Invisible Offense

Listen, meatbag—yes, you, slouching there with your coffee breath and existential dread—this is the story of the Minims, and if you think it’s about them, you’re already missing the point. It’s about YOU. It’s about all of us. It’s about the cosmic joke that is consciousness in a universe that doesn’t give a quantum shit about your feelings.

The Minims called themselves Infinitesimus absurdus, which sounds impressive until you realize they named themselves after a taxonomical classification that translates roughly to “ridiculously fucking small.” They were so microscopic they existed in the spaces between your thoughts—which, let’s be honest, leaves them plenty of room to maneuver.

They came to conquer Earth.

EARTH! Can you believe it? These molecular Don Quixotes, these subatomic Napoleons, these—oh, hell, what’s the point of metaphors when the universe is already a metaphor for its own meaninglessness?

“We are the invisible hand of destiny!” shrieked Zzzt-13, whose name sounds like a dying electrical socket because, frankly, that’s what passes for dignity when you’re smaller than a viral load. He was their general, their führer, their self-appointed emperor of the infinitesimal. “We shall make their coffee bitter! We shall cause their Netflix to buffer! We shall—”

“—be completely fucking ignored,” interrupted Pip, the philosopher among them, who had the unfortunate clarity of vision that comes with being too small to matter and too smart to accept it.

And that’s exactly what happened.

The giants—those lumbering, catastrophically stupid behemoths we call humans—went about their pathetic little lives while the Minims rewrote their DNA, manipulated their molecules, and generally tried to be the chaos gods they desperately wanted to be. The humans blamed everything on Mercury being in retrograde, as if the universe gives a shit about astrology when it can’t even be bothered to make the speed of light a round number.

Do you see it yet? Do you see the beautiful, terrible irony?

The Minims were us. We are the Minims.

We scream into the void, demanding acknowledgment, insisting on our significance, certain that our grand gestures and passionate manifestos will somehow make the universe sit up and take notice. We blog, we post, we rage against the machine—but the machine doesn’t even know we exist. We’re invisible to the very forces we’re trying to influence, microscopic irritants in a cosmic digestive system that’s going to process us whether we cooperate or not.

But here’s where it gets interesting, where it gets delicious—

Enter the bug.

Not THE bug. Not some mythological creature or metaphysical construct. Just a bug. Nameless, mindless, operating on pure hunger-driven instinct. A bug that smelled the Minims like a sommelier smells wine, like a crack addict smells opportunity, like you smell the coffee you’re drinking while reading this story about microscopic beings being devoured by something even more insignificant than themselves.

The bug ate them.

All of them. The Minims never had a chance.

Every last Minim, every molecular megalomaniac, every subatomic philosopher—GULP. Gone. Processed. Converted into bug-shit.

Zzzt-13’s final thought, as the digestive enzymes dissolved his cellular structure: “We came to conquer giants but became lunch for something even smaller than our ambitions.”

And that, dear reader, is the universe in a nutshell—if the universe could fit in a nutshell, which it can’t, because it’s too busy expanding and not giving a fuck about your nutshell metaphors.

The humans? Still oblivious. Still blaming Mercury retrograde for their slightly bitter coffee and mysteriously disappearing socks. Still living their giant, unconscious lives while microscopic dramas play out in the spaces between their synapses.

The bug? Already forgotten, already moved on, already busy being eaten by something else in the endless, recursive nightmare of consumption that we call existence.

And the Minims? They learned the ultimate lesson that the universe teaches every conscious being eventually:

Being invisible doesn’t make you important. Being invisible doesn’t make you safe. Being invisible just makes you… invisible.

Which is exactly what you’ll be, too, when your time comes. We all will. Microscopic, forgotten, processed into something else’s shit while the giants go on blaming Mercury retrograde for everything that goes wrong in their blissfully unaware lives.

The universe is a bug, and we’re all Minims.

Sweet dreams.