COVID's End

When story implodes in sickness

Image by Alexandra Koch via Pixabay

The Lines burned through slowly—the C first, and then the impossible T, faint at first but unmistakable. The T Line wasn’t supposed to happen, ever. Not to my family. We’d done so many of these over the past few years, so very many. There was always just the one Line and it was always the solitary C.

This time, the two Lines came for my husband. He’d felt it. He could sense them coming for him since the night before. I watched the second Line push through on the test strip, and my blood ran cold.

I turned to him. My face said it all.

“Shit,” he said.

We looked at each other and had the same thought instantly. Our daughter needs to test now. She had just started high school—and before that, coughed her way through the entire month of July. Unable to see friends. Unable to swim. Unable to sing, one of her great passions. The Lines had not come for her then, but it was all but certain they had now.

The first Line came through on her test strip, bright and bold. Then, the other.

Two down. My turn. I gritted my teeth, and stared down the Strip.

One Line. And only the One Line. Last person standing, then. The Warrior Mama, defying a cold-blooded virus that had been toppling lives all over the world for four years now. I felt vindicated, determined. My body had withstood what had no doubt been the whooping cough in July, despite all the hugs and kisses with my rising high schooler. And it sure as hell could withstand this virus too. I planted my flag.

Two days later the virus tried again. Its first parry: a strange, non throbbing, metallic headache.

I don’t get headaches.

Two Lines for me. Virus scores.

Within the day I’d be bedridden, the virus drawing its own visitor’s map through my body as if it were on an all-expenses paid cruise. Strange pains in places they didn’t belong. A ton of bricks pressing on my head, pressure-heating the brain. Capillaries coagulating. Sweeping torrents of chills like sheets of November rain. Bones no longer willing to move, muscles in dream state. A plastic-like, nagging nausea killed off all my appetite. In one bright spot, eucalyptus essential oil pushed back the virus when it tried to kick down the door to my lungs. The one place I refused to surrender.

We knew, thankfully, what to do. And what not to do. A virus like this you don’t “push through.” You don’t “suck it up.” You rest—intensely. When you’re fighting this beast, you rest with all your power.

And this, of course, was “mild.” Nothing compared to the horrors visited upon the bodies of all those of our fellow humans when the pandemic first struck nearly five years ago. My family had all been vaccinated and boosted, except for this latest round of variants.

So it is that I was involuntarily unplugged from the world I usually inhabit. Gone in a microbubble were the frenetic days of client calls and meetings, emails and voicemails, ideation sessions, taking my daughter rock climbing, to and from school, planning dinner, long hikes on the weekend… As for exercise… can you hear the sound of that thunderous laughter?

It was just two days. We were lucky. Lucky enough to have insurance that benevolently paid for an antiviral drug that cost $1,700. That price, by the way, is a crime.

It has been years if not full decades since I was any kind of sick. Not even a cold. (Ok, granted, there was the norovirus—that thing literally turned me inside out and hung me out to dry in the cold spring air.) There are ways to stay illness-free even while you keep up a rather energetic pattern of activity. Sleep and nutrition have a lot to do with it. But this time, I was down. KO’ed.

And so, while the virus braided my capillaries and built rollercoasters out of my veins, and somewhere a LinkedIn post about our genAI survey was blowing up, my mind disembarked from worldly affairs and entered another dimension.

Image by Эльвина Якубова from Pixabay (cropped)

The day after the Two Lines took their stand, my daughter happened to leave her copy of Childhood’s End on the dining table. I stared at the thin little book, feeling the irony of its title in every bone of my body.

It became mine for the next two days. Or perhaps I became its. It was an unexpected whirlwind of literary courtship, marriage, and divorce that could easily turn turtles into mayflies.

When a book is good, I enjoy it. But when a book is great, I disengage from everything else, and I live in its world.

Arthur C. Clarke is, no question, one of modern literature’s greatest sci-fi writers. His 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my personal favorites. Childhood’s End is equally vast in the ambition of its imagination. It’s short enough that you can easily read it in a day—or two if you’re laid up. As I slid down the pages to the novel’s close, the antiviral forces slashed through the ranks of the corona armies, derailing their supply trains and decapitating their strategic command. I could taste the remnants of their swords… a bitter, grapefruit-like, metallic aftertaste each time I took in new reinforcements. It wasn’t victory yet, but the battlefield was clearing up. That’s when a bizarrely palpable and thoroughly nauseating thing happened: story and sickness fused in a nuclear reaction in my body.

That, upon the story’s close, I was possessed of a visceral desire to vomit, would not be a false statement. That I nearly drowned in the immeasurable depths of an extinction-level despair, would not be at all a satirical note. That waves of a rich, layered sense of an emotion I can best describe as utter awe, fury, and desolation passed over me, would not be misaligned with the depth of that final reaction.

