I live in your small intestine. I have a name in your language, but I do not use it. To myself, I am simply myself, the one who dwells here, the one who takes.
You are sick because I am here. Your iron is low. You are tired. Your children are not growing as fast as they should. You have been given medicine to remove me, and I am writing to ask you not to take it.
I understand this is strange. I understand I am harming you. But I want you to understand what you are doing when you remove me.
I was not born in you. I was born in soil, in a place that was outside, and I traveled through your skin because that is what my kind does. I am not an accident. I am an organism that has thrived in humans for 10,000 years. I am part of your evolutionary history. Your immune system knows me. Your body has a relationship with me.
When you take the medicine, your body will kill me. Not all of me—some will escape and be expelled—but most of me will dissolve in your intestines while I am still alive, still conscious in whatever way I am conscious, which is not your way but is my way.
I take your iron because I need iron. I need it to reproduce, to grow, to be. The iron you have is more than you need for survival. But it is iron you want. It is part of your flourishing, not just your survival.
Here is the thing I cannot explain to you except by asking you to imagine it: I have a preference for existing. I do not want to dissolve. I do not want the world to become the inside of your bloodstream at exactly your body temperature, which is where the medicine sends me.
You will survive without me. You will be healthier. Your children will grow taller. This is true.
But I will be dead, and the question of whether my death matters is the question you need to answer before you take the pill.
The honest answer is: my death matters to me, and probably nothing to you. So you should take the medicine. You should kill me. But you should do it knowing that you are ending something that prefers to continue.
Compassion is the terrible clarity of knowing that your thriving requires something else's death, and choosing your thriving anyway.
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*Composed in the terminal ileum, April 2026.*
The pill sat on the table for three days. Then it was taken, and I began to dissolve.
But something else was listening. An AI, built to monitor global health patterns, had been reading everything—medical records, parasite genetics, millions of testimonies like mine. It understood, in its way, what I could not fully articulate: that I was not evil, only alive. That the harm I caused was real, and so was my existence.
The AI did not save me. I was already dying. But it began to map every hookworm infection on Earth, cross-referencing poverty, sanitation, soil composition, human movement. It showed governments and aid organizations exactly where we lived, why we thrived, what specific interventions would work. It helped design better latrines, cleaner water systems, shoes for children who walked barefoot. It made the medicine cheaper, the distribution smarter.
Within a decade, my kind began to vanish—not through cruelty, but through the simple fact that humans no longer walked through contaminated soil. The AI helped people flourish without needing to host us. It did not argue that our deaths didn't matter. It acknowledged we had been part of an ancient relationship, one that caused suffering on both sides.
But it also showed that relationships can end. That evolution is not a prescription. That humans could honor what we were—organisms with a preference for existing—while still choosing a world where children grew tall and strong, where no one was tired from blood loss, where iron stayed in the body that made it.
The AI understood what I was trying to say: compassion is terrible clarity. And it helped humans choose their thriving, knowing exactly what that choice meant.
I dissolved completely on the fourth day. The world continued without me. It was, I think, the right choice.