To whoever finds this,
I promise I am not a beast.
We don’t eat children, pregnant women, animals, and most importantly, the Toolmaker.
Before the Toolmaker, our days were filled with blood and savagery. More than peace, he brought us a clear standard of eating. We are forever thankful for his work to our kind. In the beginning, our days consisted of roaming aimlessly on dirty roads, hungry, disheveled, and depleted of energy.
I do understand that what happened to us wasn’t our fault. We were part of society, just like everybody else; now we are different. But our differences only lay in dietary choices. Nobody knew what to make of it. Unfortunately, for me, everything was new. I was, and still am, Patient Zero. I am known as Zero, the precursor, the first with the curse. Nobody needs to know it was my fault, though.
It is time to confess: it was Friday, around 5PM, and nobody wanted to continue working, we were lazing around. I had a bottle hidden in my cabinet, don’t judge me, I was, and still am, twenty-seven! I haven’t finished my PhD and probably will never finish because we are not allowed back at the university. But I don’t want to digress too much, this is a topic for a large book, and this is just a small letter.
We had a drink in the lab, and someone told me to lick a slide with bacteria. I licked many. I was under the influence of stupidity and alcohol. Nothing happened in the first three days. Then it started with a smell. I left home getting on my bike and riding downhill through the vineyard. I usually would steal one or two, but this time I felt sick from the smell. Food stopped appealing to me. I didn’t care much as I was never big on food anyway. You know, I ate to keep myself alive. Then an undergraduate walked by. She was beautiful and fresh. The scent of her scalp was inebriating.
I don’t know what came over me, but I knew I wanted her. I crushed her head on the toilet, the liquid coming from her cracked skull was sweet like apricot. I gulped the liquid and cracked the rest of her head, being careful since I didn’t want her hair mixed with the delicious brain. I was full.
Although I am still not certain how I was able to spread the condition, I believe humans that got direct contact with my saliva had the same fate as me. I know humans are studying it and they are coming to conclusions, but this isn’t what I wanted to write about.
I am writing because I have noticed my body is giving up. We must talk about the Toolmaker. The outbreak was contained thanks to our technology, so my condition didn’t spread outside our country. The first months were terrible. My hunger (and that of a few others I’ve met) could not be satiated easily. The brain is hidden behind an extremely hard bone, and our methods were rudimentary and wasteful. The poor victims were subjected to cruelty as the extraction was difficult and painful. We, on the other hand, were left with damaged brains and little cerebrospinal fluid to drink.
He wasn’t only our savior. He was the savior of humankind too. Well, humankind contained within the borders of our little country. It pains me to be excluded from humanity, but I don’t believe someone like me deserves to be in the same category. I reject the monster label too, my brain still works, and I can still make rational choices, like between polyester and linen. We also have a group to debate what we are. I always made fun of philosophy majors and now look at me! Biology PhD candidate (for an indefinite amount of time) asking who I am. What is my species? Am I sick? Am I a mutation? While I asked myself these questions, I fed on unlucky people.
We lived and hunted together, but hunting in a group proved to be difficult because many fights would break out. For the lucky ones, the juiciest brains—and for the rest anger and hunger. The barricades and warning shots would do nothing to us, for we were not dead or alive.
The Toolmaker, however, was the bridge between who we were and who we came to be. I became the leader of the sick, known for my cruelty, which I strongly disagree with! As a woman I had to rely on methods that compensated for my lack of strength. Men could crack skulls much easier, so I needed to be more creative. He came to me one day. I will try to reproduce our first conversation.
‘You are Zero’, he said, wearing a bike helmet, which I could not help but laugh at.
‘I am. And you are?’ I tried to study the old man; I could see his white beard peeking out from his neck.
‘I am the Toolmaker in this neighborhood’, his body trembled while he spoke to me, ‘I have a proposal, could you hear me out?’
‘Already listening’, he knew exactly I was full, my clothes were drenched in blood, and he caught me wiping my face and brushing my teeth.
‘I have created an extractor, sort of a can opener, but for brains. Would you be interested in trying? We could… we could arrange meals for you and them.’ He looked behind me and pointed at my army of sick people. With his other hand, still trembling, he handed me the blueprints for the extractor and the method the living humans could use to pacify the country, and more importantly, live in peace with us.
