It started out harmless enough. At least there didn’t seem to be any malice in the idea. In fact, people seemed to welcome the idea. Let’s use anti-bacterial soap to wash our hands so as to kill any bad bacteria you got on them while taking out the trash, cleaning the bathroom or playing on the jungle gym in the park. She even remembered the advertisements depicting just those scenes.
At first it was just a few companies selling the anti-bacterial soap and only in the liquid form. The pump stuff you might use in public restrooms or the liquid soap you might put by the kitchen or bathroom sinks at home. It was more convenient and made less mess. Everything was about less mess, less illness, fewer scrapes and injuries; nothing but safety, cleanliness, and perfect health; not to mention the perfect body. But that’s all a story for another day.
She, herself, had been unable to use the anti-bacterial soaps. They irritated her skin. Some even made the tough skin on the palms of her hands peel and flake. So she didn’t buy the liquid soap and just cleaned up the mess from the bar soap. When they started making the bar soap anti-bacterial she had had to start buying the expensive handmade soap from the hippy types, as her friends called them. Those soaps were made from things like olive oil or other vegetable oils and herbs or salts.
One day at a party she noticed how all her female friends looked a lot alike. She’d never thought they did before. But they looked so much alike that she was starting to mistake them for each other. It didn’t used to be like that. She wondered how it could be. Maybe it was in the cosmetics, their cosmetics. They did all use the same stuff since one of them sold it for a living. That was something else she couldn’t use. Her friend had asked her to try it, even did her up in a makeover with it. She couldn’t wear it. It burned so bad she was almost in tears by the time she got it washed off.
A few days later she realized that it wasn’t just her female friends that were starting to look like each other. All her male friends were too. At that point she knew it wasn’t the cosmetics, at least not alone, because most of the guys she knew were too macho to even consider wearing makeup. They barely used lotion on their skin; they were not going to be wearing foundation to smooth out their facial tone.
And yet it was happening to all her friends. The only difference might be their hair color, or if they had very dark skin or very light skin. But even then, their skin colors seemed to change too. Everyone was looking more like each other.
A few weeks after she noticed this change in her friends she started noticing complete strangers looked like her friends.
And then there was the story she read. It was in the science section; probably not many people read it. There had been a scientific study years before that showed that the bacteria in a person’s navel was unique to each person. So unique it was like a finger print. No two persons had the exact same combinations of bacteria. Some scientists had decided they wanted to recreate the study and expand it, with the idea, no doubt, of creating a database of people, probably for surveillance.
They were able to find some of the participants from the original study to get updated samples. They compared them to the results from that first study and found that each person’s bacterial forest had changed. So at first the scientists thought they were on to something, our navel bacteria change as we age. It made sense, but that meant it couldn’t be used to identify people. Unless, of course, you got regular samples, like updating your driver’s license photo or passport.
As the scientists doing the new study got enough samples so they could start to analyze the results they found something even more startling. It was starting to look like the original study had been wrong. They found several people in their first group of participants that had the exact same navel bacteria construct. They weren’t from the same family but they were from the same city. So they expanded the study further to include more people across the country. The results were even more significant. The original study had to be wrong.
She was always known to have leaps of understanding. Her smart friends liked this because it meant they didn’t always have to explain things to her. Her average friends just thought she had a cool imagination or read too much fiction. Whatever they thought, she had just made one of those leaps.
What if the anti-bacterial soap was what was altering the navel bacteria in people? What if that was what was causing all those people in the study to have the same results?
Then she thought about how all her friends were starting to look the same. She knew that one of the reasons for that first study had been to find out if the stuff that grows on or in us has any beneficial effects. Now she thought she knew. It is what makes us unique from each other.
That thought, that realization, while a mind numbing shock– was just the beginning.
She had, at first, found it pleasant that her radical liberal and radical conservative friends were starting to get along. At one time she couldn’t invite them to the same party for fear of a riot. But they were not just getting along; they had even started to agree. First it was a choice of restaurant, then movies, and eventually even with regards to political, social, and those types of ideas. Not only was it boring, it had started to disturb her. As did everyone’s sparkling white teeth. They had all been using the whitening toothpaste that was so prevalent, and one of the banes of her existence. She hadn’t been able to use it, it caused chemical burns in her mouth and the inside of her mouth would peel off a layer. It would start almost as soon as she’d rinsed the tooth paste from her mouth, so she had had to find something different.
She now realized that it must somehow be affecting the way her friends thought, like a drug. Something she had heard or read so long ago having to do with the importance of the bacteria in the stomach came to mind. That’s when the final realization hit and it made her sick to think about it.
She knew she had always been outside the norm. And she knew she tended to take very cautious views of revolutionary breakthroughs that were touted as being so great for humanity. She’d even been called a conspiracist. She wasn’t. She was a realist and she knew, at that moment that what she had always said had been true.
It is not in the best interest of the government of this country or its corporations to have a unique, diverse, educated, and thinking populace.
And now they had managed to eliminate the majority of that which was not in their best interest.
She knew how they did it too.
