Seanan McGuire
The vertebrate body is a miracle. Cells self-organising into organs and tissues, specialising themselves according to the needs of the body at each specific stage of its development, growing from a single zygote into a fully functional, independent organism. While there may or may not have been a divine spark behind the origins of evolution, the body itself is a miraculous thing, and deserves to be appreciated as such.
The miraculous is also present in the invertebrate world, in every cellular organism, from the simplest algae to the most complex mammal. It binds them together, tissue to tissue, membrane to membrane, connecting the animal world. Present in all things.
Miraculous.
* * *
Maybe it started with a virus, although if it did, it was something subtle enough to be overlooked, some minor infection that everyone passed around like the broccoli at a church supper before they even realised they’d gotten sick. A little tickle in the back of the throat, a little softness in the stool, and then you’re feeling fine and hearty and completely unaware of what’s brewing deep down in your guts, masked by a hundred layers of immune response and biological process.
Or maybe the conspiracy theorists are right, and it started as a weapon somebody slapped together in a lab somewhere, thinking they’d finally figured out the way to win the next war, and the one after that for good measure. If that’s the case, I hope the architects are still around to be proud of themselves, because they did it. They won the next war. They won all the wars, forever and ever, all the way to the end of history.
Which, if my guesses are correct, is about seventy-two hours from now.
I think the most likely answer is somewhere in the middle. I don’t think it was a weapon. I think it was the consequences of our choices coming back to bite us on our aging asses.
See, what I think happened – and it matters because I’m still here to write this down, when almost nobody else is, when I probably shouldn’t be wasting the time or taking the risk of the small impact of my fingers on the keys – what I think happened is that we spent decades telling people they were only as valuable as their youth. Women, especially, but everyone when you really stopped and looked at the messages we were sending. And they were global. Beauty standards might change by country and culture, but the idea that youth was wasted on the young, that a person’s value was measured in the smoothness of their skin, that grew and grew and grew.
If you did something early enough, you were a genius, a prodigy, and the world would shower you in riches for the chance to hear the next pearl of impossible brilliance that dropped from your lips. If you didn’t, if you wrote a perfect novel or painted a perfect painting, but didn’t do it until you were thirty-one, you were a has-been before you even got the chance to be.
It was worst for the women. Women were expected to be effortlessly thin and beautiful, even if their professions had nothing to do with thinness or beauty, their faces unlined and their hands unwrinkled, and oh, didn’t we build an industry around making that possible? Didn’t we build a dozen? Diet industries to sell you skinny in food made from designer molecules the body couldn’t figure out digesting, fitness industries to make you feel like any amount of skinny wasn’t quite skinny enough, and endless cosmetic industries to make sure you knew exactly how hideous and wrong your skin was. We sold creams to reverse the effects of aging, and serums to rebuild collagen in the skin, trying to convince people that every seventy-year-old could have the complexion of a dewy-eyed seventeen-year-old if they’d only try hard enough.
We sold and we sold and we sold, and people bought and bought and bought. They bought by the gallon, by the tanker, by the ton. They slathered themselves in liquid youth, chasing the impossible, and when it didn’t work, they washed it off, right down the drain, on to the next miracle.
Which miracle was it? Fucked if I know. But it must have been one of the more successful ones, the ones that made enough of a splash that they were sold globally, and to a whole lot of people. Probably something with a celebrity spokesperson or high-profile influencer at the helm, standing there and smiling with all their porcelain teeth as they swore that one little jar would make you look just like them. Promising to change the world.
Guess they did that much.
So yeah, logically, I’m going to call it a skin serum gone wrong, something that sold enough that when people washed it off their hands, it built up in the water. It went from the sewers to the seas, and from the seas to…well.
You know where it went from there.
* * *
A lot of people have wasted a lot of time arguing about where it started, as if we can see that far back. But where it started to become visible was in the aquariums.
It was the jellyfish.
