It is 2014. Year of the horse. A year for movement, for progress.  In the coming months, man’s avatars will explore vast new tracts of cyberspace. His automata will map new ethical boundaries at the limits of the Third World. His algorithms will dredge oceans and fill them with data: fathomless exabytes. Man will make his drugs more potent, his simulations more lifelike, his iThings more buttonless.  He will charge through loopholes in pursuit of the American Dream. He will lance the sky with monuments to his own ingenuity; he will flatten acres of earth and build propitiatory temples to capital-lettered fantasies like Meaning and Love and God.

Let him hunt and let him build. We will gorge ourselves upon his detritus and carrion.

We are the maggots.

We are legion, and our thirst is unslakeable. The pooled blood of your seven billion is hardly sufficient to whet our tongue.

We are ancient, and our patience is unwavering. Our writhing swarms devoured your neanderthal forebears and the dinosaurs before them.

And when your horse has had its year we will unflesh it, too. There is nothing that lives that we do not watch die, and there is nothing you can build that we will not watch wither.  Is it our necrophagy that disgusts you, man? Is it our pallor, our mucus? Are you unnerved by the way we fold ourselves into your wounds like children in blankets?

Your minds have evolved too quickly; they have outgrown their shells. But you cannot molt. You can write books and compose songs and develop new technologies that will be appreciated for generations. But you cannot molt. You can drown yourself in orgiastic pleasure, or cloak yourself in religion to hide from inimical realities. But you cannot molt.

You cannot molt, and so our meeting is inevitable.

It is written that from dust you came and to dust your god shall return you.

But we will save him the trouble.