"To possess a telescope without its other essential half -
the microscope - seems to me a symbol of
the darkest incomprehension.
The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope,
while the left eye peers into the microscope."
Leonora Carrington.

Unwashed and unkempt within the ruins of a medieval church encircled by a cemetery overgrown with triffid-like weeds octogenarian recluse Winslow Witcombe shuffled forth. Once an acclaimed cosmologist, Witcombe's lot since decades has been that of a pariah, banished by the scientific fraternity due to a disturbing theory he had published which his detractors would come to begrudgingly admit was prophetic.

Sheltering from the gathering shit storm, Witcombe's current boondoggle is to remind sceptics of his theory they had callously dismissed, which predicted the cause of the recent worldwide outbreak of sudden inexplicable deaths of healthy newborn infants, an aberration Witcombe's theory had prophesied would be a harbinger for the extinction of the human race.

Skeletal hands trembling, Witcombe rolled up the sleeves of the moth-eaten djellaba he wore and swept back grey shoulder-length hair which blended into a totem of a waist-length beard before rummaging through cobweb-laden chaos littering the church altar. The clutter included greasy plates where mould spores multiplied on morsels of leftover food, weevils partying in bread crust hotels, bottles containing dregs of fine Bordeaux, a Havana cigar smouldering in a tarnished vermeil ashtray, flickering pillar candles and scattered leaves of pungent sinsemilla. Witcombe's grail amongst the disorder was a dog-eared journal containing coded marginalia that only he could decipher.        

Perched atop the church pulpit adjacent to the altar, a species of diminutive prosimian, a lemur by its zoological nomenclature, evolutionary hybrid of a monkey, a rodent, and an arboreal marsupial. Clad in a faded and threadbare T-shirt emblazoned with the No Future slogan of yesteryear, the creature raised its head from within the innards of a vintage valve radio it was attempting to repair with a rusty can opener.

Hissing, buzzing and static from the radio, punctuated by truncated soundbites…sudden mass deaths…healthy newborn infants…some stillborn…post-mortems fail to determine cause…places of worship remain open for prayer…your call is in a queue and will never be answered…doomscrollers will be prosecuted….do not panic unless instructed to do so…

When the lemur applauded, Witcombe looked up from his cogitations scratched in black ink.

'Witcombe. You're a badass. Predicting this clusterfuck, and diagnosing the cause of the imminent apocalypse. A double whammy.'

The savant nodded at his companion's commentary.

'My diagnosis was also an autopsy. As described in my thesis, atavism in panspermia.'

'Panspermia? Hey. Don't talk dirty in here. This is a church.' Screeched the lemur. 'But then again, the Good Book is about as clean as a geriatric Nun's knickers. Chapter one begins with smut. Naked woman in garden gets fruity and tempts naked man into rumpy-pumpy neath a shady tree. Porn masquerading as piety.'

Witcombe's response was pithy.

'You're confusing panspermia as a homophone for spermatozoa. Before single-celled organisms in the oceans became the first life forms on Earth, this celestial exurbia was a boiling uninhabited planet permanently bombarded by meteorites from the solar system which was encompassed in a swirling cloud of cosmic dust of gargantuan magnitude. Micro-organisms in those dust clouds - scientifically defined as panspermia, were the fallout from meteor collisions. Dust particles from debris that fell to Earth from the cosmos were the interplanetary transfer of seeds of life, panspermia that used this cooling planet as a host to germinate.'

Seemingly nonchalant of this illumination, the lemur continued his bricolage of the radio.        

'This chunk of low-tech is about to pop its clogs. Mostly static, mores the pity. I'd relish a belly-aching guffaw at the manipulative mendacity the media puppets have been fed by their masters to explain the sudden demise of millions of babies, and counting.'

Sparks and smoke emanating from the radio caused the lemur to leap backwards, coughing out his words.

'You're saying Homo Sap. are an extra-terrestrial freak show?'

Witcombe chuckled.

'I am saying that. Within the human gene pool, certain genes remain dormant for generations before randomly emerging, which is known as atavism. Examples of unpredictable activation of dormant genes would be a couple who both have blond hair and blue eyes but give birth to a child with dark hair and brown eyes, or a couple of less than average intelligence whose offspring has an exceptionally high IQ. Just as there is good bacteria and bad bacteria, the revelatory core of my theory states that atavism is hard-wired within panspermia, and at the moment of inception of pregnancy, atavism promotes the dominance of either constructive or destructive genes in the foetus. Think Buddha and Hitler.

The telescope and the microscope are wedded in scientific matrimony, but regrettably, there are few witnesses to their troth. Between the inner space of human biology and outer space of the Universe, science gives priority to exploration of the latter. The platitude that stresses the importance of seeing the bigger picture is indicative of human myopia, for exploration of what is microscopic is just as important as exploration of far-distant planets.

Genes may be microscopic, but they are sentient, and were underestimated to our peril. The mass deaths of newborn babies worldwide is an insurgent attack from within the gene pool, revenge for millennia of human folly. Most humans are morons, and morons beget more morons. The message being sent by atavism is no more births of deadheads who will continue to trash this planet as their predecessors did. The previously dormant self-destruct gene means the newborn go straight from the womb to the tomb. With no more births, there will be no future generations, all living children, adolescents and adults will eventually die, and the uninhabited planet will slowly heal itself from the shameful litany of human error.'

The lemur grinned as he lifted a Bible from the pulpit and held it over the flame of a candle until it caught fire.

