Something’s swarming around the ozone layer. It’s already leeched into the soil in some isolated New Zealand backwater. Specialized parasites are deployed to inhabit the cow’s rumen so the animal may digest this new, unfamiliar grass. Nothing’s breaking up; it’s just the way things come through here. Martian language. Our ears fold over into cocoons to gestate the sounds into rhythms or patterns. The cocoon doesn’t compute.
Many years later, extracted Antarctic ice core samples awake this long-dormant agent. A foreign virus infects the expedition, like in that episode of The X-Files. Only, the scientists aren’t driven into a ferocious rage, instead, the corpse flower has released its spores. One onlooker described the stench as “dead animal.”
This isn’t all so unlikely. Remember anthrax? That hollow drum, ticking almost, builds as much suspense as a trembling hand reaching for a cracked-open door. What’s behind there? It’s sinister.
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