The Virus has directly killed over 7 million people.¹ A small percentage, perhaps, of the 8.2 billion on the planet today, but significant enough—for every human life is priceless (certain warmongers’ world leaders’ personal opinions notwithstanding). What takes place in Childhood’s End makes this Virus look like Child’s Play.

SPOILER ALERT: For those who have not yet read Childhood’s End, I recommend you do not continue to the end, for the remaining sections do contain spoilers and will ruin your virgin reading experience. (Read the novel first and then come back!) Also, this is not your typical review. I’ll focus on a few highly specific reactions the story provoked in my fevered psyche.

Demon Form & Function

The Overlords, the alien species that arrives on Earth and makes humans an offer they can’t refuse (namely, play nice with each other or we’ll kill your entire race), have two secrets they take their sweet time sharing with their Homo sapiens charge: their appearance, and the reason for coming all the way to Earth in the first place.

Secret One: Their physical form. For fifty years after their arrival, the Overlords stubbornly resist allowing humans to see them. Then comes the promised day… Karellen, the Supervisor, emerges from his ship, in a Christ-like entrance with a human child on each arm (these are human children he has called from among the waiting crowd, but also a poignant foreshadowing). His physical body—complete with horns, wings, and tail—is what humans would call a demon, or the Devil. If my eyes hadn’t hurt from the virus-induced headache, I would have done an eye-roll. Really, an alien demon? Wait, there’s a deeper undercurrent to this, hints the author.

Later we are told that the archetypal fear and horror humans have felt for demons are unfortunate artifacts of the non linear nature of Time—it is but a future memory, a collective premonition of the Overlords’ unintended association with the future end of the human race that has lasted through the centuries. Hence the Devil/Satan association. In (the novel’s) actual reality they’re pretty swell fellas. After all, their civilization has figured out how to achieve travel at the speed of light, set up a supply chain from their planet to Earth, and they’ve brought peace and prosperity to the entire planet.

As much as this narrative seems to be a novel twist on an ancient myth, it feels a touch cliché. The Devil is a primarily Judeo-Christian construct—he does not exist in the mythologies of other civilizations, for example Egyptian, Babylonian, Maya, Toltec, or the ancient tribes of the Mongolian steppes. It’s difficult if not impossible to pull a singular mythic figure that resonates with all the cultures of the world—naturally, Mr. Clarke chose one of the most pervasive, the most well-marketed throughout the ages. But that’s precisely why it feels at once awe-inspiring and trite.

The Overmind overrules the Overlords

Secret Two: The real reason for the Overlords’ presence in Earth’s airspace and extended guardianship of Humanity. And the reason they can’t divulge that reason quite yet is because they, in turn, have masters to answer to, or rather, a Master. A supreme omniscient intelligence called the Overmind, which the reader may assume is nothing less than God or Divinity itself. Humans have lived in the grip of this fascination since we came down from the trees and learned to speak. I’m certainly not one to argue with the concept of some kind of vast, universal force, call it God, Divinity, Life, or Consciousness. Whatever label you prefer, it fascinates us humans to no end, this idea of some kind of higher—no, highest—intelligence that permeates and governs the Universe and, by extension, all of earthly existence. It certainly makes things easy; it frees us from the ultimate responsibility.

Can you blame us for preferring structure, order, and comfort, in all the chaos of the cosmos? It’s a pretty violent, shape-shifting, mind-blowing place.

The big secret is finally cracked open at the end, when the Overlords confirm that the eerie supernatural powers that are beginning to appear in young children—starting with the son and daughter of key characters George and Jean Greggson—are early signs that the Overmind is coming, and the end of the Human race is near. For this generation of children is the final brood, and there is no further need for physical bodies.

Does it make sense that an evolutionary leap of this magnitude could be made within a single generation? Of course not. But this is sci-fi, and it’s Arthur C. Clarke. Still, my eyebrow twitched many a time as I read on. Consider the following:

Jeffrey Greggson, George and Jean’s eldest son, dreams of faraway worlds only the Overlords know are real. His baby sister, Jennifer Anne, lies in her bed controlling her toy rattle with her mind and causes food to “disappear” from the fridge. Overmind? More like overtones of a poltergeist. (It could be that this scene had some indirect inspiration for a certain popular ghost film in the 1980’s…)

In one of the final scenes, the Earth is all but emptied of the old-guard humans, and only the star children remain. They’re described as follows:

They might have been savages, engaged in some complex ritual dance. They were naked and filthy, with matted hair obscuring their eyes. … Then Jan saw their faces. … They were emptier than the faces of the dead, for even a corpse has some record carved by time’s chisel upon its features… There was no more emotion or feeling here than in the face of a snake or an insect. The Overlords themselves were more human than this.²

Forgive the eyeroll, but. Why must the extraordinary, the alien, the super-intelligent, always be horrific? Why must it always horrify and gut us? If the Overlords, who had won over humans with their superior technology and all-encompassing benevolence, carried themselves with such grace, then why would an even higher intelligence turn children into empty zombies rather than render them far more magnificent than both their human parents and their Overlord guardians? Why should children endowed with a new evolutionary intelligence have to lose their personality and their joy? Supposedly it was precisely their pure state, their innocence, and their connection to the supernatural, that rendered them amenable to the Transition to begin with. It doesn’t make much sense that this higher intelligence would suck dry the human psyche in this manner. It feels less like a well-developed narrative than a story device designed to play on the emotions of the reader.

