Mosquito and Whitefly are Dead
Setting: Mosquito and Whitefly flutter over a shallow sea; the chemical scent of their food driving them onward. Mosquito has just learned that they are to deliver a message, but they will die as soon as the message is delivered.
Mosquito: “Let’s not do it. Let’s not deliver our message.” He flips a coin, it is heads.
Whitefly: “If we don’t do it, what do we do?” She flips a coin, it is heads.
Mosquito: “We could work on our flying, try to perfect it.” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “Perfect it how? Why? If I fly too much, then I’m somebody’s lunch.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “If we deliver our payload, we die.” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “But that is the only purpose we have.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “Why don’t we at least look at the message?” He flips a coin, it is heads.
Whitefly: “Why?” She flips a coin, it is heads.
Mosquito: “So we know what it is.” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “Won’t that kill the mystery?” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “How many times have we both thrown the same thing?”
Whitefly: “89 already. Rather improbable I think.”
Mosquito: “You throw first this time.”
Whitefly: “I’m going to look at the message.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “What does it say?” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: He takes the message out of its viral envelope and reads it: “ACGACACCCTGACTTA.” She flips a coin, it is tails.
Mosquito: “What does it mean?” He flips a coin, it is tails.
Whitefly: “I don’t know, I’d say it is morally ambiguous at best.” She flips a coin, it is heads.
Mosquito: “I’d say it is ambiguous, ambiguous at best.” He flips a coin, it is heads.
Whitefly: “Again the same. Does this mean we are somehow entangled?”
Mosquito: “I don’t know. Hey lamprey, do you carry a message?”
Lamprey: “Yes, I am to deliver it to a fish.”
Mosquito: “Can you throw a coin at the same time we do?”
They all flip, all the coins come up heads.
They all flip, all the coins come up heads.
They all flip, all the coins come up tails.
Lamprey: “Satisfied?” He swims onward.
Whitefly: “Why do we have to die to deliver a message that we don’t understand? We could be destroying the world.”
Mosquito: “We could be saving the world.”
They both flip, both coins come up heads.
Whitefly: “How many is that?”
Mosquito: “96.”
Whitefly: “We are here.” Whitefly lands on the leaf of a tree. She is hungry. She sips the sap out of the succulent leaf.
Mosquito: “Yes, I guess we eat.” Mosquito lands on a bird. He is hungry. He sips its delicious blood.
Both fall over dead. Their coins drop. One is heads. One is tails.
A removed excerpt from “Property of Nature” after edits rendered the passage obsolete. Reproduced here with permission from the author (me).