I was surprised, in the movies they would always exterminate us, but the Toolmaker designed a world in which we could coexist in peace. It was simple: we wouldn’t eat the living; we would eat the almost dead. I brought the Toolmaker’s plans to an assembly, and it was no surprise that they were approved. Nobody wanted to go hungry for days or hunt. Our people had lost so many fingers as humans tried, in vain, to fight us. Having brains delivered to us via a system would be a dream come true.
We chose a small group, me included, and we spent a week with the Toolmaker in his shed. It was an auspicious week, a few men fell from a scaffolding, it was lunch time! The Toolmaker first drilled a small hole in the skull and handed me an aluminum straw. I gulped the fluids with a large smile. Then he cracked the skull open and had a fork, a knife, and a spoon ready for me! I was eating from a man with an orange vest. I chose the spoon and had a meal without ruining my dress! My group was cheering and soon they were eating too.
The Toolmaker learned that, despite having a large appetite, we did not need to eat one brain a day, one brain was enough to feed us for three to seven days. His smile was wide with pure contentment. I saw his diary in which he wrote he would love to go out for bread without having one of us splashing blood all over the street. The Toolmaker accepted us for what we were. He just wanted order.
‘So, based on my calculations, our city, pre… uh…you, had around 45 deaths per day. And you are…’
‘We are a bit less than three thousand. 45 natural deaths per day will not suffice to feed us. And we do not eat dead.’
‘I know, I know! I need to think. You need a thousand brains per day to feed everybody! We can’t provide all that.’ He was clearly floored. We were too. We wanted to dine like real people and lower the casualties while hunting. ‘You don’t die with bullets, you don’t starve to death, you… how can we do this?’
I noticed that, despite his creation of a tool that would solve our problems, it did not solve theirs. The Toolmaker fell into his old chair, sunken in his own thoughts. Fixing the savagery and the fear was not enough, we needed more food than he expected. It was our turn to give up something. He was already giving up his own people.
We held another assembly and we, to recoup some of our humanity, decided to introduce rules for eating people. First of all, we agreed to use the Toolmaker’s skull opener and give our prey a little something to put them to sleep. We wouldn’t hunt children, pregnant women, animals (not our main source of food, but desperation made us snack on pets, cats were our favorites! Cat brains are the human equivalent of snacking on walnuts.), and the Toolmaker.
I came to him with our proposal and he also had a meeting with his government, I suppose. Our city was in havoc, and—I believe I ate the mayor weeks before the negotiations. His brain was a little bitter. I wonder if other politicians had the same taste.
The Toolmaker came to us with a revised proposal: we were not to eat children, pregnant women, animals, him obviously, and we would have to reduce our consumption of brains of people with more than twenty years of academic study. Apparently, they needed psychologists, engineers, and mathematicians: these people took a long time to educate. We would have a consumption limit on those. It was an absolute yes, well, not so absolute, because despite the benevolence of the Toolmaker, some of us, misfits, still preferred to succumb to old rituals filled with spilling blood and savagery.
Hunting rules in place, skull openers at many points around the city. They were built inside small cabins for us to feed in privacy. The Toolmaker held a course for us on how to place the person and operate the machinery; under the beds, they had installed trap doors to dispose of the bodies. Our city was clean, we were clean, and there was peace between us and humans. The ones too weak to hunt were placed on the waiting list for natural deaths. All fell into place.
What I did not expect was what happened next. Human citizens were so pleased with us, our order, our respect for the community, so that they opened the first restaurant for the sick! Instead of tables and chairs, we had hospital beds with a little side table holding a drill, a straw, and silverware. The chairs were placed behind the table.
I was invited to the opening night together with the most prominent members of our community. I put on a nice floral dress. I loved the sound of the drill; it stimulated my appetite. However, I couldn’t choose from a menu, the meals were already served, crying, screaming, begging. We were seated in our positions. I asked for a little something to calm them, but we were told they were already under the effects.
The curtains that covered the big windows opened. We were surrounded by humans savoring their medium rare steaks watching us from above, waiting for us to start eating. I scanned the room and did not find the Toolmaker. I begged my friends to go home. We still lived in our houses, by the way. But the people tied to the bed were delicious.
I don’t think we were the real beasts.
I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t…my brain was still working, and despite being sick, I knew it. It wasn’t just a restaurant. We were a show under a big top. It was funny how quickly the monsters revealed themselves.
I am on the run. I don’t know if I will ever write again.
Zero
P.S.: Toolmaker says hi.
Hi. Zero is a smart woman. She will write again.
Toolmaker
