It Happened Before

by M.J. Harkins

On many occasions in the history of earth various catastrophes befell humanity. The scales vary. A tidal wave, an earthquake, a plague, war, famine, drought. This one was kind of unique. Large meteors have devastated the planet from time to time, and smaller ones probably influenced cultures, but an unobtrusive rock, in an out of the way place had come to bring us to our knees. It occurred outside the tiny town of Aldrich, eastward toward Arkham, considered a local anomaly, which became a folktale, drowned by a reservoir, something not of this world took hold.

Many decades later, during the 60s, some flower children discovered Aldrich, and wandering the woods east of town, fell in love with the fall colors. Descendants of those psychonauts, because that’s what the current inhabitants thought of the tall tales of unimaginably colorful falls of that generation, muttered “Must have been the mushroom tea…”  But nobody could resist the produce from Aunt Maggie’s Farm. People came from two and three counties away during harvest. The farm grew and grew. In the 90s the stop on the train up from Boston, just after the spur to Arkham, became a bustling Mecca every Autumn.

By the end of the millennium, it was a three season retreat that rivaled Cape Cod. A freight car was added to carry away produce as it came available, and a cottage industry of jarred preserves and pickled vegetables blossomed. Aldrich grew slowly because Aunt Maggie’s relatives and their descendants had bought up the town and most of the surrounding countryside. Only frequent visitors managed to secure anything long-term, let alone permanent. 

It was as if Aldrich itself was picking and choosing who could stay. If you did come to visit, you would find the town almost binary in its taking to you. Everyone was either warm and inviting or gave you the cold shoulder, which was hard on mix matched couples. Bill and Sue were one such couple. Sometime around 2000, one of the other post-doctoral students at MIT, where Bill and Sue were ensconced, invited them up for a weekend. Bill thought Jane was an odd bird, but she and Sue had become inseparable over the winter. As soon as they were free in late spring, they accepted the invitation. 

It was decided that first afternoon, Bill hated the place and Sue fell in love. Sue insisted on returning every weekend that summer and by August she was going by herself. It was as if Aldrich had claimed her. Bill was flabbergasted that fall when Sue announced she was moving to Aldrich. They had been at odds all summer, but Bill couldn’t believe she would walk away from a fellowship, to work on a farm. Sue explained that her studies in logistics would benefit the town. The town ate up her ideas about expanding distribution and opening markets all over the country. 

Over the next decade, Aunt Maggie’s Farms were a booming franchise on three continents, Europe and the Americas. Expansion into the Middle East & Africa and Pacific Rim was next. The model was to replicate Aldrich. They would pick locations around major cities, on the outer edges of suburbia, adjacent to forests if possible. In less hospitable climes they built greenhouses. They had also expanded to selling seeds, seedlings, soil, mulch, and plant food. A talent acquisition Sue had cultivated named Donna became their brand specialist. “Good for what ails you” became the mantra. And the strange thing was, people that ate the food got healthy. Suspiciously so.

That was the first clue that something was off. Not only did people improve their health, the way you would expect if your diet included lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, and seeds, but a noticeable decline in common ailments was present. Turning an eye back on Aldrich and there were a significant number of active healthy inhabitants up above 80, and many supercentenarians. A few years later and everywhere you went, Maggie’s Foods were there. It wasn’t long before most menus offered little else. It was putting a dint in the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession. 

Along with the franchise went the mood Bill had encountered in Aldrich. Wherever Maggie’s Farms or Aldrich Foods popped up, communities became binary. It wasn’t very noticeable at first, because of the out-of-the-way places that the farms had selected. People would move out of the area; Aunt Maggie would buy up properties. People came to stay, others never put down roots. 

Unbeknownst to humanity a selection process was being conducted. Spheres of influence were changing shape, cities were as large as ever, but the churn was there. Urban lifespans declined precipitously, but outcasts from the countryside were ever trickling in. No one would ever figure out what was happening, but in their guts they knew.

An inkling of the puzzle pieces lay on the table. A newly discovered taxonomic anomaly was encountered while sifting through genetic data; an enigmatic taxa, incerti ordinis (of uncertain order), rings of RNA sequences named obelisks appeared in the computer-aided transcriptomics, not belonging to any previously known life form. These proto-life fragments were found in 50% of human saliva samples. Further studies suggest that these RNA strands are read by the human microbiome. Parallel studied were just underway to determine how the microbiome interacts with the brain via the nervous system, the production of hormones, and through interaction with the immune system.

This had happened in the past, but the world in those times was quite disconnected. Previous encounters with this sort of thing was handled with fire and blood. Wars were fought to curtail the spread. Ascetics would starve to retore their gut biome, then preach their restored clarity. Whole cultures would adopt strange food rituals to purge themselves. Scapegoating kept it at bay. But the world had become globalized. 

This particular strain had been whipped out in a near extinction level event by a sizeable meteor. However, that same meteor sent debris into space. Occasionally, a piece returns. One such piece returned outside Aldrich about a century ago. There was some immediate local hysteria, which subsided into folktales. Humans have short memories, are slow to learn, and often dismiss what they are unwilling to understand. 

The biome/brain connection works both ways. It’s a feedback loop. Species follow environmental gradients. There was no hive mind at work here, just colonies of bacteria with common goals. Anyone that the strain could commandeer became part of a larger community. A community that persisted in the further development of an environment that perpetuated the strain. 

In the coming decades Aldrich Foods, through acquisitions and investments, procured a truly self-sustaining infrastructure, it went global by staying local. They didn’t specialize in millions of hectares of wheat, corn, barley, and such. They grew three times the food they needed for their communities, stored one third, and sent the other third off to the suburban and urban areas they avoided. Surplus stores were distributed or sold based on environmental factors. Everyone in these communities lived mild-mannered existences. Some would leave, but most stayed. As long as they participated in the common good, there would be peace and calm. You see, the ones that left were the ones that were always bellyaching. This was not a metaphor. There was something about the biome/brain connection that didn’t take here and there. And those individuals were purged.

Initially the situation wasn’t obvious. The bellyachers weren’t numerous, so it wasn’t obvious. The corporations that fed the world still provided any manner of poison, and people, especially in urban areas, literally ate it up. This contributed to their decreased lifespans. The longevity of Aldrich communities was due in part to the absence of such poisons and their modified biomes. It was later learned, but too late, that the immunological benefits of this particular strain of obelisks would have been a boon to humanity, if they could have separated those benefits from the flat affect it had on mood and behavior. 

The sad truth came to be that WWIII was initiated late in the 21st century, and heavy use of tactical nuclear weapons on hundreds of urban centers worldwide caused a collapse of the modern era. Infrastructures failed. Communications, continuity of government, supply chains, all essential requirements to maintain civilization as they knew it, collapsed. What remained were most of those outlying communities created by the spread of Aldrich farms. A dark age ensued.