Variation is a feature of natural populations and every population produces more progeny than its environment can manage. The consequences of this overproduction is that those individuals with the best genetic fitness for the environment will produce offspring that can more successfully compete in that environment. Thus the subsequent generation will have a higher representation of these offspring and the population will have evolved. - Charles Darwin
Most people remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the few world changing events that of their lives. Any example of this for those old enough to have lived "before" was 9-11.
Why do some memories like these stay so vivid in peoples minds? This can get rather complex when it comes to how memories are created an maintained in the brain. To simplify things, lets just say that the stronger the emotion you are feeling when your memory is created the easier it is to recall that memory.
That being said, I challenge you to find one person that lived through E-Day that does not recall exactly when they saw those words.
"The world is evolving, will you evolve with it?"
It was burned into the eyes of everyone around the world at the same time. As if you had been staring into a sun, and the after image was fading slowly away.
How do people react when they realize that every person around them shared what appears to be a hallucination? The answer turns out to be surprisingly normal. Sure, there are those that are abnormalities, who scream in terror and hysteria, or who run to their basement to get as many guns as they can carry. Interestingly enough these abnormalities had the right of it in most cases. The world was about to change around us and quicker that you prepared the better.
Now I don't know what it was like for those that lived in developing countries or those that lived off the grid. I imagine that the transition from the old to the new world was a bit more gradual than what I and a good number of other city livers experienced.
I was just getting back from my baby sisters middle school graduation. I am not entirely sure why they ask me to speak at such an occasion, considering I was just a grad student in Evolutionary Biology. I guess it was hard to find well educated alumni that were still easily contacted.
I remember feeling frustrated after having to defend Evolution to some religious middle schoolers. It baffled me how some people could remain intentionally ignorant of what was clearly a fact in the name of faith to a less than proven "God".
I was unlocking the door to my apartment, when those words appeared to burn themselves into my door. Looking around I realized it was not the door they had appeared on but my eyes. I quickly went into my apartment, trying to think of what type of illness could have caused this. I had no idea what could cause a hallucination like this besides schizophrenia, and I thought I was past the normal age for schizophrenia to appear.
When in doubt my go to solution is to go online and research. As I was going over to my computer the power for my apartment went out. Now these two different things happening together like they did started to get me a little bit panicked.
I decided to take a look outside my apartment to see if the power is out for just me, or everybody. As I got to the sliding glass door for my first floor patio I saw the cat that I had been feeding for the last few months; I was hoping to entice it to let me pet it soon. The cat was facing away from me with its tail flickering back and forth it's fur looked a bit odd, but I ignored that, thinking this might be my opportunity to finally pet it.
I slid the door open as quietly as I could. I crept forward making no noise and put my hand on its back gently. It launched itself almost straight up into the air making the most horrendous sound I had ever heard a cat make. It jumped much higher than I thought it would have been able to, a 7 Foot vertical seemed beyond my understanding of common domestic cats athletic ability.. The height of this jump as well as many other lucky things are what I attribute to surviving the next minute.
As the cat jumped into the air it spun 180° giving me a clear view of its face, its eyes were no longer yellow but blood red. It also had what looked like the mangled remains of a child's finger in its mouth. Scared out of my wits by the demonic transformation of what I hoped would be my future cute and cuddly friend I stumbled back through the sliding glass door giving me some space between me and the cat as it fell back to the ground.
As it landed to the ground it launched itself at my neck with no hesitation. I just barely managed to raise my arms in front of my neck before it hit me because it's speed was horrendous, almost too fast to follow. Its front paws gouged deep cuts into my left arm. It grabbed on to my arm with its teeth started using its back legs to rip into my flesh. I swung my arm frantically trying to dislodge it and it finally could no longer hold on and flew into a wall with a thud.
Without looking back I ran into my bedroom and tried to close the door, but with no luck seeing as a brown blur dashed right between my feet as the door was closing.
I was terrified at this point, so thinking as quickly as I could I ran to my bed. There was a brown blur zigzagging across the floor towards me and I knew there would be no chance for me to kick it based on how fast it was moving. I grabbed the sheet on my bed and flung it into the air between me and the cat.
Due to my incredible luck yet again the cat decided to launch itself at me once more right before the sheet was in the air. The cat hitting the sheet dead center got tangled in it right before it collided with me. As the cat hit the floor tangled in the bed-sheet it started trying to shred its way out. I grabbed two corners of the bed-sheet and swung it into the wall as hard as I could over and over again.
The fifth swing is the one that killed the cat. I can attest to this because at this moment everything slowed down for me. This is not the simple thought acceleration that you experience when adrenaline is introduced your body or something of the sort. It is hard to explain to those that have not experienced it, but I will try.
Have you ever thought to yourself "my eyes move too slowly"? Until this moment I had not thought such a thing. Normally when you think about looking somewhere you just look, there is no delay for your eyes to catch up to the demand. However from this point in my life onward everything around me including my eyes speed had slowed down to half what it was. It is obvious, but this was not in fact something that cause the world to slow down, this was something that caused me to think and therefore exist at twice the rate.
Feeling the pain from my arm once again after the frantic battle with the cat I desperately tried to get to the bathroom to clean the wound that was still gushing blood. Feeling as though I was running and molasses I tried to push myself to go faster not considering the fact that momentum worked the same way regardless of how fast I perceived myself going.
I ran into my bathroom door at a flat out Sprint blasting a shoulder through the door before it gave way and swung inwards.
