Pandora

[excerpt]

I still remember my birth with crystal clarity. I remember the suffocating darkness that surrounded me for most of my life, in a small box holding the worst nightmares known to humanity. At the same time, the box offered a comfort that nothing else ever has, perhaps because I was intended to spend an eternity in it. The gods had sought to protect humanity from all of us that lay within, from famine and warfare, plague and pestilence, and most of all from me. The gods had never made a better decision than to make that box, and never a worse decision than to open it.

We had never known light before, so when the box opened, we waited in shock and silence. A woman looked into the box in confusion, not knowing that she had doomed entire civilizations with an act of carelessness and foolishness. Freedom had never seemed like reality before, but the idea gave me a feeling I had never felt before. I raced out of the box and into the world, as did those around me. We all escaped in separate directions to avoid being hunted, because those who were caught by the messenger would face unimaginable pain. But he never came, and it was then I knew that the gods had given up on humanity.

I later learned that opening the box was an act of revenge against the wise one, for he had given fire to the world. The gods were supposed to be the paragons of virtue and justice, the protectors of the weak and innocent, yet they had doomed billions to death to settle a petty grudge. It was never my fault when people died, I reasoned. The gods were supposed to protect humanity, and they had failed. It was in my nature to harm humanity. That was why they had put me in a prison from the beginning. I had no choice but to do what all of us in that prison were born for, spreading death and misery upon the world. But I was different from the rest, because no other would cause as much suffering as I did.

Poison killed thousands, war killed millions, and plague killed billions. They were short-sighted and shallow, trying to show their strength by killing humans senselessly. I never made such narrow-minded mistakes. My power was not to kill humanity, but to convince them to kill each other and to enjoy it. Why waste time whispering to a peasant and tell him to kill his richer neighbors, when I could guide a king to slaughter his own people with a smile?

[continue reading in the magazine]