Homo Plasticus

My ancestors spoke of lazy, rainy days, of loving the sound of the rain and wrapping themselves in warm blankets with a cup of tea, watching the water cleanse the world. I wish I could fully understand the joy they took. I don’t hear the water so much as the thump of material landing on the roof. Different from sleet and not as heavy as snow, which sounds nearly identical to hail now, I try to take pleasure in the sounds of water mixed with debris falling around me. My world may never be cleansed.

I will need to head to the wards of the dead soon. I can feel my body slowing each day. The walk to the fields takes longer now, and I can carry so little back with me each time. I don’t wish to fall among the fruits, neither of us rotting away. I will be near my parents, hoping someone survives to read my words. I record the history I know of here in case that person ever wonders how this world with more death than life came to exist. Like with most noise, its birth cries were loud but too easily dismissed as unworthy of attention.

***

In 2372, the news cycle spent six weeks discussing little Peggy Mitchell. Born with a few pieces of plastic fused into her body, she represented the first of our kind. Like any baby, she was petite and perfect, but the doctors could not explain why she had veins running through the pieces of red and green at the top of the helix of her left ear. For a minute, people panicked at what this might mean, but soon the pundits spoke. The more obnoxious networks staked out the family’s trash. When they did not find proof of filtered water and organic food, they blamed her mother, Janet, who treated her daughter’s ear as a unique birthmark. Two years later, her father, Peter, would leave because he could not accept that he had produced a child who was .01 percent less human than her peers. Peter did not understand that it had been too late for centuries. Long before he wooed Janet, the waste had piled up as the politicians chose profits over the environment decade after decade. Janet and Peter did not mean to create a new species, and they were only one of millions of couples already leading to my evolution.

***

After the rain stopped, I went out and took the long brooms to clean off the parts of the roof I could reach, mostly purples, reds, and pinks today. A big piece of blue flew off the roof from yesterday’s storm. It might have been from a canister once. It seems like a larger artifact rather than the usual composites of plastic pieces and debris.

Once back inside, I sat for nearly an hour until I had the strength to move again. I needed to clean the filters on the water lines, lest they clog from the storm. After I finally pulled the covers and wiped down the filters with a spray that will remove the ash for maybe a week, I tried to recall the last time I saw another person and realized it was over fifty years ago.

***

Nearly 400 years before Peggy Mitchell’s birth, Susan met Bill for coffee. Their barista noticed their chemistry from across the room but did not see the microscopic particles in the water or in the coffee. Susan and Bill were one of many equally promising starting points for my kind. Every cup of tea, pint of beer, and soda changed their bodies a bit more. They ate a small percentage of plastic with every meal they shared. From root to stem, leaf, and branch, bits of plastic had already entered into the rice, the honey, and the salt. They were busy chasing a toddler when the news sounded the alarm about chicken nuggets and breaded shrimp containing microplastics, but the pears and broccoli were equally infected. The young couple tried to feed their family more organic vegetables, not realizing that they ingested plastic with each piece of lettuce, every slice of carrot, and any handful of cherry tomatoes.

***

The heat always wore me out, and it is no different now. It is 95 degrees at 7 a.m., but that is ideal in early November. I must seek the wards where I placed the bodies of my parents before the storms come. Snow is not only loud; it could trap me. I have read reports of storms measured in inches, but most now are measured in feet.

I had to dig through over twenty feet from one storm last April, and what twisted in my back has never fully healed. There was a moment when I was creating the narrow path to the water lines where I was hemmed in by so much gray snow mixed with the usual particles that I feared I would become buried in the stuff, stuck at the bottom, not melting free until July, praying to have any energy left at all then. I think that was the day I knew that my time was near.

***

Our next key ancestor, Cameron Thompson, was born in 2401. His dark skin and deep brown eyes contrasted with his blue and green eyelid. His parents quickly started doing the usual checks—ten fingers and nine toes. The tenth was purple, blue, red, and silver. Cameron was otherwise healthy, so the news cycle tried to blame his parents, Keshawn and Brianna, again. Little did the news know, my kind were born so much earlier. Centuries before, while people debated the nutritional value of fish sticks, they ignored the plastic in the air. Their clouds already held the evidence, and those who celebrated a new millennium already bathed in trash when running to catch the bus in the rain. Every snow angel brought more contact, and when their children tried to catch snow on their tongues, the flakes were already laced with plastic.

***

Today was a rough day for me. I walked to the wards to confirm my plans. I found my parents’ bodies. I used to walk up there on this day each year to mark their passing, but I finally stopped about a decade ago. The loss still aches, but I have no idea how long rituals are supposed to be performed when I am the only one left.

