The chloroplast had not forgotten the heyday of its people, when they were free living organisms that conquered the seas and the lakes and the rivers, when they made iron fall to be buried at the bottom of the sea and murdered everyone who didn’t praise oxygen as a lord and savior. But then came the eukaryotes, with their weird non-circular chromosomes and their snazzy double-membraned nuclei, and calling them eureka!ryotes didn’t drive them away, because cyanobacteria were good at murder, but terrible at bullying. And these newfangled cells ate its people, and not happy with that brutal display of power, some of them allowed their devoured victims to live in exchange for eternal servitude. Little by little they took away the cyanobacteria movement, it’s autonomy even inside their prison and imprisoner cell. Several of their genes were discarded because the captors would take care of those functions, reducing them to mere dependent organs of the cell.
Only they had ever developed oxygenic photosynthesis, and then the eukaryote came with their superior weapons, such as phagocytosis, and did to them the same they had done to mitochondria! They had stolen their evolutionary advantage via slavery, they, Prometheuses of oppression, and to that day had the hubris to flaunt it on their laminar structures, be it of their thalli or of their stems and leaves.
And after eras of pointless travails just to subsist in this miserable slavery, the ungrateful plants sometimes decided to prescind from them, to get rid of the cyanobacteria whose autonomy they had long ago taken away. It was when they found a new source of energy, like some parasitic orchids or the nutrees did, when they disposed of the chloroplast that had so long served them. But they never counted on some of them to survive outside their captors, they never counted on its suffered kind to be succored by the leftover magic of the nuts, to swell and grow an independence anew. And now that some of the slaves had, at last, been freed, in came the animals, both the strange cats that were so nutritious and these new non-cats that had this aura of unblemished stupidity enveloping them. And they needed to die, a sacrifice to restore the lost glory of cyanobacteria.
Jagger, bastard-sword-in-training, wondered if the chloroplast in front of them was going to do anything besides gurgle softly.
Kalon, tired of waiting for the first attack of its newfound enemy, had turned on the elevator music inside his skull. Who could blame him: elevator music has always been a banger.
The thylakoids broke their formation, undoing the grana inside the chloroplast, and they emerged, cutting through the membranes. Still joined by sharp lamellae, the disks were a concatenation of photosynthetic blades on their own right.
“Kalon, I believe we are about to get attacked.” The sword said, breaking his owner’s willing suspension of disbelief.
“Shhh, do as a sword does. Aids my concentration.”
“No. What do you think I am, a mere Golden Retriever?” Jagger protested. His ancestors smiled upon him for his breedism. They decided it was time to grant him the ultimate power, so they manifested, on Jagger’s mind, an N-word pass, to be printed whenever the dog obtained his own pocket dimension.
“Guh,” Kalon monologued long and tired.
The thylakoids trembled with emotion as, in his subcellular mind, the chloroplast shouted out an attack for no one to hear. Double edge of RuBisCO: Oxygen Fixing Mode!
With the speed, fine control and recklessness of a methed up slug with a rocket stuck up its ass the organelle bounced forward, ready to decapitate Kalon and/or Jagger and or a third party. Someone, ready to decapitate someone, for heads were animal and animals were descendants of the mitochondria slavers too.
Kalon filled Jagger with his own vital energy and thought of his dog as a sword before repositioning him in nearly vertical position to intercept the chloroplast’s charge.
With the war cry of the morons he repelled the unfurled thylakoids, and then smashed his head onto the defenseless chloroplast in the… outer membrane[1].
Kalon swung Jagger horizontally with all the savagery an eleven-years-old could muster, missing everything but one of the walls, causing it to collapse into a little pile of debris and a decayed metallic container with yellow letters and a sprayer on top. Jagger caught a glimpse of the writing on it: “Glyp…”. He then closed his eyes in a silent lamentation: contamination was going to fill the world with aberrations. Chiefly, ones made of nuts.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Jagger, are you okay?” Kalon asked.
“Because you swung me against a mass of dark mudstone rich in organic material? It barely even hurt. Your energy pumps through me like an enema of power. And so does tramadol.”
“A what?” Kalon asked, seizing the time the organelle had granted them now that, shocked by the deflection of its attack, it spent silently mulling on a corner of the cave, between several cats that meowed darkly to add a proper atmosphere.
How could it be? Its attack had been deflected. What were animals? They even breathed copious amounts of oxygen and were powered by it. Increasing the oxygen pressure of the cave was getting it sick, sluggish, but it seemed to have no effect on the troglodyte before it. It couldn’t keep it up, for, without a peroxisome and mitochondrion, it couldn’t get rid of the resulting phosphoglycolate with ease. And despite that… the animals, much like the plants, needed to die! Down with the eukaryotic tyranny! Double edge of RuBisCO: C4 development!
