After the Monkeys Died

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

A million years ago, all the monkeys died.

It started with chemistry, as things often do. Two ketones and a polymer, the by-products of unrelated and more-or-less innocent manufacturing processes, wafted their way into the upper atmosphere where they drifted for decades.

It took a long time for the chemical reaction to happen. It was incredibly improbable. Ultraviolet light scattered the compounds before they could interact, so it had to happen at night, on the side of the planet facing away from the sun. The right molecules, a gamma ray passing by at just the right moment, and presto.

Still, nothing interesting happened at first. Atoms moved around into new shapes, but the new shapes didn’t particularly do anything. Until hours later, that is, when the sun rose over the horizon and catalyzed them with radiation.

That’s all it took.

The potent and ludicrously specific organic poison made its way around the planet, following the sun. Wherever it went, there were monkeys, and wherever the monkeys met the poison, the monkeys died. Suddenly, instantly and quite painlessly.

Okay, actually it was probably very painful. But I’m trying to soften the blow here.

It took twenty-four hours for all the monkeys to die. They might have held out longer if not for a coincidence in the weather; it was summer in the northern hemisphere then, and on that day there were no monkeys in the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter. Wherever monkeys saw the sun, monkeys died.

In a day, they were all gone.

They left all their stuff behind, of course. All their cities and roads and monuments. All their artifacts. The lights stayed on until the power ran out, and then one by one, the monkeys’ achievements grew dark and cold and began to disappear.

Then we came along.

We knew all about the monkeys, of course. How could you not? They’d been everywhere. There were precious few places on the planet — apart from the middle of the open sea — where you could stand and see no sign that the monkeys had ever been there.

So of course we studied the monkeys. There wasn’t much else to do. The world was a placid place. We dug into the monkeys’ cities. We learned to read some of what they called writing. We learned what we could of them, and when we couldn’t learn any more, we speculated and we dreamed. What could have brought down such a globe-spanning culture? Was it war?

The monkeys had a thing they called war; it was sort of a sport. They liked to kill each other — nobody knows why; they never wrote down their reasons, apparently — and war was killing for entertainment. Was it war that brought down the monkeys? Did they all kill each other until none were left? We had a hard time working that one out. Besides, it was a depressing theory.

Maybe it was a famine, some of us thought. There were so many monkeys. How could they possibly feed each other? Surely they’d far outstripped their food sources. But then we looked deeper, and discovered that the monkeys ate everything. Grass, weeds, animals, fish, birds — yes, even birds. When the monkeys ran out of interesting things to eat they ate dull things, and when they ran out of wholesome things they put their big monkey brains on the problem and figured out how to eat vile things. Food wasn’t a problem for the monkeys.

Eventually we discovered the two ketones and the polymer, and what they do when they react in darkness in the presence of gamma rays, and what then happens when the product of that reaction is exposed to sunlight, and finally what happens when the product of that reaction gets into monkey blood and monkey brain.

So that cleared that up. The monkeys didn’t kill each other, and they didn’t die out. They were murdered by plain old bad luck.

But we still studied them. Can you blame us? We needed a way to pass the time. We learned about things called skyscrapers, which were hollow artificial trees of mammoth proportions. We learned about monuments, which the monkeys built as tall as possible. We learned about airplanes, which were actually a fairly ingenious way of dealing with the monkeys’ natural handicap with respect to wings.

The more we looked, the more examples we found of monkeys trying to get higher.

That’s when we started to figure the monkeys out. They were arboreal creatures. They lived in trees. And they were brachiators; they used their long, gangly, leg-like arms to swing from branch to branch … and to climb.

Suddenly all of monkey history made sense. It was chaotic and bizarre, but when viewed through the right lens, it made a sort of sense. The monkeys spent all their time — three million years of history, best guess — trying to reach the top of the highest tree.

Our theories were confirmed when we discovered, after decades of intense research, that monkeys actually walked on the moon.

I know! The moon! What a completely bizarre and ridiculous idea. It’s far away, it’s tiny, it’s cold and it’s barren. There’s nothing interesting there. There’s no water, no reeds. No fish. No air to support your wings, not to mention to breathe. Why go to the moon? There are plenty of ugly, dull, boring places that are a lot closer.

But the monkeys did it. They sealed their wiggly little bodies inside metal boxes and blasted those boxes into space on top of huge explosives. How they survived the trip is anybody’s guess. But then they zipped themselves into little suits and stepped out of their boxes and walked on the surface of the moon.

Because it’s high.

If the monkeys hadn’t died from a plague of bad luck, they surely would be climbing still. The moon’s not high enough. The planets would have been next. And then the stars. And then the galaxies.

There’s always a higher branch.

Which, of course, brings me to my point.

If you flew to the nearest aerie and asked around, you’d find that everybody knows all about the monkeys. But if you took a quick poll, a show of beaks, you’d also find that pretty much everybody agrees that the world is better off without them.

Oh, sure. They were cute, especially the little ones. And they had some interesting things to say about the dynamics of laminar flow and turbulence. And some of their music was okay, as best we’ve been able to guess from reconstructions.

But they were noisy. And they were numerous. And they had this annoying habit of trying to pave everywhere they went.

Ask around, and you’ll find little pity for the monkeys. History can have them.

But what the pelican-on-the-street doesn’t know is that there’s an asteroid coming.

There, I said it. I let the trout out of the net. There’s an asteroid coming, and it’s headed right down our bills. Six months, maybe six and a half at the outside, and then we’ll all be gone. Gone the way of the monkeys.

And tonight I find myself wishing there were still a few monkeys left.

Heights hold no mystery for us. We fly, we soar. We look to the skies with indifference.

But the monkeys … the monkeys were climbers. They always reached for that next branch, their eyes always on the top of the tallest tree.

If there were any monkeys left today, they’d still be climbing, still be reaching for that next branch. Maybe we’d be able to convince them to take us along. Up to the tops of the trees and beyond, to the top of the highest mountain, to the moon, to the stars.

But they’re gone. The monkeys are all long gone, killed off by a coincidence. And so we sit here, circling and preening like there’s no tomorrow, waiting for the world to burn. Just waiting for it to end, because we don’t know how to climb.

How’s that for bad luck?

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.