Hope flickers cold but unbroken,

"You, oh Aruru, who created Gilgamesh, now create his counterpart, and let his furious heart have a rival. Let them fight, and let there be peace in Uruk!

Enlil, king of the gods, heard the complaints of the people of Uruk."

(The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I, Column I)

One degree and a heat wave came. Two degrees and insects went mad. They feed on living flesh, devouring indiscriminately without race. As it happened in Rome, like an annoying buzz, people disappearing at night without a trace. Then came the sightings: mosquitoes, flies, and giant dragonflies taking people in broad daylight eating them as if they were a treat selected among the populace. Not even a day passed before the army began operations in the city, but it was in vain. Citizens had to witness firsthand how decades of military development went down the drain when anti-aircraft systems failed to penetrate the insects' armor. Rome was devoured in a week.

NATO members requested support from the United States to address the sapientivore threat. However, they were already struggling with their own infestation, as colonies of giant ants spread throughout Florida, feasting on the population. Those unfortunate countries near the equator were quickly overrun by the hungry insects, leaving behind carcasses of concrete of once-thriving civilizations. Experts estimated that earth would be devoured within five years.

Each state’s response varied depending on their first encounter with the carnivores. Those unfortunate enough to govern in the tropics were forced to abandon their population centers, retreating to near isolated regions. Those who decided to stand firm and fight the menace, quickly found out the effects of a siege without a visible enemy. Anyone could fall asleep one night and wake up to a searing pain in their spine. In those days it was one of most common ways to discover that your house had a plague.

Rural zones presented a peculiar case. Many town had remedies against the insects. Some communities would place dozens of lemons at their doorsteps, praying that it would be enough to ward off the apex predators. In other places, people filled the streets with makeshift lightning. Red Christmas lights were hung from rooftops in hopes that the insect would not be able to see through them. Every day a new method emerged, and people were desperate for protection. They would give away everything they had, either money, property, mementos or sometimes their own freedom in the desperation to survive. It seemed as though they were pigeons performing rituals for food, as demonstrated in the varying effectiveness of these methods.

After the consumption of 45% of all humanity, the first successful defense was achieved. There was no authority in charge, nor great general to organize the defenders. The military was not even nearby. It was those who lost all hope and tried to protect their loved ones, who would achieve the first victory. The prototype of what would soon become the White Smokers mounted defense in Hel, Poland.

The town was in total war, adults, children and even the elderly did what they could to delay the swarm of locusts jumping in search of flesh to devour. On the road connecting the town with the rest of the country, the first confrontation occurred. A single locust, five meters tall, attempted to devour a woman from a group patrolling the area. The insect grabbed her with its jaws, prepared to split her in half. Desperate, the woman started to strike the insect with a fire extinguisher she was carrying. The repeated blows to the insect’s impenetrable exoskeleton eventually broke the extinguisher, liberating a pressuder could of carbon dioxide that froze the locust to death. Having survived, she shared this experience with the rest of the town and managed to repel the plage withing two weeks.

In the first winter, the areas near the poles saw a decrease in attacks, allowing several command and production centers to be established. One such places was Anchorage, where a doctor hid in her office with a squad of 11 soldiers and their commander-in-chief.

—What do think happened to all those people who kept insects as pets? —asked the doctors.

—Depends —the commander replied.

—On what?

—The type of insect, the size they reached after they transformed. We’ve seen all kinds of stuff… —the commander paused for a moment—. In Pasadena we found a guy who raised and sold cockroaches —the doctor looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and disgust—, for food for ant colonies, I guess. The thing is that when they grew up, they left nothing but bones. No flesh, no cartilage, or never. Everything was consumed —he paused again—. Although we’ve also seen cases where the people actually survive with only an eaten arm of leg. Mantises do eat the head, though.

—And what if they were to be an herbivore?

—Uh… almost always, nothing happens. Sure, they can attack if provoked, but they never attack first. However, if the insect is venomous, it’s most likely you would convulse until you die.

—When do you think the sun will come out again?

—Hopefully never, but they that by January dawn will return.

—Maybe when the port unfreezes, I’ll board one of those ships that can stay in the middle of the Pacific for months. They say insects can’t fly that far.

—I don’t think that will be necessary. By that time, Anchorage should be the safest place on the planet.

"—Three swarms detected in sector Q9, wasps," the radio on the commander's chest announced. After a few seconds, the chilling sound of jets roared through the city, only to be replaced by the explosions of dry ice falling onto the swarms.

By the second winter, Anchorage continued to suffer attacks from wasp swarms. They would snatch pedestrians and tear them open mid-flight, creating snowfalls of blood and viscera. Its inhabitants lived in constant fear, but they were faring a lot better than the rest of the world. In Stockholm, NATO troops spent weeks firing CO2-filled bullets at millions of hungry ants. They were so effective at eliminating that they thought they might actually be able to defend the city, but that feeling lasted until the las bullet was fired, and the city was consumed. Paris were not as lucky as to get devoured. As when thousands of cockroaches were detected in the catacombs, the government did not hesitate to evacuate and launch their nuclear might against the capital.

Nearing the third winter, Anchorage had fallen, and the United States relocated to their territories in the Pacific Ocean. Negligence was what condemned Alaska. A container of screws shipped from Washington without the proper procedures. One single termite queen gave birth to the colony that would devour the city. Hunger spread throughout civilization; agriculture was no longer viable as there was not enough space to sustain a large population, leading to famine and hopeless revolts against fleeing governments. Humanity would have lost the fight had they not noticed that the insects avoided the Chernobyl exclusion zone. A cauldron that corrupted the genome itself, but that was not enough to stop humans from making it the world’s breadbasket, allowing the fight to endure.

The world forgot its self-imposed order; it was chaos incarnate, a desperate struggle for survival in a landscape where nature itself had decided to fight back. Yet, amidst the devastation, humanity clung to the fragments of hope. Each sacrifice, each tragedy, carried the seeds of the wise. The fight was far from over, and while the days were shrouded in darkness, the resilience of the human spirit refused to be extinguished. As long as there were those with the genome, there was still a flicker of light, a promise that the story of the Homo sapiens sapiens was not yet finished.