Thumb Fiction: The Birds Came this Morning

The birds arrived this morning. It was odd for December. Usually she noticed them in the warmer months of June and September. The beauty of their flight comforted her and released her from the restraints of her poverty. Little did she know they were not merely birds but weaponized drones using the bodies of living creatures—biomachines.

They carried the ability to surveil and to disable a living body by transmitting a particular sound frequency, inaudible to human ears. A similar weapon had been used on diplomats in Cuba this year. They never knew what it was that made them sick. But they all were carried out of their offices—dying—one by one.

It could be thought that her naïveté or inability to perceive the threat of the birds flying around and over her made her vulnerable to the dangers they carried. But it was the opposite. Her capacity to feel love and appreciation when observing them inoculated her body from the weapon’s effect. The weapon makers were unable to fully understand the power of such feelings and so could not design a defense against it. Her feeling was her protection—something understood for many centuries. It was as simple as having the capacity to love all life, to love the natural world, and to love the beauty it held.