Like Lochanverse, this next universe was sterilized completely by the
Ochivari, in an attempt to prevent them from being able to destroy their
world completely. Unfortunately for the Ochivari, their plan failed, because
it had a weakness. Organic life isn’t the only thing capable of destroying.
The truth is that it doesn’t matter what body you’re in, if you don’t care
about the environment, you’re not going to go out of your way to save it. It
doesn’t matter as much as people think if you could live long enough to see
the consequences of your actions. You’re not going to suddenly start
recycling, and turning off your lights, and driving electric cars, and
donating money to wildlife preserves. You’re going to keep doing whatever it
is that makes you happy in whatever way is the most convenient, whether that
means polluting, or wasting resources. This is what happened here. Most of
the time, the Ochivari don’t reveal themselves to the populations that they
sterilize. They do it quietly, and just let the humans figure out what
happened to them on their own. Obviously, they always will realize it,
but the hope is that it will be too late by that time. The Ochivari don’t
just want to make sure no one stops them, because once they release the
virus, that’s pretty much impossible anyway. The sooner the humans figure it
out, the longer they have to come up with some solution. Now, most of the
time, that’s not relevant. The humans spend all their resources trying to
cure the virus that they don’t have the time or resources to try anything
else. The discovery that no more children are going to be born leads to
mayhem and civil breakdown. The mistake that the Ochivari made in this case
was to reveal themselves to their victims, and they did it out of anger.
The one requirement they have when choosing a target is the people have to
be doomed to destroy their world unless someone intervenes. Generally, this
means that they’re greedy, lazy, or just inept. This world, however, was
willfully destructive. They reveled in the damage they were doing to their
environment, seeing every bad outcome as proof that they were gods of their
own planet, and were entitled to do whatever the hell they wanted with it.
They were conquerors, and takers. They didn’t want to save their planet,
because they were confident the best of them would one day leave, and
maintain their lifestyles elsewhere. They weren’t wrong. The Ochivari made a
mistake when they chose to lecture them about why they had to sterilize
them. Armed with this knowledge, the humans came up with a workaround. They
didn’t even bother to cure the virus. They simply uploaded their
consciousnesses to new bodies. They were working on this technology already,
so it wasn’t all that hard. The technology was made free—which didn’t sound
like something they would do, but presumably, they wanted to rob the aliens
of the satisfaction of watching even one organic human die. It was an
unexpected response. It showed how flawed the Ochivari's ideals were, even
within the parameters of their sick and irrational view of the multiverse.
Unfortunately, this development did nothing to dissuade them from their
crusade. They just needed to devise contingencies. Organic lifeforms were
susceptible to organic viruses, which computers were immune to, but
computers have their own viruses to contend with. All the Ochivari had to do
was program one of these viruses to be as nasty and all-inclusive as their
normal pathogen. The people died out anyway, and nothing got better. It was
a lose-lose situation.
No comments :
Post a Comment