'Smart as a whip, mean as a snake, crazy as a loon. That oughta be the epitaph spray painted on your tombstone.'

'My death is on hold.' Came Witcombe's terse response as he dipped his quill into ink. 'Until there's no more gall in my ink.'

The lemur warmed its tiny hands on the burning pages of the Bible.

'But will those boffins that blackballed you see the light?'

Witcombe's mocking laughter echoed from the stone walls of the church.

'I eschew the bleatings of those sheeple. They're focused on what they erroneously see as the big picture, or pictures - the Big Bang, entropy. And they don't want subversive dissidents like yours unruly rocking their boat. On the subject of the Big Bang, I'll read to you from an old journal of mine. When I was a student at Trinity college in Dublin, a tutor instructed the class to write an essay on alternative views of the Big Bang theory. I submitted the following, for which I was unceremoniously expelled:

"The Big Bang implies an auditory outburst of unimaginable decibel levels synchronous to the alleged cosmological collision. In that context, if one is inclined toward perversion of received wisdom, the Big Bang can be satirised as a Bacchanalian orgy, a big bang, copulation of cosmic proportions in which legions of testosterone-charged Deities gratified their prurient desires with celestial virgins, the glottal grunts of a zillion simultaneous orgasms creating a cacophony which awoke their galactic neighbours in Deep Coma Drive from their Dante-esque cauchemars. Pavlovian reflexes saw the dullards gulp down bonbons peddled by the pharmaceutical Mafia, sending them slithering back into a cozy continuum of cerebral stasis."

The lemur scratched tufts of hair on its pate.

'There's a more pressing issue here than your twisted sense of humour, cosmological funambulism, and the end of the human race. I'm hungry.'

Oblivious to his companions's need, Witcombe continued.

'The extinction of humanity is merely a prelude to the epilogue. Before the word entropy existed, Isaac Newton penned an observation of it that's lesser-known than his clumsily couched Biblical nexus of the apple falling as a metaphor for the fall of Man in the garden of Eden. Newton wrote, "All systems tend towards disorder." The relatively recent theory of entropy expressed in the second law of thermodynamics - that all forms of energy eventually dissipate and die was made in 1856 by Rudolph Clausius, a hundred years after Newton's visionary insight.         

Entropy, the nemesis of order, is omnipresent. Entropy states that the Universe, and all matter within it, inclines towards disorder. Entropy is deterioration, decomposition, destruction, and chaos. When humans attempt to create order, which is an artificial and temporary state, entropy disassembles it. Dust accumulates as soon as we've cleaned our houses. Weeds invade manicured gardens. Machines break down. Mortar between bricks crumbles and buildings fall into ruin. The human corporeal envelope and the Heath-Robinson organs within it slowly decay. Entropy predicts the eventual ultimate disorder of the universe and its end by heat death, in which all matter reaches a uniform temperature.'

Sighing deeply, Witcombe closed his journal and picked up a plastic bag from the floor beside him.

'Where's my manners. You asked for food, and I'm blathering on like a banshee with a cocaine habit. There's a frugal feast, Rice Krispies au lait. At dawn, I ventured into the cemetery, hoping a sunbeam would pierce through the miasma of pollution. In the undergrowth, prostrate amongst weeds, I espied a corpse. A young woman, bloated belly indicating nine months of pregnancy. Beside her, this plastic bag containing a box of Rice Krispies and a carton of milk. Manna to break your fast and keep the emblem of The Spirit of the Dead alive.'

The lemur chattered through barred yellow teeth.

'So you know? Silly me, 'natch a brainiac like youz would know the history of lemurs. Native of Madagascar, my species has been dubbed the emblem of The Spirit of the Dead since millennia. Given your prediction of the current deluge of death, is that why you chose me as your muse?'

Witcombe blew dust from a small bowl before filling it with rice Krispies and changing the subject.

'My addled cerebrum,' he said with a hint of jocularity, 'just made a connection between the Big Bang being the beginning of everything, entropy being its end, and your breakfast. Listen to what happens when milk is poured onto Rice Krispies.'

The lemur scampered down from the pulpit to witness the event.

'Hear that?' Witcombe whispered, as he drizzled milk over the cereal. 'Snap, crackle, pop. Energy. Life. And wait…sudden silence. Entropy. The death of a very small universe in a breakfast bowl.'

The lemur, more hungry than impressed by this theatre, grabbed the bowl and gobbled the minor miracle within whilst Witcombe returned to his marginalia.

'What now?' Enquired the lemur after he'd licked the bowl clean.

Witcombe gazed though a shattered stained glass window.

'Noblesse oblige. I shall bury that pregnant dead girl and her infant in the cemetery. What's your next move?'

Turning around, Witcombe saw that the lemur was no longer present. The simian was not outside either when Witcombe traversed the cemetery carrying a shovel.

A chill wind blowing autumn leaves had lifted the girl's smock to reveal the stretched skin of her pregnancy had turned blue. Floating out and upwards from her dilated navel, a cartoon speech bubble, patois from her infant, the entropy of language.

sup bro

'You're dead.'

no cap…i'm pressed! spill tea…finna cotch n glow up? go below n get salty?


Witcombe gently removed dead leaves from the girl's corpse before replying.

'There is no Heaven, no Hell. Only a waiting room without walls. The Universe expanding into nothingness.'

bussin'! that yard…it twined?…i got fomo…

Witcombe began digging a grave.