Sloth Liberation Organization for Triumphant Hegemony

[mindbum]

when the williamsburg bridge grows over in vines and ivy the water will be enough feet higher odd islands and canals will show in a nameless archipelago once called metropolis.

with rising water and warmth (despite man’s attempts to the contrary) species expand and migrate. the possum and armadillo have been headed northward since the last ice age. that’s ten thousand years. there are bears in 49 states.

by the time the bridge is grown over in vines and great thick mangrove and mulberry take root on the traintracks in the center of the bridge there will be no more states. even democracy and freedom are not infinite.

the sloth, our fine three-toed friend, the armadillo’s distant cousin, you remember. he’s special cause he’s slow. and he has extra cervical vertebrae, more than you have where your back hurts because you slouch. maybe if you spent your days upside down.

as recently as those ten thousand years back the sloth’s giant forbear, megatherium, used its long arms to grab leaves from the trees. they weighed a couple tons with massive tails to make standing on hindquarters easier. they shrank, reduced tailsizes drastically, and went fulltime into the trees.

with more modern times most animals scaled down so as to better interact with humankind, their superior. man wouldnt stand for giant sloths freely roaming even if they are ‘herbivores’ with small brains. but your average cat-sized sloth is cute and slow enough for humans not to feel threatened and animals so much smaller require less food.

sloths commute from brooklyn to manhattan through the trees that cross the williamsburg bridge. trees that were once trains. these slow tree-riders only go to ground to defecate and move from tree to tree when it cannot be done in the canopy. they are very slow on land. they swim very well dogpaddling with their long forelegs. rumor has it they will drop into the water from the bridge for kicks.

sloth means slow and even though it’s a deadly sin a sloth sleeps fifteen hours a day and creeps hardly noticed through the canopy. the hue of algal cells prosper in the grooves of their coarse overhair to provide camoflauge.

amazing how time will put trees on a bridge. not everything left behind is completely levelled.

apocalypse is another word for global climate change. increasing natural disasters paralize and kill more and more so that, finally, the survivors are forced to figure out how to build weatherproof domed cities. it’s getting hot out there anyway and May snow frightens people in the tropics.

if you nuke a domed city everybody dies. nuke a buncha domed cities quick and you have a lot less people to worry about. plus, there’s germ warfare, mutant viral strains, dioxin, bad fish, bird flu, the bubonic plague and a few more nukes.

-did everybody just move together in the domed cities so they could be wiped out all at once?
-well, it was more like the alamo. they thought the fort would be a safe place to make a stand.
-but some sneaky mexicans got em.
-no. it was eco-terrorism.
-eco-terrorism?
-you know, foolish types that think all the earth’s species are more deserving than mankind because mankind destroys the other species.
-isn’t that just natural dominance?
-yeah, just like a man beating up on his wife and kids.

eco-terror is not mankind’s fear of what he’s doing to the earth. it’s a radical response to what man is doing. a group declares death to domes and all their inhabitants. it takes some real freaks to decide to nuke a city even if it’s for ideological reasons. dont think a sloth is defenseless. he is very agile in the trees and a swipe of those claws is swift and powerful. sure to injure.

there’s nothing worse than smart radicals. the kind who take their time to plan things out right.

-where are you going with this? all this sloth information... are you making a point?
-if you want to know so bad i’ll tell you i already told you. eco-terrorism.
-commando sloths?
-not quite. activists in central and south america became alarmed at the rate of sloth habitat destruction. they tried all avenues of prevention and conserrvation only to discover the only way to stop the onslaught of deforestation was by eliminating capitalism, the free market system and so on.
-so they took a crackpot idea to heart?

it started in brazil. bulldozer operators were assasinated. petroleum tanker trucks were sabotaged. logging bridges were blown up with logging company dynamite. executives were killed with poison dart frog poison. logging company mailing lists were sent a series of biological reagents. mailboys and secretaries dropped like flies and a most offices that received a note lost 35% of their staffs.

but secretaries, mailboys, bulldozer drivers and office workers are necessarily replaceable. lumber companies keep going. the sloth lovers saw the scale of their operations would have to be greater.

lucky thing already quarantined africa was wiped out by flesh-eating viruses and flesh-eating civil war and interracial religious strife. that left fewer people to massacre in the interest of sloth domination.

the sloth is an ancient creature. they have small brains and move slow and cause no trouble. with the slowness and all that sleeping sloths bear many bugs as passengers. the sloth moth spends its entire life on the sloth. the sloth is integral to the sloth moth’s life cycle. the sloth climbs to the ground, using far more energy than normally used in any full day in the canopy, to defecate. using it’s short, blunt tail as an auger the sloth makes a hole where it deposits its feces and the sloth moth then has the chance to lay its eggs. when the larvae hatch and come to maturity they fly up to find a sloth to live on after they have fed on the nutrients in the sloth feces. interdependency like this usually means the moth performs some necessary function for the sloth.

-thanks for telling me about the bugs that are born in sloth shit.
-you’re welcome. it’s very interesting that the sloth would waste all that energy going to the ground when they could just let one go from the canopy.
-that’s insanitary.
-it’s the jungle. some theorize sloths only defecate in the canopy when it’s raining so the sound of falling poop won’t alert predators.

the activists hold some kind of ten thousand year old grudge that doesnt make any sense. it’s a grudge over the northern migration of possums whereas sloths have been left to prosper in expansive but dwindling rain forests. sloth activists don’t like this one bit.

-why cant the sloth migrate north? why can’t the sloth expand?
-because the rain forest doesnt reach that far north.
-and why is that?
-it’s too cold.
-wrong! because man is destroying the rainforest.
-therefore destroy man?
-you got it.

i want to destroy mankind but i want the sloths and other plants and animals to survive. how such a plan was carried out is hard to precisely gauge. there were survivors. those minorities excluded from the domed cities and a few domed cities themselves, especially domed cities already on the verge of extinction. the domed cities make killing a lot of people at once very easy.

sloths dont hold grudges. they do not worry if they’re on the competitive grid. thousands of bugs call each sloth home. sloth moths, mites, tropical fleas & beetles & flies. a sensitive microsomic ecosystem of its own slowly moving through the canopy of the trees.

this ancient folivore travels the canopy in search of the most luscious leaves. and on his slippery upsidedown shoulders rests the responsibility for the eradication of humanity.

Sloth Liberation Organization for Triumphant Hegemony