Synopsis
Life moves forward. Despite despair, anger, amputation, and even massacres and wars, we live in a world where there is always the subtle background music of life. Honking cars, jabbering TVs, cafe conversations, and arguments. It's how reality is established. The world constantly spins on its axis and even though every year it tilts off center by a fraction, we continue to think that life will progress as it always has been.
Set on a futuristic Earth where the world has been abandoned, destroyed, and laid waste by invisible forces, Macrolens pieces together an intricate story of Earth's immediate future from the rubble left behind, and how it could've been prevented. If it should've been prevented.
I hope I can write 50,000 words of this!
Excerpt
Bubblegum Capsule
It's half-wedged in granular sand, bottoms up. The capsule has been discarded, dropped from some height to sink and carve out a concave home in the sand, a thumbnail-sized pearl half-swallowed by the earth. The glossy coating is dissolved on one side, revealing its foamy innards gushing over and crusted with age. An inflammation mechanism triggered by water that simulates chewing gum. It's not the way it was supposed to be eaten. A pearl destroyed by something as feeble as the sand's of time. But no one wants it, or has forgotten it. Two initials are printed on the other side in blue eight-point: DA. Harken back to the old days of the Food and Drug Association, but without the F for failure.
On the molecular level, strings of calcium and vitamin D molecules cohabitate to produce a gradual shot of supplemental vitamins per each chew. The candy-coating is a combination of flouride, mica, and zinc chloride to promote good dental hygiene. Tearing, ripping, crushing, and massaging the capsule between clenched molars for mechanic break down, the vitamins are mixed with saliva, dissolved by stomach acids, and absorbed into the blood for distribution to various bones throughout the body. One of a myriad of supplements meant to combat an increasingly deficient diet. Unlike most pharmaceutical drugs, it has no side effects and a single overdose will not kill you.
Beige whey protein, salmon omega 3/6, yellow vitamin C, orange vitamin A, lime-green zinc, yellow selenium, blue vitamin B-complex, red co-enzyme Q10, and gray magnesium citrate. Rainbow skittles promoting perfect health. Protein is directly-proportional to body weight, averaging 120g per day, then two 1g omega 3:6, and 75g for females or 95g for males of vitamin C, 12mg of zinc, 55mcg selenium capsules for females, 70mcg for males, one vitamin b-complex, along with 40mg of CEQ10 and 350mg of magnesium citrate. Each capsule carefully measured and adjusted according to weight and sex, separated into color-coded cases, and refilled once a week.
To pop into the mouth daily, eight to ten capsules, and chew on them for two hours each, the jaw muscles of these super humans must be rhino strength. Teeth enamel polished, bones fused with iron, blood perfectly balanced, and all internal organs accounted for and without disease. They must look physically different, the spike in nutrition making their hair glossy, eyes bright, movements quick and succinct. They could be towering giants and not have to worry about back problems, play any kind of sport and experience half the expected injuries. The benefits have to far outpace the alternatives.
Upon realizing the soil lacked essential minerals, the water polluted, and the food fiber without substance, the pill-popping perfectionists developed a marketable tool to sell health. Pilates in a bubblegum capsule. If you don't take it then you die from malnutrition, osteoporosis, heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, cancer, or suffer from hypertension, anxiety, sleeping disorders, and chronic exhaustion. It's your choice. It's your life. And then, when the semi-intellgent flocks of ten billion, fifteen billion, finally decided it was time to save their own lives, capsules became the new Slim milkshake.
Fruits were saved for dessert and calories, vegetables for fiber, and carbs for storing energy. However, no one ate any meat. The whey protein capsule and omega 3/6 completed the requirements for carnivores without the cholesterol or unhealthy toxins absorbed from the surrounding vegetation. Without the need to chew through tendons and roasted flesh, teeth softened and became another aesthetic in the portrait of the human body.
Decaying in a sand pit, the capsule is a cracked egg, broken by the careless hands of the world. Calculation of recent weather conditions, the acidity of the sand, and the humidity in the air predict that it was dropped about two weeks ago.
