Prompt Lost
Bio-hazard
Your body is a full 2%, by weight, foreign bacteria.
The rest of your body is “you,” but what in the world does that mean? Your cells have your genetic structure in them, that’s one metric. They work as a team for the most part, that’s another.
But, if you get down to the individual cells that make up “you,” they are just that – individuals. They look much like cells have looked for millions of years.
Mitochondria.
That might seem like a leap, but stick with me.
Mitochondria are the center pieces of all multi-cellular life on Earth. They are the engines of the cell, providing cells with the energy necessary to do the astounding things we’ve all done.
Where did the mitochondria come from though? They did not develop from within – but invaded, in a sense, from without.
One day, an extraordinarily long time ago, a big old cell met a much smaller cell, a rudimentary mitochondria. And instead of floating apart, the big cell consumed the little cell, and the little cell didn’t die. It lived on, inside the big cell, and fed the big cell with its own energy.
That first super cell became the basis of all modern life on Earth.
I tell you this to highlight the out sized effect a single cell can have on the larger scheme of life.
Three months ago a NASA spacecraft returning from a high atmosphere flyby of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, crash landed on Earth. The spacecraft was intended to meet with the ISS and offload its collected air samples into a secure facility. Instead, those sample ended up strewn over the Appalachian mountains.
Analysis of the remains discovered just a few – just four or five – living cells. The scientific community was simultaneously amazed and horrified. Extra planetary life existed, and now was roaming free, on the microscopic level, on Earth.
Weeks passed, the crash site was quarantined, and the samples sent to a government lab for testing. What they discovered there was unnerving. The 4 or 5 cells had ballooned in population to 4 or 5 million. Moreover, they had immense antibiotic properties, and killed any bacteria they touched.
The UN and WHO released a statement intended to calm fears of an alien plague. It worked, for a time.
One month in, multiple sightings trickled in across the eastern U.S., of a bright orange, slime mold like, organism, popping up over night. These initial reports were downplayed as simple myxomycetes, harmless antiquated organisms naturally occurring on Earth.
Around this same time the scientists who had conducted the initial tests on the alien cell cultures began to get sick. One by one they died, their insides bulging terribly, until every Earth bound bacteria in their bodies was dead. Autopsies discovered their abdomens filled to the brim with the same orange slime.
Two months ago civilians started to die. At first they would come down with auto-immunological symptoms – rashes, itching, inflammation. But eventually they too filled up with the alien organism, their abdomens distending grotesquely, sometimes coughing and vomiting up orange slime before death took them.
Today we’re three months out, and the western hemisphere has been quarantined. You read that right. The entire western hemisphere is being treated by the east as a giant island, all in an effort to halt the spread of the organism. Of course, desperate people are not so obliging, and in their efforts to avoid an excruciating end, bio-refugees have spread the organism worldwide.
From my vantage, receiving updates from Houston in the ISS, I can see the spread of the slime directly. From 250 miles above the Earth, at dawn, everything east of the Rockies, every square mile of land, is bathed in orange. You can’t see the ground, nor forests, nor lakes, nor rivers. Just bright orange, everywhere. And day by day, it spreads.
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