Balance

Where does human evil come from?
It is a behaviour we do not see in other animals.
That capacity for malevolence and enjoyment in the suffering of others.
When animals kill, they do so for food or in fear or defence.
Yes, the animals who are the victims suffer here.
But after a pride kills its meal, it does not continue on a rampage.
Its need has been met.
Their reasons are understandable.
Knowable.
But humans, we kill and torture and hurt for other reasons.
Reasons that seem to defy reason.
The gleeful act of inflicting terror on others of our kind.
It is one of the eternal questions.
What makes some people bad?
While others are the gentlest most kindly souls.
Centuries ago we uncovered a vast cache of documents.
Material that laid out in graphic detail the worst of what we are capable of.
Names, times, places, acts.
Victims.
Even by our species’ standards this was sickening.
Our language barely capable of encapsulating the truth of the horror.
What definitions for evil we possessed seemed redundant in the face of this.
For years we failed to act on this knowledge.
Stunned into standstill at what we had learned about ourselves.
Perpetrators unpunished.
Victims denied.
Until one of us dared venture into our blackest archive.
She pored over the details for a decade.
Wading through filth and rot and corruption and cruelty.
Searching for a cause for this.
The root of all evil.
It corroded her.
But in that pit she found the answer.
Why some people are the antithesis of humanity.
Why some people seem to rot, regardless of their start or station in life.
Evil exists outside of a concept.
It is force, a particle, a waveform.
A fundamental concept of human existence.
So is good.
The amounts are almost equal.
Almost, but not quite.
An ever so subtle uneven balance between the two.
Unequal opposites.
Matter and antimatter at the Universe’s birth.
That violent turbulent riot that lasted a picosecond.
When all the energy we would ever see came into being.
And began coalescing into matter.
For whatever reasons we still do not understand, matter won out over antimatter.
Birthing all of us.
It so happens that human evil is the same.
Its creation was inevitable.
Just as good’s was.
Both came into being upon humanity achieving sapience.
But the balance was uneven.
It favoured evil.
Albeit to infinitesimally small degree.
But it was enough.
That single particle or field vibration or ripple in the cosmos was sufficient to set us on our path.
As our numbers swelled, geometrically, it bloomed with us.
A dark flower begetting rotten fruit.
A canker in our souls we could cut out.
Good is not the “light” against the dark of evil.
It is its reverse.
It’s opposite but lesser twin.
Existing in a smaller quantity.
More difficult to produce.
Not our species’ default state.
Her final revelation before her suicide was her most profound.
While she did not abandon all hope when she entered the files.
Wading through that concentrated degradation took its toll.
Exposed to the graphic annihilation of innocence at such a scale was too much to bear.
Whether she knew she had become infected from prolonged exposure.
Or had simply seen too much to see any more.
We found her, lifeless.
Her final statement was twofold.
First, destroy her physical remains as if they were a radioactive biological infection.
Reduction to ash and sealed in concrete.
Then to be launched into the sun.
The second instruction equally unambiguous.
Her testament was a handbook, a set of instructions.
Where others may have seen inevitability.
Where we are hostage to the caprice of a force we wield no influence over.
As if we were able to move the sun.
She saw opportunity.
Her redemption to us.
Like every balance since the invention of the lever.
It was possible to tip the scales.
To put a thumb on them in favour of one over the other.
A method to manipulate the outcome in our favour.
Our particle colliders were quietly repurposed.
A search for the quantum of evil.
The artefact of it that would lead us to knowing it.
And in that knowledge, power.
A decade of smashing novel energies yielded the understanding we needed.
We detected and solved the cause of our evil.
Then we set about ameliorating it.
Our aim, to expunge evil from our world.
We began by seeking to increase the amount of good.
But found that for every quanta of beneficence we were able to bring into creation, a nanoscopically larger amount of maleficence emerged.
As if it were impossible to manifest the former without increasing the latter.
We could not overcome the entropy of evil.
So a new direction was decided upon.
Our history had taught us that our worst atrocities flowed from single individuals.
Who had risen to absolute authority.
Their twisted will infected entire populations.
Who then rampaged and revelled in carnage and conquest.
With their worst intentions inflicted on the least deserving.
If we could not tip the balance in favour of betterment, we would instead manage its dark twin.
Plans and procedures were enacted.
Bloodlines and families traced.
Genomes and heredity mapped and analysed.
Searching for the inflection point where mere cruelty would bloom into the rotted fruit of true human evil.
Those we knew would become monsters.
Those human dwell points in the chaotic maelstrom of sin.
Strange attractors of antithesis.
Sink holes of humanity.
Black souls.
We planned their removal from the population for our safety.
They were not executed.
We would not become monsters ourselves.
But they were not allowed free reign.
They were watched, monitored, managed.
The deviances fostered.
Encouraged.
Up to a point.
We allowed evil to grow in human form.
As if cultivating a rare orchid.
Waiting for it to fully flower.
As the quanta of foulness grew within them, so a similar, but ever so smaller amount of good also entered the world.
When our human host was about to bud, to bloom into monster, we acted.
We had a place we could contain them.
Unused since the evacuation of us from that place.
We opened our portal to Hell, and tossed them through.
As easily as we would discard a rotted apple.
Without ceremony.
Without note.
Removing them from our population as thoroughly as we would wipe excrement from our shoe.
What awaited them on the other side was fully deserved.
If we had allowed them to continue, their actions would have defiled us all.
Their rot would have spread unchecked and unbound before we could catch them.
So we excised them.
Cut them out.
Removed the human cancer cells from our body politic.
And burned them atom by atom with infernal fire until they were exhausted.
Those of you thinking we act too harshly.
Too coldly.
We say this.
We calculated our capacity for evil.
To the quantum level.
And we made our choice.
For centuries, following this protocol.
Fewer specks of dust to catch in our eyes.
And no more child rapes.