A Speck of Dust

A Speck of Dust 150 150 Ben Coker

A Speck of Dust

And so it came to pass that a tiny speck of matter, smaller than a speck of dust, appeared on the planet. No-one know from whence it came and at first no-one noticed it at all, it might have been around for years.

It was not alive, it had no awareness, just a few molecules of protein, lipid, and nucleic acid, totally inert – a tiny sub-microscopic speck.

As with everything of course it was just an energy system, but as you and I know, everything is created twice so it must have started out as a thoughtform, but who (or what) had that thought is purely a matter of guesswork, it could have come from anywhere in the Universe.

One day, purely by chance, by accident, it came into contact with a living cell and was absorbed by that cell. And the nature of that cell was to respond to the ‘instructions’ contained within the nucleic acid in that speck, to replicate it.

And so it did, many thousands maybe even millions of times, until eventually the cell died, or maybe was destroyed by other cells in the body of which it formed part, and the multitude of replicated specks it had created were released.

Some stayed inside that body being taken up by other cells and the process was repeated. Some though, left that body through the normal processes of its life and were expelled into the atmosphere, where, again quite by accident, by chance, they came into contact with other living cells in other bodies and the whole process of replication was repeated.

At some time one or more of these tiny specks of micro-dust came, by chance, into contact with a human cell within a human body.

We have no knowledge of when this happened or where this happened. A human may have been the first type of body the original speck ‘bumped into’, or maybe not, it doesn’t matter.

But what does matter is what happened once humans became involved.

Now it’s really important for you and me to keep hold of the fact that the original speck of dust and all its replicates were purely three-dimensional inanimate objects. They had no awareness, no ‘purpose’, no ‘agenda’, no ‘intent’, no thought, no life, nothing. They were not organisms, not alive and so could not be ‘killed’. They were just ‘specks of dust’ carried hither and thither by the dynamics of the planet and the living creatures thereon.

But the humans, who like to have explanations for everything and are highly suggestible creatures decided amongst themselves to ascribe all these qualities to these innocent specks of dust.

The specks were ‘evil’ they were ‘out to kill us all’ they were a threat and so on. The humans also agreed that they were some sort of life form and had to be ‘killed’.

The problem was that this particular type of speck was something that human bodies, human cells, had not really encountered before although there were others like it.

Consequently in ‘mistakenly’ turning their efforts over to replicating the specks rather than performing their originally assigned purpose, the cells did themselves quite a bit of damage and put excessive pressure on the body’s ‘health service’, its immune system, distracting it from other, perhaps more pressing, urgent, or serious matters it was dealing with.

Because of this many humans died from the problems they already had, often earlier than they would have expected without the extra pressure on their health services needed to deal with the specks.

It wasn’t the specks that caused the deaths because the effect of the specks on their own was relatively minor, although uncomfortable, but the humans decided to ‘blame’ the speck for all those deaths that would have occurred anyway although maybe at a later date.

Eventually they worked themselves up into such a state that almost every death, whatever the cause, was blamed on the speck – humans of course love to have something or someone to blame for everything that goes even slightly wrong.

Some humans came to believe that if a speck came near them they would die, and so they did, not from the speck but because of their belief they would die, some humans even wanted to die and believed that the speck had been sent to kill them.

The specks of course were not ‘doing’ anything, they were just specks, with no ability to ‘do’. But the humans really believed that they were and so they started to make changes in the way they lived so that they could avoid any possibility of the specks ‘infecting’ them.

They persuaded their governments to order that everyone should stay locked inside their houses and have no contact with anyone else, they persuaded their governments to order that they keep apart and wear masks to prevent the specks being passed from one person to another and they persuaded their governments to enforce these rules and arrest or fine anyone found breaking them.

They even persuaded their governments to ban people from taking walks alone in the countryside or on the beaches – everyone was forced to stay at home, except for a few key workers who would keep things going.

Almost every death that occurred, even those from old age, were blamed on the speck – even if it only might have been present, and the people worked themselves up into a state of fear that the world was coming to an end and that everyone would die.

Well of course everyone will, but not because of the speck.

Now the speck was very hard to find, very hard to test for, so no-one really knew whether they ‘had’ it or not because there were lots of other specks that looked a bit like it. The people didn’t really know how ‘bad’ it was – or even if the speck was still there!

The humans also worked hard to find a ‘cure’, something that would eliminate the speck, but because no-one was really able to isolate it, this proved very difficult especially as different human bodies reacted in different ways according to the condition they were in before the speck chanced, by accident, to encounter them.

Different people’s immune systems dealt with the speck in different ways making the ‘symptoms’ of being ‘infected’ by the speck difficult to determine. As usual most human ‘medicine’ was about treating the symptoms rather than the cause, but they did come up with an idea for that.

Why not take substances from people who had the ‘disease’ and use them to create something that could be injected into healthy people to give them the disease so their immune systems could recognise it and start to build defences?

Sounds like a good plan?

The humans became so enamoured with this idea that they demanded that such a ‘vaccine’ be developed to ‘kill off’ this ‘threat’.

And they became so enthusiastic that they started to demand that everyone should be forced to receive this vaccination – or in other words that everyone should be forcibly given the speck so their immune systems could, in time, become resistant to it.

But what if, what if?

They had just left it alone as they had with other types of speck, and let it run its course. After all the symptoms it caused by itself were not much different from the ‘common cold’ – for which no remedy had ever been found.

In the end, livelihoods were destroyed, businesses were destroyed, the people gave themselves over to increasing state control over what they did, parliamentary democracy was superseded my mob democracy, people were not allowed to travel, curiosity and exploration were discouraged, society was broken, and life on the planet changed irreversibly.

All because of a speck of dust.