Robert Brockway
As those of you savvy enough to read bylines know by now, my name is Robert Brockway. What you may not know is that I wrote a book called Everything is Going to Kill Everybody. Now, I don't want to overstate anything here, but I heard it wins the Pulitzer next year, reading it raises your IQ by a factor of 460 points, and I once saw it kill a guy in a bar-fight (you wouldn't have heard about that; the police covered it up because they couldn't catch it. It's really fast.)
It's a non-fiction book about the apocalypse - and while that sounds like I'm proclaiming myself a prophet, I assure you that it's all quite factual, so there's no need to burn me at the stake. Everything is Going to Kill Everybody runs down the many bizarre, frightening, and very real ways the world may soon - or already almost did - die screaming. This is a sample chapter pulled straight from the book (though we've added images and other such shiny things, because the internet is a very distracting place):
In the 1990s, A European biotech company prepared to commercially release a genetically engineered soil bacterium for use by farmers. They were operating under two very reasonable assumptions:
1. Nobody likes plant waste.
2. Everybody likes booze.
Whereas the common man might address these issues by simply not doing any plowing and opting to get plowed instead, scientists at the biotech company thought of a much more elegant solution: Engineer a bacterium that aggressively decomposes dead plant material--specifically wheat--into alcohol. And in 1990, they did exactly that. The bacterium was called Klebsiella planticola, and it nearly murdered everybody; you just don't know it yet.
What the Hell Was It?
Klebsiella planticola is of the enterobacterium family, microbes that typically reside inside the guts of mammals, but this particular strain inhabits the root systems of most terrestrial plants. Actually, every root system that's ever been tested for the presence of K. planticola has come up positive, so it is as near to a universal plant bacterium as there has ever been (you should remember that part, because it's going to come in handy later). In its pre-modified, natural form, K. planticola is partly responsible for the decomposition of all plant matter--a vital step in the natural life cycle--and it's notoriously aggressive in this role. That's why it was picked out for experimentation in the first place: Like an Old Testament God, K. planticola is both omnipresent and incredibly belligerent.
Biotech researchers saw these traits and thought they seemed perfect for an agricultural problem they were working on. Burning off dead plant material, as was the standard practice, severely pollutes the air and damages the lungs of farmers.
So What Did They Do?
What if, instead of the regular old largely useless sludge that decomposing plant material result in, we could alter that sludge into something more useful to humans, thus eliminating the desire to simply burn it away? What if we could ferment it, and turn it into an alcohol, a fuel or a hyper-efficient fertilizer? Or better yet, all three! Why not get blitzed off of it, piss it into your gas tank to power your car and then puke it up into the yard to make your garden grow?
Suddenly alcoholics are useful members of society again. Hell, they're practically heroes: brave men and women sacrificing both their livers and their dignity to bring us power, food and alcoholic-inspired confidence!
Well, that's the noble goal biotech researchers had in mind when they spliced an alcohol-producing bacterium into K. planticola. Once their product was released, farmers would simply gather the dead plant matter into buckets and let it ferment into alcohol. Alcohol that could do everything they hoped: Be distilled into gasoline, sowed as fertilizer, burned as cooking fuel or just drunk by the filthy, dirt- tasting bucketful. Their bioengineered K. planticola would create a beautiful, Eden-like garden paradise. So it was all with the intent of doing good that they engineered this microbe, but you know what they say about "the best intentions," don't you?
That's right: They inevitably result in pestilent, humanity-destroying plagues.
See, it was that fertilizer part where things got, shall we say, fucking horrifying: Once the fermentation process necessary to turn that dead plant material into alcohol occurred, the sludge left over would be rich in nitrogen and other such beneficial substances, making it an ideal fertilizer. The plan was to spread this sludge fertilizer back on the fields, thus eliminating all waste from the whole process.
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