Too concerned about stopping the bleeding to worry about the door I washed off my arms in the sink but unfortunately the water pressure seemed to start waning. I used gauze and medical tape to wrap the strips of skin that were now loosely hanging off my arm. It was truly terrifying what a mutated cat can do to your body in just a few seconds. I then tore up a clean sheet and wrapped it around my arm taping it with duct tape as tightly as I could. I figured the tighter it was the less blood i would lose, After my arm was wrap so tightly that all I could feel is a pulsing pain from it, I determined that it was good enough.
Feeling like the immediate danger past, I went back to my bedroom to investigate the cat's body and think about what to do from here. It was clear to me that from this point on the world around me was going to be drastically different. A cat that I had been feeding for the last two months had just attacked me with the intention to kill. This was terrifyingly dangerous considering cats were not nearly as scary of an animal as some things out in nature and I had just survived by the skin of my teeth.
It was clearly not a case of rabies or some other known virus considering the fact that it was moving drastically faster than any cat I had ever seen, as well as after I killed it I had a perception altering improvement allowing me to think twice as quickly.
When I got to the cat and opened up the sheet I noticed that it wasn't only a dead bludgeoned cat left, but what looked like a book. This made no logical sense considering the book appeared from nowhere after the cat died.
I looked at the cat first trying to determine anything that I could from its body, but that proved to be fruitless. The cat looked just like it did before only the eyes were red and the claws and teeth seem to have been elongated and sharpened. As I saw it that could definitely be considered an evolution but only one for a much fiercer world.
After looking at the mutated cat the only remaining option was to look at the book, which interestingly enough was titled "the rules to your new world". It is said that once a technology gets significantly more advanced than the current technology that it becomes indistinguishable from magic. It was not clear what or who changed the world on e-day, but at least to me it seemed to like the laws of the world had changed to those run by magic.
The most simple of indications that magic was currently in front of me was that a book appeared as if conjured from the air. This had no rhyme or reason to it even when I considered all of the technologies that I knew of.
I read over "the rules to your new world" quickly, it seemed like it would become very important to have all the knowledge that I could as soon as possible. The book was relatively short detailing that everything in the world now have the possibility of evolving. It would only do so when it did something considered extraordinary for its current state. It was surprisingly vague on the details regarding the evolution, but it seemed to indicate that the evolution would follow along with the action that was deemed extraordinary.
Based on what I understood this meant that because the world noticed I had displayed an exceptional level of quick thinking in my struggle against that ridiculously fast cat, it determined that my evolution should progress along the same line, accelerated thought.
I was still somewhat baffled on how the world determined that my soon-to-be pet needed to be made drastically more dangerous with longer and sharper teeth and claws and a drastically accelerated speed.
The book also hinted at the fact that not only the creatures that lived on the earth as I knew it would be inhabiting it now. It said that "myths and legends would start to wake up once again". Much of the book was very difficult to decipher considering its archaic language but the last thing that I could determine was that the current world was set up to force accelerated evolution on the inhabitants rather than adaption which humans had excelled at throughout their short history.
Now that I had gotten as much information as I could from the book it was time for me to leave my apartment.
What I really needed to do at this point was get supplies as well as hopefully some professional medical assistance. I figured there wouldn't be too many extreme changes in the world as I knew it yet. Social order and human standards of living don't to generate that quickly, at least I hoped. I figured it would be better to be safe than sorry though.
I grabbed my bike in my backpacking backpack as well as my ornamental samurai sword which I got for a very low price online considering it was not just a flimsy piece of metal, but a sharp piece of metal that appeared to have some heft and durability to it. I took all that stuff and threw it in the back of my car. The benefits of having hatchback are plenty.
When I got outside and really looked around it seemed like the world had not changed as much to others as it changed for me over the past hour or so.
There were a lot of people outside their apartments looking around and talking about when the power would come back. There was a large ruckus down a few buildings because some kid who is throwing rocks at a cat got his finger bitten off. Seemed like they called animal control.
I figured it was a good sign for me that nobody was really panicking yet because that meant I had a head start on preparations before things got really dangerous.
I jumped in my car and headed off to the nearest drug store where I know I could get a decent amount of medical supplies as well as nonperishable foods that I could fill my backpack up with. I had bought as much high density high calorie food that I could afford, unfortunately it is hard to also maintain a healthy diet at the same time. It all went pretty smoothly for me at the store I had to pay with cash because the credit card scanner ran on electricity which was still out. I did not think that the power would ever be coming back on, on the other hand I could have become very delusional and was going to have to be eating a lot more fudge brownies than I had hoped over the next few days.
Next up the hospital. I was really hoping to get some decent antibiotics because I figured there was no way this nasty cut/bite was sterile. As I got closer to downtown I started seeing a lot more signs of issues. It looks like there was an enormous gridlock in terms of traffic because the streetlights stopped working and it is not conducive for a good traffic environment for a big city to have a four way stop at every intersection.
I pulled off the road and parked my car in a fast food parking lot and took out my bike. Made sure to pack my backpack with everything that I had gotten, and started biking the remaining 2 miles to the hospital.
It might be commented that so far the city seems incredibly normal on a day that was supposed to of changed the future of everything on earth. It has to be noted that my experience in these few hours was drastically different than most other people. The evolution of animals and people was incredibly slow in the beginning because there was no catalyst to encourage the reaction.
I only bring this up at this point in my tale because that catalyst was about to arrive.