STORY - Sex Food Death

I wrote this inspired obliquely by a dear friend's misfortune, and just wanting to write. The library makes me want to write, there are odd people, and wonderful books.

So here it is, Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.12

Sex Food Death

In the year 2107, with the economic nano-wars having reduced much of the earths surface to sterile mush, and its seas polluted with endless self constructing creatures that utilised everything living for their own construction apart from the hordes of mutated jellyfish that now constitute the only living thing in the oceans; occasionally they make raids on colonies of surviving humans to replenish numbers lost during subsurface volcanic eruptions.

The surviving human race is so deprived of resources the only thing they can survive off apart from eating their dead, is nutrient derived from iodine and trace elements in seawater. This is strictly rationed. Three variants are produced – sex, food and death.

Food is food. That is self explanatory. Sex, well in an atmosphere running 5 percent carbon dioxide and other suffocating gases, sex was strenuous and often fatal. The additives in rusted reused cans of “Sex” enabled greater absorption of oxygen for ten minutes permitting intercourse, but the heat generated during the act raises the temperature so much it is rationed to 6 cans a year during times of maximum fertility.

Sex outside of ovulation in a dying world is punishable by ritual sacrifice to appease the nanomonsters.

That leaves us with Death. That again is self explanatory, each tin of death contains an additive made from mutoidal jellyfish extract, the only poison the resource-less earth can spare. But because it toxifies the body so much the corpses can no longer be utilized, so the right to Death is given only to the most productive members of society at a time when they have lost the strength to be useful but have earned merciful release.

A release where there bodies are not given to be fought over by children in the decayed centres of slum settlement, in a land where perversely the dead are the most important resource there is.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.12