Jellyfish are both surprisingly sturdy and surprisingly easy to kill. The wrong salinity in the tank and they’re done for. The wrong level of filtration and you’re dealing with dead jellyfish everywhere. But for all that they’re animate plastic bags possessed by the malevolent spirit of an elemental force of pain, they still exist. What kid with access to a coastal beach hasn’t seen a jellyfish washed up, looking like a clump of snot on the sand? When they die, they leave bodies behind. They don’t get to opt out of the mortal coil.
Until they did. Marine biologists and hobbyists with home aquariums alike began waking up and finding that their jellyfish were just…gone. Not in their tanks. Nowhere to be found. Oh, there might be a thin protean slurry at the bottom of the enclosure, depending on how strong the filters were, but the jellyfish themselves had basically dissipated, like bubbles in the water.
Jellyfish protein consists almost entirely of collagen. Collagen and water, that’s a jellyfish, and not much else. An undifferentiated protein slurry. Nothing to get excited about.
Except that we should have been getting excited about it. Maybe if we’d gotten excited when it was just a few disappearing jellyfish, we would have been able to isolate the problem and resolve it before it could become a global catastrophe. I don’t think so, however. Jellyfish play a major role in the global food chain. Everything eats jellies. Fish, sea turtles, dolphins, if it’s in the ocean, it eats jellyfish, and then – because humans are apex predators who own giant fishing boats – we take those things out of the ocean, and we eat them. So long before whatever this is had built up in complex tissues enough to make itself known, every piece of sushi and fish stick in the world was helping us to saturate ourselves with it.
After the jellyfish came…well, after the jellyfish came a lot of things, all at the same time, but apparently unconnected, so no one drew the lines that needed drawing. Caterpillars spinning cocoons and turning into goo, the way they always had, the way nature designed them to…but instead of turning into butterflies, they stopped at goo. Little tubes of goo, inert, not metamorphosising, not changing. Just goo.
Fishermen pulling up nets where half the fish were dead or deformed, scales melting into an undifferentiated sludge or bodies dripping off their bones. Some of them looked almost like jellyfish themselves, little bundles of meat and scales with no bones at all.
The empty shells of sea turtles washing up on the beach in Honolulu, not a scrap of flesh or sinew left inside, only a few bones with a soft, gelatinous quality to them. And then, whales, beached in much the same way, their bodies dissolving even before they hit the sand.
We had so many warnings. Warning after warning, and we ignored them all, because that’s what people do. That’s what works for us. We ignore. We let it build up, until we can’t ignore it anymore.
* * *
This became something we couldn’t ignore on August 8th, during the two o’clock BBC news broadcast, when the latest chirpy blonde talking head settled behind her desk and smiled her perfect, expensive smile at the camera, and started to explain the horrors of the day. Her smile didn’t waver as she described horror after horror, except in the few cases where she had clearly been instructed to seem solemn – people found a smile reassuring, but not when it was attached to reports of children dying in apartment block fires or cancerous chemicals in the water.
Her smile returned as she moved on to more pleasant matters, and perhaps people found it reassuring again, for the few minutes it remained before it began to run down her face. As her skin softened and dripped like heated wax, exposing raw tissue and ligaments beneath. Incredibly, she kept speaking, muscles untouched by this spreading dissolution, at least until her nerves realised they had lost their protection from the stinging outside air. Sensing something was wrong, she paused, raising her hand to touch her cheek, and saw the skin dripping from her own fingers.
She screamed for ninety-seven seconds before someone thought to cut the feed, and by then, it was infinitely too late. The footage was uploaded to every file-sharing site in the world, and aired on every news broadcast, and still people thought – foolishly, incorrectly – that this was an isolated incident. Until it kept on happening, over and over again. Until we figured out that we were wrong.
* * *
Maybe we would have put the pieces together faster if it had looked the same in everyone, but I honestly don’t think so. There were too many manifestations, too many ways for the dissolution to begin. There’s a lot of collagen in the human body.
