Thursday, July 07, 2005

"Circumcision May Decrees AIDS Infection"

(as mentioned in Wired News's Elsewhere Today section)

It was not going to be a pleasant Conference of the Germs. They were never particularly festive occasions; dour symposia on topics like global albedo management, ocean current analysis, animal husbandry, and the thousand other details required to run a planet like Earth. But there was a new item on the schedule this time, one sure to cause shouting matches and bruise egos, if not provoke outright simwar. Back in 3-66-66-7, when the Germs recieved Stewardship of Earth from the Historical Zealotry Commission, DOS attacks made in protest killed upwards of 1017 independant processes. We planetary conservationists necessarily enjoy long memories.

The matter at hand: the reintroduction of homo sapiens into the wild. It didn't help that the Germs began the project in secret, betting the surprise factor of the public reveal would pave over messier elements, and to an extent, and for a time, they were right. Baseline h. sapiens aren't rare by any means, even in historical display contexts; but revisiting the original Age of Intelligence on Earth itself focused a great amount of otherwise distributed interest.

But there was a reason the Germs had been chosen, and it had nothing to do with the shortlived Age of Intelligence, an Age, many have pointed out, in which their natural dominance had been questioned. The Historical Zealots wanted an authentically microbial Earth. H. sapiens are crowd pleasers, but hardly representative of the Commission's ideal Earth.

Even that wasn't the real problem, or at least not the one that attracted the most attention. It's no secret that Germs and h. sapiens have had a tempestuous history, one that still colors behaviors today. I spent a week at a conference several years ago being constantly ambushed and berated on a host of topics by Tuberculosis; at dinner, at the bar, and at more than one afterhour party. Tuberculosis had all sorts of opinions on my paper on the desertification effects of posturban arcology wreckage, all of them wrong, if I may be allowed to say so. Anwyay, it certainly had little tact when it came to sharing its opinions, so I wasn't surprised when I heard, just shortly before the Conference, about their plans to not just reintroduce h. sapiens, but refashion their lifestyles and habits along more Germ-approved lines. AIDS Infection's Circumcision May was one of the more baffling initiatives, but others, like Tuberculosis's Russian Prison Week or Lhasa Fever's Deep Jungle Housing Project, were self-explanatory.

Outsiders might have a hard time believing that postorganic hiveminds like AIDS Infection would spend much time worrying about the trials and travails of their long-forgotten ancestors, but deep memory fosters deep grudges.