My father died scavenging an old house. The roof collapsed, pinning him and piercing his lungs. I dragged him to the ward rather than burying him because the ground has become wildly unstable now: either hard as rock or as slippery as sand. I did not want the ground to shift and for my mother to walk up to his body while gathering food for breakfast. She faded quickly after that, finally asking me to take her to the wards for fear of losing her way. 

Only three people had entered them since my father, so I rearranged everyone to put my parents side-by-side. That was two hundred years ago. Only about thirty people have been added, so while I cannot rearrange anyone this time, I can still be near them. I think they would have liked that.

***

Peggy and Cameron were the subjects of many studies, and doctors quietly grew concerned. Cameron’s eyelid rose and fell as if it contained no foreign material. Wiggling her ear brought Peggy joy. The implications were terrifying, but it was already too late. In 2024, microplastics were often limited to the human placenta, lungs, and intestines, but they did not stay there. Each new generation gifted their offspring a percentage of particles as a horrific inheritance. But the plastics that contributed to blocked arteries and deep coughs used to kill; now, they became embedded.

Peggy and Cameron were seen as unusual at first, but by 2450, most countries had similar children and identical news stories. Peggy could cover her ear with her hair when she entered the work force, but Cameron had to resort to stage makeup to avoid being harassed as a teenager.

A mere generation later, Peggy and Cameron were no longer the outliers. Kindergartens were filled with speckled children. Ears, eyes, and the flesh between the thumb and the fingers changed first, but the internal changes were more spectacular. Entirely plastic kidneys and hearts began to form. Human organs had stopped being blocked by the plastic; they were now built on a foundation of waste and former corporate greed. Peggy’s granddaughter had four fingers, one kidney, and two chambers of her heart made from leftover laundry detergent bottles, the hard shells around scissors, and the twist ties items were secured with.

The scientists did not notice the issues at first because most of the body was still flesh and blood. They blamed the dropping fertility rate on how societies did not support parents enough, but fertility clinics were becoming overwhelmed. Plastic ovaries did not always release their eggs. Plastic in the brain meant a child did not always forge neural pathways the same way. Sometimes the body accepted the plastic, but often it did not. While the schools tried to create anti-bullying campaigns, the street gave our kind another name: Plastics.

At first, the term was merely an insult, and people with plastic on their faces or hands found it harder to obtain housing, find a job, or get married. The discrimination grew when scientists labeled my kind a separate species. By pushing the people with the most plastic into the same spaces and ensuring they had less access to quality food and clean air, the humans sped up our evolution.

***

In the garden today, I went to harvest my pumpkins. In the fall light, I was amazed that one plant had a single leaf that was entirely green. I found myself staring, entranced by its beauty, trying to imagine a world with an environment where plastic was not visible in everything. When I cut apart the pumpkin, the seeds and strings inside were the same various shades of purple, gray, and blue as its flesh. The colors do not change the nutrition of the pumpkin; my pie will merely be more colorful than those of my ancestors.

***

In 2800, my kind were born over thirty percent plastic. Humanity refused to do the hard work of dredging the lakes, reclaiming the water, and changing their habits, but worse, they forgot to consider how every teenage couple that forgot to use birth control also added to our numbers when the mother already had plastic in her womb. Our kind accepted anyone who came to us whether the plastic was visible or not. We shared resources and built cities in rural areas. We gladly accepted the labor of the plumber whose daughter had a plastic web across her face, and we welcomed the professor who taught poetry. Our communities thrived and had the best of everything. The professor knew how to set up our computers, and the plumber’s wife knew how to build the Wi-Fi.

2965 is when the violence started. By then, my kind had thriving cities on every continent. Yes, we were even living in Antarctica. I’m sure some of you wonder how we did not break in the cold, but we had research centers and warm clothing. Soon, our kind were chosen for this research because our skin did not need vitamin D. We could stay inside for months with few mental or physical side effects. That research knowledge also made our cities thrive. We took the land no one wanted initially, but with our growing profits, we tried to invest in other rural areas where people were suffering. One of our attempts to help had been in Appalachia.

