Consider the slow creeping horror of a spring with no insects.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

Consider the slow creeping horror of a spring with no insects. The uncanny unspecified silence of the night. The emptiness and around you the whole ecosystem would be failing from the bottom up... without making a single sound.

You might make it to fall, maybe through the first winter but beyond that? When the soil fails? When most of the birds and river fish are gone?

It would be the end, but how many would notice it had begun?

[nev@flipping.rocks]

@futurebird On Nextdoor, someone posted, "Am I crazy or are dead animals just…*around* longer? Like, it's not normal for a dead squirrel to still be identifiable after two weeks, right? Sorry for being gross, but normally after a week it's just a ratty bit of fur."

One commenter said she hadn't noticed dead animals, but that the ground beneath the crabapple tree in her backyard was a slimy mess of rotting fruit, that she hadn't seen anything like it in the 20 years she'd lived there. She wondered if it was the unusually warm and rainy autumn, or some kind of plant disease, or what.

Someone else speculated that perhaps the weather was also why they hadn't had any problems with ladybugs getting inside en masse, as they often did in the fall.

Kathy shrugged and kept scrolling. The next thread was a local business owner complaining about immigrants ruining the economy and costing him business because of…well, he wasn't quite clear. She pursed her lips and squinted at the vaguely familiar logo in the man's profile picture. It was "Bugs-B-Gone" Pest Control Services.

[nev@flipping.rocks]

@futurebird TWO MONTHS LATER

A tech trillionaire suggests creating fleets of tiny drones to fertilize crops. The hype cycle invigorates the economy for three whole weeks.

SIX MONTHS LATER

A lot of people are taking the government-provided "Easy Way Out".

The rest try not to think too hard about where the fresh rations are coming from.

ONE YEAR LATER

The tech trillionaire has been murdered in his ultra-secure bunker compound by members of his private security force. They divvy up the rations and supplies, and unplug the cryo-tanks and the data centre before they leave.

TWO YEARS LATER

At nearly 200 years old, the matriarch (we do not give her name, it is untranslatable and too long to print here) is the oldest of her kind, and the last who remembers the seas as they were, as all her ancestors had known them. She was just a calf when the seas began to change. They grew warm, acid, foul. None of the songs told of anything like this. She grew up in the constant terror of annihilation, disaster after disaster. By sheer luck, she survived the near-extinction of her people and gave rise to three generations.

The flumes of death continue to roll off the land from which, the songs tell, her people once came. The detritus and debris drifts down to the dark and silent plain where innumerable tiny creatures fall upon it and extract every nutrient. Their numbers will explode. Another great change is coming.

Her daughter, granddaughters, great-granddaughters are apprehensive this spring evening as they approach the southernmost limit of their home range. In years past, these waters were painful to swim in, an earsplitting cacophony of screeching, drones, distorted roars. They had to bellow to be heard. Now, for the first time in their lives, there is...nothing. Are they lost? Is it a trap? They moan their unease, then cut themselves short, hearing the unnatural boom of their own voices.

The matriarch remembers. She begins to hum the beginning of one of the old, old Ice-melt songs, one she taught her own daughters to sing to theirs. It is delicate and subtly melodious. It resonates so sweetly in the water and an irresistible sense of *rightness* shivers through them all. This sea was made for this song. Their voices raise in harmony.

And from far away—impossibly far away, for the children of the matriarch, but still rising above the tiny chorus of the lesser creatures—they hear *other voices*. Yes, the matriarch remembers, it was like that when I was a child, it sounded exactly like that.

She leads her wondering children on through the black waters, singing.