In this reality, humanity has divided. Once climaxed to its evolutionary capabilities, it had nowhere to grow but diverge. The majority devolving into short, Neanderthal like creatures. Returning to their brainless animalistic qualities, some digressing into grotesque cannibal mutants.
The minority of the human species that remain were once the rich and well educated who grew taller, weaker and smarter.
During the twenty first century people reached a climax of comfort and technology. Cars drove themselves, televisions played 2000 channels, necessities were met and a growing gap between the poor and rich stretched further and further. The educated stopped having offspring while the poor breed more, mating within their own bloodline. Slowly over many generations the split grew wider dividing humanity into a canyon of difference.
There were those who grew smarter, their brains evolving far beyond normal capabilities of memory, telepathy, and intelligence. While, the masses sat at home, watching their televisions, eating their high chemically processed foods and drinking from plastic containers.
They blamed the first few thousand incidents on the synthetic material, plastic. Known to enter the human body through consumption, tiny microparticles of plastic entered the digestive system. Over constant use, generation after generation, plastic began altering human DNA. Nobody regarded the warnings and continued to use this highly unnatural material to encase, contain, and contaminate their food, clothing, and material possessions.
The first million babies were stillborn births. A natural population control mechanism saying the planet doesn’t want this defective new species. Babies came out with ape like faces, hairless, shorter, thicker, and uglier. The ones that survived were segregated in schools, slow learners and high tempered.
No one knew much for sure what happened there after over the course of the next five hundred years, except maybe the smart ones, those in the Gray Towers, those that dwell up high in the city sky scrapers, safe and elevated from the infected, brainless ground level dwellers.
The quarter of humanity that could afford security, sanctuary, medical treatment, education and royalty separated themselves from this digressing breed. At first, they used the slow mutants as a labor force, paying them in food rations. Then the masses of animal-like people broke free, rioting and fleeing to the outskirts of villages and towns.
Early in the twenty second century, the rich, the powerful, and the elite became prisoners in their own cities. The dumb got dumber, the smart got smarter evolving beyond normal human consciousnesses.
Now the Earth remains split screaming between the hungry ones and the gray ones, hiding high in their towers, deep in cities, knowing but unable to do anything.
Copyright © 2018, Charles Denton
Art collaboration with 