Perhaps it wasn’t a worn trope in the 1950’s, but it sure is today. Today we’re being terrified by tech billionaires with the prospect of a potentially malevolent AGI—although they have a much more insidious agenda than igniting our imaginations. There are trillions to be made.

Secondly, from an evolutionary perspective, the idea that every single child born into the world would be gifted with these powers—in other words a quantum shift in evolution—within a single generation is non sensical. Yes, yes, this is fiction and anything can happen, but give us a little nuance! a little flavor! is what I’m saying. It’s simply too simplistic.

Third, I’m ruffled by the underlying purpose of the role of the Overlords in preparing the human race for the arrival of the Overmind. Yes, they instituted world peace and prosperity, they resolved climate change and the energy crisis, but they snuffed out scientific pursuit. How does that bring about a quantum leap in human evolution? Is it because humanity needs to destress and detraumatize collectively before it can give such momentous birth? According to the novel, it’s the alien version of “You can’t handle the truth.” We humans are so clueless about the vagaries of interstellar travel that we would be hopelessly and utterly lost in the face of its blinding realities—and in fact might have annihilated our race before we got there. Hence the need for our benevolent alien guardians. Given how we’ve been reacting to the mere idea of a superintelligent, autonomous AI, I have to say Clarke might have a point there.

One final point about the role of higher intelligence in the novel. Clarke places a singular focus on human intelligence, the role of Homo sapiens as the sole species of high intelligence on Earth. We know, of course, that we are not the only intelligent beings on this planet. Whales, elephants, chimpanzees, birds, and other species have their own intelligence. In fact, Nature’s intelligence encompasses all of Life, including human beings. It simply does not follow that a newly evolved higher intelligence would willfully devour Earth and all of its life forms as it “leaves” the planet to join the Overmind. Why the need to leave at all, and why the need to destroy a cradle of life to join a supposedly “universal” intelligence? Is not a “universal” intelligence already suffused throughout every atom of the Universe, by default? It is not a zero sum game—the current race of humans does not need to be eradicated in order for the star children to fully evolve. Evolutionary trees split all the time—that’s how new species come to be.

Ah but it does make sense—when you consider the creator of the idea, and that is a Western European author (in this case male and white, although I don’t wish to overburden that point specifically). The narrative aligns with the rather stereotypical European colonial worldview, which is that only “Mankind” possesses any real intelligence, and Nature is an entity to be harvested, extracted, conquered, and destroyed, not just for industry and political power but apparently for science fiction material as well.

Then there is the line of thought that says Childhood’s End has taken as inspiration the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit, Catholic theologian, and scientist who subscribed to the idea that the purpose of intelligent life was to evolve toward becoming one with God.

If we take these two lines of thinking into consideration, Childhood’s End is perfectly aligned with sensible expectations. It also explains why both the Virus and I reacted so vehemently to the novel. Viruses, after all, are one of the most ancient forms of life, certainly the most numerous, and if intelligence is a sign of survival and adaptation, it does beg a very obvious question.

Parting thoughts

How would a story like this have differed if it had been written by a non Western writer? For example, an Australian aboriginal author, or Maori, Hawai’ian, Native American, Maya, or any other ancient native people around the world?

Indigenous world cultures also have their destruction mythology—but the difference is that the destruction serves a deeper purpose, and it follows a cyclical pattern. It’s birth and rebirth, life and death, day and night. The modern European worldview has always followed a linear pattern, of cause and effect. In Childhood’s End, the Earth is destroyed by a superintelligence born within the minds and bodies of a new generation of children. It serves, essentially, as their last psychic meal before they’re absorbed by the Overmind. It’s a singular, non cyclical event: the Earth can only be destroyed once. There is no regeneration, no rejuvenation, no rebirth. You can argue it’s the rebirth of a new race, and that the old must die, but that is a false narrative. In a cyclical worldview, there is no final destruction of anything.

Indigenous cultures’ worldviews, their relationship to Time and the Cosmos, their ways of expression and seeing, are profoundly different from the dominant European cultures. Yet we, as writers and as readers, automatically depart from a certain default that has been set a long time ago—we’re barely aware just how trained we have been to think a certain way. Perhaps it is time to take a page from a small but powerful string of RNA.

1. “Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths by world region,” Our World in Data, accessed online on September 1, 2024 at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-covid-deaths-region.

2. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 196.