwide Big Clean Up, just like everyone else.

They’ve been pursuing the starving boy for months, acting on tip-offs from concerned neighbours and sightings captured on CCTV and high street traffic cameras, tracking him with drones and dogs and spotters on horses, flushing him out of hiding places in abandoned shops and garden sheds and disused electricity substations.

They are cheered on by an audience of hundreds of thousands.

Under huge winter skies they chase him out of the suburbs and across the fields and light industrial estates at the edge of town. Cold rain blown in from the north stings their eyes as they run him to ground in the woods overlooking the bypass.

Their hatred is unstoppable. Their need for vengeance knows no limits.

The kid has no chance.

Afterward, they drag the body back to town and leave it hanging from a road sign as a warning to the others, except there are no others anymore. It becomes a sort of tourist attraction, for a while, and elderly people come from miles around to take pictures in front of it, to point and laugh and share amusing captions.

Because he had it coming, just like they all did. Because he was too smart or too stupid or too loud or too quiet. Because he was too beautiful or because he was not beautiful enough. Because he couldn’t do the things his grandparents found simple to do. Or because he could.

Because he’d had it too easy and expected too much for far too long, and look at him now.

There’s still snow on the ground when they take the remains away, still weeks of winter left. Everyone goes back to complaining about everything else and pretends that nothing has changed.

And then they wait and wait and wait and wait for something to happen.