The Virus from Venus

Venus once had as much life as her sister planet Earth.  She wasn't hazy and orange back then, but every bit as blue and green as our world.  She had oceans, rivers, mountains with glaciers, even vegetation that served as food for her pets.  The climate was mostly tropical, due to her proximity to the sun.  The sparse highlands offered all the benefits of more temperate climates.  It was so rich in biodiversity that you couldn't look anywhere without seeing some form of life.

Being the planet of love, many of its creatures thrived on it.  They needed love to survive, for it was as commonplace as food.  They needed it so much that the only evolutionary path to success was by an excess of it.  Natural selection was partial to species that loved and respected others so much that it fused them into the planetary network, making them inseparable from Venus' orgy of life.  The amount of mutualism was exponentially higher than it was on Earth, creating a harmonious environment for all who were selfless enough to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

Everyone on Venus was getting along fine until the rise of the clockwalkers.  They were the first carnivorous species on the planet, and the last.  The clockwalkers devoured so much of Venus' vegetation that the balance was upset.  They not only consumed all the planet's resources, but all the love as well.  Their hungry clocks ate up all the mutualism and defecated it into separatism.  Love became a thing of the past.  All the residue of that once rich and beautiful planet was excavated from the ground, churned through factories and spewed into the atmosphere, creating the runaway greenhouse effect we see today.  It wasn't long before the clockwalkers became suffocated by their own greed.

Some say they escaped their demise by looking to the stars, using the last remaining metal they'd harnessed into building a spaceship.  Others say they are as extinct as everything else on the planet.  I say they were like a virus, eating its host cell from the inside out, replicating itself into something stronger.  Something that would help them find a way to occupy another cell in the cosmos.  A cell like the Earth, its closest habitable neighbor.  I say that in the future, Earth will suffer the same fate.

-Homer the space-time traveler