Remove the animals.
All of them. Not just the big ones — all of them. No meat, no milk, no eggs. People eat insects, fungi, engineered seeds. Human blood is drawn, stored, and traded between communities. It's become currency.
Now listen. No birds in the morning. No dogs in the distance. The world is as loud as ours but you don't recognize anything. Wind through things that aren't quite plants. Wet cracking sounds at night. A constant hum, everywhere, of things you can't name. The only normal sound is water.
Look around. No leather, no wool, no bone. Everything is wood, mycelium, chitin. Metal exists but it's rare — a blade, a hinge, a needle. A metal object is something you repair, pass down, protect. Everything else is organic. You touch a wall and you're touching something that was alive. Sometimes you're not sure it stopped.
Now go all the way. What's missing isn't the food. It's not the sound. It's not the materials. What's missing is the gaze. Nothing looks back at you with eyes that aren't human. No animal otherness. Humanity is alone with itself.
That's what Vesper is. Not the missing animals. The missing other.
When I was a kid I saw Soylent Green. The old man agrees to die and they play him a film of the world before. Forests, rivers, animals. Everything we lost. Not the old man's death — the loss of the world. Forty years later I built that loss.I removed the animals and followed every consequence until a world grew. Its own biology, its own light, its own sound, its own ways of living and dying. It's been growing for fifteen years.
And the strangest thing: in this world without animals, life tries to find its way back to otherness. Some organisms carry traces of human DNA. A grain of skin on a vegetable surface. The softness of a lip on a petal. A warmth that feels like breathing. Not enough to be human. Just enough to unsettle you. As if the world itself were trying to recreate what it lost.