Because, of course, that’s what this does. We didn’t have time to finish the analysis, though – once your scientists start melting, research into ‘why’ goes on the back burner, and the focus tends to shift to ‘can we make it stop?’ To which the answer was, tragically, ‘no, because we don’t know how.’ Collagen is present in the entire animal kingdom, in greater or larger proportions. It makes up muscles and mantles and connective tissue and the exoskeletons of insects. It’s in snails and squid and jellyfish…and people, of course. People are just chock full of collagen. It protects our organs, it cradles our brains, it makes up our skin and our muscles and our bones. Collagen for everybody.
And thanks to whatever was going on, the collagen was breaking down. Not at the same rate for everybody. Vegans living in Ohio who had never been exposed to the ocean were falling apart more slowly than people who lived on the coast and ate a lot of sushi, but they were still falling apart, because it was in the water, which meant it was in the rain, and in the plants. Not eating the primary concentration just bought them a little more time, and I’m honestly not sure it was worth it. Would you want to be the last person standing as the world melted around you?
People started to come apart. The lucky ones were like that reporter, skin first, melting off their own tissues before going into massive systemic shock or picking up an infection. None of them lived more than a day. The world’s best burn wards couldn’t save them. No one could.
But they died fast, and since they went into shock so quickly, they died relatively painlessly, compared to the ones whose muscles began to turn to goo inside their bodies. On the outside, they looked perfectly normal. On the inside, they were collapsing. That form of dissolution tended to begin with the extremities, the arms and legs breaking down, then the muscles of the face and neck, moving inward to the torso and finally dissolving the heart. It was a slower process. It could take weeks from the moment when someone’s legs buckled for the first time to the moment when their heart gave out and they stopped breathing, but once the process began, there was no stopping it.
Then there were the ones whose skeletons dissolved inside their bodies, collagen breaking down and leaving the rest of the bone too eroded to hold up against the clenching pressure of muscles and the heavy weight of organs. Those people died faster, and in agony to the very end, most making it all the way to the moment when their skulls collapsed inward like rotting pumpkins. It was a horrifying process to watch. People watched it anyway, of course. People will watch anything, and in the beginning, we still thought these things were unconnected, that we might have a chance.
The last, and least common, form of the syndrome began with the brain, the collagen of the dura dissolving and leaving the tissue to swell and smooth and surrender its crenulations. It looked like dementia to the outside eye, but appearing in all ages, and coming on over the course of hours, rather than taking years. Those people died as well, of course, but they died unaware of their own names, crying in corners for mothers they wouldn’t have recognised even if those mothers had still been alive.
Bit by bit, we were being taken apart.
Not just us – anything with collagen, meaning anything belonging to the animal kingdom. It started in the fish, which reinforces my belief that it was something in the water, and then it took out the insects, and then it moved on to everything else. The reptiles and the birds and the mammals, all of them, from the smallest mouse to the greatest elephant, went through the same horrifying decline as we did, coming to pieces in the hands of the people who loved them.
We couldn’t be content with damning ourselves. We had to take the rest of the world with us.
Life will go on. There are still plants, and bacteria, and potentialities. If anything in the Cambrian Period was intelligent enough to be self-aware, they probably thought the end of their kind was the end of the world, that without them in all their strange, innovative glory, life was coming to an end. But life found a way to come back again, transformed into something they would never have recognised, and life went on.
Earth will go on. Whatever we’ve made will work its way out of the water, and animal life will rise again, slowly but steadily. It may take a long, long time. That’s fine. The planet can wait.
I, however, can’t.
My wheelchair has been my constant companion since I was a child. I realised the process had started only when I noticed the unnatural sponginess of my thighs, the looseness of my hips. There may be no one left in the world to read this, but I wanted to get it down while I still could.
The softening has spread to my shoulders. If I don’t go now, I won’t have the strength to transfer myself into the bed, and there is no one left. I know how I’m going to die. I’ve made my peace with it. But I’d rather not die sitting up.
Maybe someday, when life has formed again, some new intelligence will rise, and find our writings, and decode them. When they do, may they find this, and may they take my warning:
Do not fear your own biology so much you would destroy the world to change it. Be what you were made to be. The world can be good. Treat it more gently than we did.
When it calls on you to age, allow it.