For me, the remarkable thing is not that things went wrong. Science is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it doesn’t care whether it hurts you. Fire warms us, cooks our food, protects us from predators, but it will burn us if we let it. Fire is more than happy to eat us all alive. Science is fire writ large. As soon as we created the prototype for what would become the SymboGen implants, I knew that we were tailoring our own demise. Even if the science hadn’t been willing to turn on us, we were entrusting a magic bullet to corporate greed.

Humanity has always been disturbingly happy to sacrifice its future on the altar of right now. Look at the antitrust suits of the early 2000s, or the copyright extensions pushed through again and again by large media companies who feared losing their hold over their greatest moneymakers. We will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. So for me, the remarkable thing has never been that things went wrong. It’s that it took so long for them to fall apart as badly as they did.

—FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.

We lost two more people today. Both had checked out as clean, and then abruptly went into convulsions. They died before we could offer medical help.

It’s unclear how this new strain is interfacing with the human brain. We seem to be experiencing more early deaths than we did with the previous strain: It’s as if the worm is going so directly for the brain that it skips the “sleepwalker” stage entirely, leading to a quick, violent death. Only two of the impacted personnel have made it from stage 1 (infection) to stage 2 (animation). None have progressed to stage 3 (sapience), although posthumous study has shown that in all cases, the worms had infiltrated the brain to such a degree that stage 3 should have been possible.

I sent men into the city today to round up surviving stage 2 victims of this terrible disease. They came back with thirty-four test subjects. We’ll be spraying them down with infected water, to see what happens when someone who has already been infected is infected for a second time.

Still no signs of Shanti. USAMRIID has lost Sal. We may be doomed.

—FROM THE PRIVATE NOTES OF DR. STEVEN BANKS, DECEMBER 19, 2027