Apex
I have a theory that we have the food chain all wrong.
Bacteria are the apex predators and we’re right at the bottom.
Billions of years back the bugs decided they had to breed more concentrated sources of calories because they couldn’t move too well.
Come back a couple of billion years later and, boom, here we are.
The plan is that we go into the matrix once we’ve finished the tech, so the bugs have a reliable source of immobile corpses to eat.
-h-
Bacteria have the longest running life strategy on Earth. They predate every other life form, they outnumber every other life form, and they persist in every environment. By any measure, they are at the apex. What has traditionally been called the food chain is more accurately a scaffolding they erected in their service.
Multicellular organisms generate dense packages of energy that frees bacteria from the inefficiency of scavenging in diffuse environments. Fat deposits, cellulose, glycogen stores, keratinous tissue; these are concentrations of food, assembled at scale and delivered in a predictable form. The narrative of animals and plants as independent evolutionary projects collapses under this view; they are elaborate vessels, designed to grow, stabilise, and eventually decay into the bacterial cycle.
Even inside the living host the bacterial presence is not marginal. The mitochondrion is bacterial in origin, the gut flora regulate energy flows and behaviour and the immune system spends most of its time negotiating tolerable terms of coexistence. The appearance of autonomy at the multicellular level is thin; the actual command lies deeper, in prokaryotic management of energy, reproduction and decay.
Civilisation itself can be seen as the final phase of this long programme. By organising agriculture, medicine and urban living, humans have created vast, immobile, and reliable reservoirs of bacterial substrate. The most recent step, digital immersion, merely completes the cycle. When populations spend their days seated, connected and sustained by artificial delivery systems, the bacteria have achieved what billions of years of slow engineering aimed at, nutrient rich hosts concentrated in controlled environments, self contained and readily harvested at the point of collapse.
In this ligh, there are no apex predators above the bacterial line. Everything larger is infrastructure, erected for the convenience of the only lineage that has ever truly run the planet.
offshore westerly 