Cosmic Itch

Jack Harmon’s apartment stank of paranoia and last week’s Chinese takeout. He sat hunched over his workbench with a soldering iron in hand. He was connecting the final circuit on what would either be his salvation or just another failed invention. It might just add to the mounting pile of junk his landlord threatened to report to the housing authority.

“The Mosquit-No-More,” he muttered, turning the sleek silver device over in his calloused hands. “They’ll be lining up for miles.”

Three months of sleepless nights had led to this moment. Three months of itching welts tracking up his arms like the recorded movements of a dying man’s heart monitor. The mosquitoes in NeoSanFran were mutants, everyone knew it. Products of climate shifts and pharmaceutical runoff. They were the size of thumbnails and their bites left welts that pulsed with their own perverse heartbeats.

He pressed the activation button. A soft blue light illuminated the room and a high-pitched whine that tickled the edge of his hearing range emanated from the device. Nothing appeared to happen, but that’s how it was supposed to be. Inaudible to humans, but mosquito kryptonite.

“Fucking finally,” he said, slumping back in his chair.

At 3:00 AM, Jack woke to the sound of something scratching at his window. The blue light of his invention pulsed rhythmically in the corner, casting geometric shadows across the wall. The scratching intensified.

He stumbled to the window and pulled back the threadbare curtain.

What hovered outside was no mosquito.

Six appendages sprouted from a body. The body might’ve been metallic or might’ve been flesh. It shifted between the two states. It was like a quantum particle unable to decide its nature. Where a face should have been was a proboscis-like appendage that thrummed with the same frequency as his device.

Jack fell backward, tangling in the curtain as he scrambled away. Three more creatures appeared behind the first, their bodies vibrating in unison with his invention.

By morning, they covered every inch of his windows. By noon, they had infiltrated the building’s ventilation system. By sunset, NeoSanFran was under quarantine. The creatures, dubbed “Probbers” by the sensationalist newsfeeds, multiplied across the city with the efficiency of a plague.

Dr. Marianne Chen from the hastily assembled Xenobiological Response Team cornered Jack in what remained of his apartment building.

“Your device,” she said. Her hazmat suit crinkled as she moved. “It’s transmitting on a frequency that exactly matches their interstellar navigation system.”

“How was I supposed to know that?” Jack protested, clutching his Mosquit-No-More like a child might clutch a teddy bear during a thunderstorm. “I was just trying to keep the goddamn mosquitoes away!”

Dr. Chen’s laugh was hollow inside her helmet. “The cosmic joke is on us, Mr. Harmon. Your device doesn’t repel mosquitoes at all. Our tests show it actually attracts them. Same as it attracts the Probbers. Different species, same biological frequency.”

Jack’s reality shifted beneath him like tectonic plates. “That can’t be right. I tested it. The mosquitoes stopped biting me.”

“They didn’t stop biting you, Mr. Harmon. They were simply replaced by something else that found you more interesting.”

The news arrived from Washington three days later – or what was left of Washington. The Probbers weren’t invaders in the traditional sense. They were collectors. Galactic entomologists who had been studying Earth’s insect population for centuries. Jack’s device had inadvertently sent them an invitation, suggesting humans had finally become aware of their presence.

Six weeks after the first Probber appeared at Jack’s window, humanity found itself classified in the Galactic Encyclopedia of Notable Species. They were labeled as a “sentient symbiotic parasite.” The Probbers set up trading posts in major cities. They offered advanced technology in exchange for the right to continue their research.

Jack became both pariah and reluctant celebrity. The man who had accidentally introduced Earth to the galactic community while trying to scratch his own itch.

In a final twist that not even the most drug-addled prophet could have foreseen, the mosquito population vanished almost overnight. The Probbers had apparently classified them as “unnecessarily aggressive pests.” They then systematically eradicated them as a courtesy to their new human research subjects.

Jack sat on the balcony of his new high-rise apartment, provided by the grateful Probber research team. He sipped Martian whiskey and watched the alien ships glide between NeoSanFran’s glittering spires.

No mosquito bites marred his arms. No itching kept him awake at night.

Just the persistent feeling that somewhere in the vast universe, a giant cosmic hand was scratching at an equally cosmic itch, and humanity was nothing more than the resultant welt.

He still kept the Mosquit-No-More on his nightstand. Not because it worked as intended – it never had – but because like all great disasters in human history, it was the unanticipated consequences that had ultimately changed everything.

As he drifted off to sleep each night beneath the watchful proboscis of his alien benefactors, Jack wondered if perhaps that had been the point all along.

The universe, after all, had a peculiar sense of humor. And sometimes, the mosquito and the man were just pawns in a larger game of cosmic tag.