It was a strange creature, the size of a cat, with an extremely stocky build. Its face was so flat that it was nearly concave. Its eyes looked in all different directions, marbles spinning in sockets too big, and its thick wavy black fur stuck out in randomly-directed, coarse tufts. Its most prominent feature was its disproportionately large rump.

It didn’t nibble or pull at the clover, but more so slammed its face into the leafy patch, pulling up a large mass of dirt along with the vegetation. In a single gulp it swallowed the wad of greens without seeming to notice the extra roughage. It took three gasping breaths, looking like a struggling beached cod, and it belched. A fleck of wet clover flew from its mouth.

If anyone were to observe the creature for any extended length of time, they would undoubtedly note that the only noise it ever seemed to make was the occasional burp.

When a pair of them met, by chance or design, they would sit only an inch apart, facing each other, eyes wide and empty, as they stared into each other's blankness. Then they would belch. For hours they would sit there eructating into each other's wide eyed flat faces.

It was in this way that they would learn everything they needed and could ever know from each other. They shared their lineage, their life story, even information about their health and well-being. They would present everything that they were, which admittedly wasn’t much. Then the moment it was over they would instantly forget it, for they were creatures not even aware of the moment they were in, let alone the future, or the past, or even the presence of another.

They scuttled about on their stubby little legs, cramming their faces with whatever biological matter they ran into, burping as they habitually bounced their faces off the trunks of the enormous trees that collectively constituted their woodland home. Though their eyes worked perfectly fine they did not have the extra mental capacity for sight. It would be true to say that they couldn’t see, that they were blind because they were too stupid to simply look.

To call them stupid is not to invoke the traditional sense of stupidity. In order to correctly define them as stupid, the definition of stupid must presuppositionally include egotism as a form of stupidity. 

For no matter how much extra capacity was given to the minds of these creatures, that extra thinking power would be drawn into the gravitational pull of its all encompassing self and it would remain blind.

A person might wonder how such a creature could survive complete annihilation from predation. They survived predation simply because predators eventually learned that eating one of these creatures meant certain death.

It wasn’t that they were poisonous. It was that they were deadly toxic. Their bodies produced unnatural chemicals and metals. Their flesh was filled with thymerisol, butyulated hydroxytoulene, fluoride, vinyl chloride and enough monosodium glutimate to liquefy a brain. It was easy to avoid them since their species habitually suffered from anal seepage. Wherever they went they left a toxic liquid trail. Occasionally other animals, a deer, or a mountain lion perhaps, would awake to the sound of raspy apneic breathing to find one of the creatures cuddled against their side, seeking the warmth from their body heat. Adrenaline fueled panic would then fill the animal sending it fleeing, with its eyes wide and breath as raspy as the large assed mouth breather from which it fled. Most often any contact with the creature was deadly due to their leaky butts. The toxins would seep into the skin of the deer or presumed lion, that is if it didn't first try to clean itself, which only quickened the onset of the inevitable death. A death which of course was often preceded by stumbling madness, and ended in frothing, backbreaking seizures.

It was with their jiggling posteriors that the creatures destroyed entire ecosystems. Lines of corrosion, and trails of dead vegetation would slowly criss-cross a forest until, with enough time the toxins would accumulate in the soil to such a degree that even the oldest of the trees would die. The forest would crumble and the land would remain barren for several millenia. The creatures of course would then move on, their stubby legs propelling them in the direction of new lands to decimate.

Once these creatures had reached an appropriate age and consumed a certain average of biological matter they would begin to grow and swell doubling, tripling in size in just a matter of a few weeks. Soon they would reach a point where their stubby legs could no longer drag their fat, leaking asses around. At which point they would fall over, face first into the earth, ass sticking up in the air. To all observing, they would appear as dead.

For nine months, on average, they would stay like this, their skin hardening as the ass continued to swell. A tertiary, complex, mycelial root structure would grow from the mouths and into the soil. The white feathery web would continue to absorb water, minerals, and additional nutrients.

Once the nine month mark neared, the ass would become semi-translucent and occasionally would jiggle with movement. Eventually it would begin to spew forth fluid of various viscosities, colors and smells. Then from the hole, a sexually mature human, if you could still call them that, would come tearing out, covered in slime and things rotten and foul. Like a butterfly who'd emerged from a terrible cocoon they would crawl across the forest floor, their skin drying and their muscles hardening as they gained the strength to stand over the course of the first day.

In this form they lived about a week, slowly starving as they had lost their capacity to eat and speak, the jaw, the teeth, vocal chords had all become vestigial. The mouth was fused shut. Like this, they lived just long enough to find another and reproduce.

As humans they had complete access to something similar in function to complete genetic memory. They remembered their history, fraught with the common theme of sociopathic arrogance, especially the last mile of that terrible race. Consistently they seemed to make the same mistake, yielding to the monster within, that thing, that voice of ravenous hubris, the one who lies.

Convinced and driven by the idea that if they could only know more, that if they could obtain enough knowledge then their self destruction would end, not that they ever admitted what their self destruction truly was. No they treated it like something that they just needed to work through, a sort of collective growing pangs.

Insanity.

Never were they willing to realize that the belief that believing knowledge could cure the human condition was a product of the human condition, so few were willing to acknowledge that the remedy to the human condition lies not in the world of knowledge.

In the end it was attempting to cure disease with disease, to end egotism with ego that caused the genetic cataclysm. Truly it was hubris that resulted in the creature thus described. The last civilization of man assembled together from the DNA of all known life forms, what they considered to be the perfect code, the amalgamation of a perfect being.

So they would crawl away from the pupa, from the carcass of that flat faced, gaseous, blind, creature knowing that belching, black, fat-assed, unconscious, thing they spent most of their lives as to be the result of their attempt to become gods.

For a few thousand years it continued like this. For a moment at a time they would each become human, but still broken in the way of those that had came before them. Amongst the shade of the tall trees couples would unite in morose copulation. These unions were bitter and painful, knowing what they knew. They wept during intercourse, so angry, so consumed with their own pain were they. Yet even then their tears were not for each other, or even their race, only for themselves. Yet still they did not understand humility.

Yet still did their egos lust for knowledge over life.

As the generations went on this sadness and despair continued to compound, due to the nature of their memory. In increasing numbers this burden quickly began to outweigh the urge to mate. They began to choose death instead, spending their week in starving isolation.

Eventually, there was only one left. He found himself to be asexual, the last lingering effect of the biological apocalypse, one final change upon the last remnant human.

He liked to spend his week as a person on a particular sunny ledge that overlooked the mountainous forest in which he lived his lives in his states of belching unconsciousness.

On that sun lit ledge he sat, surrounded by the skeletons of his own corpses, of his psuedo former selves, starving in the light, an ever dying immortal, a creature that knew everything and understood nothing.