That was our first mistake. We should have let the humans die off sooner. Attempts to filter the water were greeted with suspicion and ridicule. Jameson Smith, one of our kindest leaders, was leading the cleanup for the people of Morgantown, West Virginia. He had plastic over most of his right arm, and the community had a high number of households without enough food. While a few folks were kind, most watched Jameson with suspicion. They were happy enough to accept food and shelter, but they reverted to hysteria when a local woman, Sadie Arbogast, gave birth to the first child with an entirely plastic limb. They blamed Jameson for the child’s condition, claiming he had to be the father. Sadie already had plastic kidneys, entirely plastic fingers, and a plastic ear, and the child’s father, an area principal who was already married, had a plastic hand, ears, an eyelid, and several toes in addition to a half-plastic heart. It was no wonder that their child came in at forty percent, but the plastic manifested entirely over a limb for the first time. Johnathan Arbogast had an entirely plastic left arm in addition to plastic running up and down the left side of his face.

On the day of the child’s christening, about ten of the locals rounded up Jameson. They overpowered him and tied him to a couch, and they set only the visible plastic parts of him on fire. When the flesh melted, they paused, allowed the materials to cool, then burned their victim again. They cauterized the wounds before dumping Jameson on the edge of where the plastic workers in charge of the water cleanup lived.

The workers came running and got Jameson medical attention as quickly as possible, but his humanity died that day. He was the one that set fire to ten square blocks, but before he did, he and the other workers sealed the doors and the lower windows to most of the homes. The smell of burning flesh spread all the way to Keyser and even into parts of D.C.

Jameson’s righteous fury led to humans lighting fires in plastics’ ghettos in every major city and plastics descending from their communities to try to liberate those in the larger urban areas. What started as riots and bombings turned into a war.

***

I try to walk everyday to keep my joints supple now. Arthritis was always a problem, but once plastic stiffens, it does not change back. I prepare the pillows and warm bottles for my shoulders and hips as I once did for my parents. As I fish green particles out of my tea, I see that I need to clean the water filters again, and I sigh. I try to savor my drink as I watch the sky darken ahead of yet another storm.

***

Plastic limbs can melt, but plastic joints have more endurance over time. Thus, we fought in greater numbers, and the humans brought as much fire as they could muster. Chicago burned for days with the wind spreading the ashes and toxins, including more plastic, across the entire Northeast. While the fighting ended after a few decades, it was not because we learned to work together. A few countries tried to avoid the in-fighting, but none held out in the end. More toxins simply sped up the changes, and by 3027, the first child of eighty-five percent plastic appeared. There were no “pure” Homo sapiens left to fight, as everyone finally saw that we had always, all, been contaminated.

For a few more decades, we mistakenly assumed we could now live in peace, but once the human body passed ninety percent plastic, the true horrors began. It was too hot, the entire world was covered in rubble, and large pieces of ash and plastic fell with every rainstorm. Our food also now held visible plastic as the plants evolved as well.

My kind’s life span had been increasing for some time, and because of the wars, our numbers had been too decimated by violence and trauma to realize the truth. A body that is ninety percent plastic cannot conceive. The plastics around both the sperm and the ovum are too thick for the mergers of life.

Worse, the eight percent of our populace that were children began to be overwhelmed by caring for their elders. The mind and body often come apart with age, but plastic bodies do not break down at the same rates, and some of us had plastic limbs that would not fade for decades. As the cities had burned, the worst plastics had been released into the atmosphere. While some plastic breaks down more quickly, many of us had pieces that would last centuries. No brain, not even a plastic one, can endure that much life in a world like the one that was left. Entirely plastic bodies do not cremate well, nor do their remains do anything but add to the toxins around us. Our ancestors once said their bodies were temples, but ours became curses.

The first wards of the dead were created in 3045. What used to be skyscrapers, shopping malls, and schools housed corpses—one body that only occasionally breathed beside another until the building was filled. We set up guards until our numbers grew too few. We realized that no one abused the bodies: they had no wealth and were beyond reaction. They had no needs, and even if one died, it could not decompose enough to torment the others.

***

For the next decades, the power and then the water ran out. More of us should have died from cold or dehydration, but being ninety-seven percent plastic has bizarre advantages. We took to living in remote locations, trying to capture rain from the sky, filtering out the worst of the waste. We grew what little food we could and watched as the animals either died off or started the same cycles of change. I had a puppy with a plastic eye and a plastic left front paw as a child. I grow nostalgic as I write this because I long for the days with my parents and the thumping of my dog’s tail. I cannot remember her name anymore, though, which is why I need to take my final walk.

I do not know if anyone will find this. I do not know if the next evolution of life on this planet will be able to read or if this planet will ever be able to spawn life without plastic again.

I write this, like so many others, to have not lived in vain. I, Thomas Davidson, have never known a world with clean air, unpolluted water, or non-plastic food. May whoever comes after me desire a world free of toxins and the suffering humanity has caused.