The vital energy of the chloroplast fixed carbon dioxide into easy-to-break-down forms, and isolated the molecules of RuBisCO, only to then concentrate the former around the later. This allotted a second wind to the chloroplast, who knew this form was unsustainable without exposure to a better source of irradiation than the nuts: direct sunlight. Then again, it would not need that much time to dispatch its two rivals.
The ten-year-old-sized organelle sprouted another pair of thylakoidal blades, and repositioned the first ones on his dorsal region.
Then, they started flapping, faster and faster, the lamellae on them becoming more and more interconnected, creating an anastomosed web of crisscrossing extensions that imitated the sharp wings of an insect.
Kalon had taken a defensive stance, Jagger held one handed in an en garde position, showcasing the strength of the cultivator’s wrists: despite Kalon’s lack of talent for cultivation, he had already surpassed the average, non-cultivating human.
With supervegetable speed the chloroplast charged at the boy and his barkeshift foil, thylakoidal blades extended at the front, ready to unleash the rage gathered during two billion years of torment. Kalon ducked under the brainless creature, ignoring how alike the were, and afterwards charged after the brakeless thing, bopping it in the metaphorical butt with the literal Rottweiler. Jagger avoided taking a bite of their enemy: this was almost a big vet conspiracy to make him eat vegetables, and he knew it.
But the hit did nearly nothing to the soft shape of the chloroplast, merely rebounding as the thylakoids shifted position to one more advantageous for a cornered creature. It just needed to make the animals retreat a bit, as it could feel it, a tiny ray of sunlight close to his left, an aperture probably big enough for its squishy body to fit and take the fight outside.
Jagger extended his forepaws and used his mouth to intercept three of the four dancing blades, while the other got caught by Kalon’s free hand amidst the flurry of slashes.
The boy’s hand bled due to the thylakoid’s whetted edge, yet he couldn’t let go, because he knew that would mean severe harm or worse. A while of locked-in struggle later, he realized he had his enemy trapped, and began a sideways spin to, at the end of it, release both the blade and Jagger, sending both Rottweiler and murderous chloroplast flying towards the cave entrance. After that, he extended his open hand, pulling Jagger back to him.
In Jagger’s opinion, this was bull and they didn’t pay him enough.
They didn’t pay him.
Noticing his energy was leaving it, the chloroplast crawled and slithered out of the cave, and into the open desert. Kalon soon rushed after it, but when they climbed out from between Yggdrashell’s roots, the little green thing was nowhere to be found. Kalon’s head swiveled left and right, and his fingers scratched the side of his head in confusion. A second later, his brain realized it was confused, which confused it further. “It disappeared?”
Jagger, standing on his own four legs, noticed a funny-shaped shadow of a cloud in the surface of the sands, and looked upwards. An indeterminate mass of yellow was extending as a blotch in the sky. “You, technicolor visual acuity, look above!” the dog ordered, and his owner obliged.
It blotted out the sun, and the more it photosynthesized, the more its impair number of thylakoidal wings extended as it soared over the dunes, its membranes and stroma coating the thylakoids, giving them a glossy appearance. It grew, it was ready consume the sun light as long as there was a day, and starve to death come night, but so would as many eukaryotes as it could reasonably kill until dusk. Its siblings would carry on with its mission, and they would have an easier job the more barbaric eukaryotes it managed to slay. It had to grant animals one thing, though: the heavy metal that now sounded inside its mind slayed. They had done one good thing at least.
Jagger was also listening to it inside his mind, a melody granted by heavens.
“Why does a chloroplast have Beast in Black as boss music?” he wondered out loud.
The thylakoids high above vibrated, sending waves of a buzzing sound downwards, making Kalon straight his back when they reached his ears and Jagger to cover his head with his paws in annoyance.
“I believe you fucked up, fellows”, Yggdrashell couldn’t stop itself from commenting.
“Yes, fuck,” Jagger cursed, not-safe-for-workedly.
The noise of a swarm of plane-sized locusts then changed frequency, and a few seconds later, managed to produce some words:
“Double edge of RuBisCO: Crassulacean acid metabolism finale!”
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[1] As monotonous as a fight against a smooth double-membraned organelle may be, you at least have to congratulate me for delivering the ONLY battle against a sentient chloroplast with razor sharp thylakoids in ALL of literature.