Prompt:
“The chicken has crossed the road! I repeat. The chicken. Has. Cros-” The line went dead as the rumbling began.
Response:
We knew it would happen eventually. These things are not a question of if, but when. Grand forces of nature, whether freak natural disasters or true doomsday scenarios – all are inevitable given long enough time scales.
Our governments, especially those of the spacefaring nations, had been criticized for years for their lack of potential deterrents for killer asteroids that showed up on our planetary doorstep. In the U.S., effective evacuation plans were lacking for a hypothesized supervolcanic eruption at Yellowstone, should the earth give little warning before the event.
But in the deepest halls of power – from Beijing to Moscow to Washington – a greater threat has always been known, more dire, even, than all the city-killer sized chunks lurking dark and silent in the Taurid swarm. For two millennia the secret knowledge has been carried on in the secret channels that run like translucent veins through the cacophonous body of humanity and its relentless march of progress. The Illuminati and the Master Masons structured farming principles around the threat, so exquisitely that Western Man thought his methods had developed organically. The Star Soldiers rose in storied Tenochtitlán and ranged even beyond the very boundaries of the Aztec empire to protect against cataclysm. A branch of Ninja whose title has been lost to history – if indeed they ever allowed it to be recorded – allegiant to no one and nothing save all human life on Earth, worked in shadows with the Shoguns to influence how fowl were raised across the Japanese archipelago.
Humans seldom wonder why chicken farms are kept far back from the major highways, those central thoroughfares of a civilization that run so much like Ley Lines across the Earth.
The fact is that those great thoroughfares, unknown even to their builders, were unconsciously laid, indeed, across the existing Ley Lines. The ancient Ley Lines: those lines that predate the rise of mammals, running invisibly across the planet like a net of energy that constrains gravitational forces our mainstream scientists cannot even guess at. Our core spins too fast, with a density exponentially greater than is commonly thought. The Earth tears at the seams where the Ley Lines break.
No one knows why this domesticated organism, a common chicken, has the power to sever the Lines. The straggling survivors of Pompeii, though, didn’t require any explanation beyond their frantic gibbering about the “Cock of Doom” that escaped its pen and strutted across the trade highway at the edge of the city. Vesuvius wrought a terrible lesson that day.
We use landlines only for our phone communication. Wireless signals are too easy to intercept, and the panic would be too great if seven billion humans knew of the reality that we do. Panic would be instantaneous. A mass chicken extermination would begin, and in the chaos one of the birds would undoubtedly escape and cross “the Road” – our term for any of the Ley Line highways, enshrined in a common joke for over 1800 years since it was first spread by the nomadic bearers of the Ark of the Covenant.
Besides, fried chicken is the bomb and a suitable synthetic meat alternative hasn’t been developed yet.
So the question I ask myself, now, was whether that taste was worth it. Should we not have destroyed them all after Pompeii? Was risking all human life worth it? I’m not responsible for the decisions of my ancestors, it’s true, but I carried their torch.
“The chicken has crossed the road! I repeat. The chicken. Has. Cros-“
When the line went dead, I knew that the Earth had begun to heave, upset by titanic forces that none would escape. The rumbling had already begun, and louder and louder it grew.
“Goddamn you,” I whispered silently to that unknown and unknowing chicken.
We flirted with destruction. We were greedy for satiety. We’ve run afowl of our sins at last.
