How I Caused the Apocalypse

I have a weakness. Everyone has their Achilles’ heel, no matter how many gifts nature bestows. It’s strange, even after what’s happened, I can’t bring myself to feel any shame. The absurdity of the catalyst for all of this is benign, it’s playful, it’s Fruit & Flakes Cereal and I have to have it. Out here on the station we mostly make do with vacuum packed dry goods. Standard rations for a research platform in high orbit. We’ve been here for a three year rotation and we get by without much. Since the development of artificial gravity generators, stations like ours have proliferated. The appeal of research facilities that are a safe distance from the planet is beyond anyone’s expectations. Not that it should have been, I suppose. If the privatized space market had guessed at a fraction of the fantasy projects people were cooking up in their heads just waiting for some way to operate outside safety regulations… let’s just say it was startling to see what people could come up with.
Obviously weapons development spiked. Test whatever you want! Set up a station, make something incredibly dangerous and play asteroids… with asteroids. Energy experiments also picked up. Other than the crews on the stations, who have a shuttle for evac, nobody could get hurt no matter what kind of risks you wanted to take. This station is called a Platform Staging Base, so-called because it’s wide and flat and we test the first ever line of small scale, two manned combat vehicles to operate solely in space. Who we’re supposed to fight off with these things, well, does that question really need to come into it? The beauty of privatization, money makes it happen and if your weapons conglomerate wants to corner the market on manned attack vehicles, then someone’ll build ‘em.
That someone is me. Or at least it includes me. The main hurdle in developing these ships is finding a condensed propulsion system strong enough to get these babies moving like old fashioned jet airplanes. Nothing moves like that yet. There are carriers, transport ships, shuttles, even deep space research vessels (deep being not quite outside of the solar system. Everything’s relative.) A ship that’s a quarter the size of the smallest shuttle and able to run rings around it? That’s the thing we’re trying to make happen. My role is- was- bio-chemical engineer responsible for manipulating organic power sources (such as algae or the human heart) with chemically derived adaptations with the goal of creating a cybernetic engine. Functioning by natural principles contorted by me into a self-generating power source. Imagine an atom the size of a shoebox, with electrons rotating around it, more electrons than any naturally existing atom. Those electrons stimulate a convulsive response in the organic engine material causing compression of the nucleus. We don’t split the nucleus, we apply more or less pressure to it, creating more and less energy in a small space directed out the back of the ship. It’s not technically nuclear, but that’s the trickiest part: making sure it stays that way. Too much pressure and the nucleus collapses. That explosion - remember that the atom is about 1,000,000,000 x’s the size and complexity of the atoms we split in the 20th- is big. Heck, it’s just excessive.
I have a ritual. Some people smoke while they think things through. Some people sip on a drink. I dip into a bowl of Fruit & Flakes. It’s a childhood thing, it was always around when I was growing up and then it disappeared. Discontinued or something. Then while I was prepping for this rotation they just appeared again! The same box, the same picture, the same small print that reads “Enlarged to show texture.” I haven’t been without since. We get supply runs every month and I managed to get the company to put a regular shipment into my contract. Worth it. Worth what I expected to pay, a hunk of my bargaining power. Definitely not worth the fireball rocketing towards the Earths atmosphere it quixotically brought about. I don’t even know what I’m going to do. If that thing makes it through the upper atmosphere it’ll obliterate some vast amount of the planet while simultaneously releasing a plague beyond anyone’s imagining. I mean, the illness didn’t exist until it manifested as a byproduct of the cybernetic integration. New life forms: you want one, but you get about 17. Mostly on the cellular level, mostly unable to survive more than a few nanoseconds. One standout though, it thrives inside a host organism, taking over the mitochondria of the cells, creating a proliferation of rebellious cells refusing to simply stay where they are. They move, congregate, form tumors within hours, grow to obscene size and since they draw from any type of cell, it becomes a race between the tumor and the drain on essential cell function to see which kills first.
I stumbled across it in the lab. Fortunately there are protocols for this contingency and it was isolated and identified without contaminating the organic material. That is, until a box of Fruit & Flakes tipped off the lab table and spilled into proximity of the isolation space the bug was held in. Turns out the nasty critter can follow organic matter and transfer itself without contact if it’s within a few feet. I couldn’t know it at the time but the dried mango and pineapple were contaminated immediately and if I hadn’t been completely caught up in the problem of containing organic viability without ongoing gestation (I needed organic material, but I didn’t need for it to grow up), I probably would have been proactive enough to get down on my hands and knees and collect the cereal that had skitted across the illumined white floor and across the barrier into the containment area. It’s strange how scientific progress can be so short sighted. The bug was held safely within a field of pulsing energy that killed any living material it came in contact with. Except it was designed to work with viral life forms and so it lacked the strength to kill any macro life forms. It’s a very small space, only a cylindrical area with a radius of 10 millimeters with the field projected from cylindrical emitters at the base and the top, one meter above. A grape is a macro life form, and so a raisin is a macro environment available for contamination that can pass directly through the containment field. A few pieces of dried fruit skitted right into the contaminated area, picked up the bug, and went right out the far side where the muscular tissue being designed to apply pressure to the nucleus was waiting to be tested further.
My nose was buried in a data cypher containing theoretically viable pressure ratio’s and nuclear vulnerabilities that might go boom under the wrong circumstances when the living engine began to groan like a submarine compressing under the pressure of the ocean. I see the splotches of bright red indicating infection as soon as I look and since I’ve invested roughly one in three minutes of my life over the past three weeks in terrorizing myself with the hypothetical catastrophe that just took place, I knew exactly what I was looking at. The nucleus would be warped and compressed to rupture. I’d already determined this. I’d also determined that ejecting the cybernetic engine into space was the first, safest and obvious choice for the next thing I would do were this to occur.
There’s an airlock in the lab for just this type of situation. Working with live nuclear material in a closed environment suggests the value of ridding oneself of said material and efficient ways of doing so. Between me and setting the airlock to open was a pressurized decontamination room. Once on the outside I could close the inner seal and evacuate the bio-space within the larger lab.
I run. Doors in space take their time, they don’t swish like in the old films, they drone and plod and patience is required when nuclear material is not imminently combusting. I panic. I watch the door to the decontamination room drag itself across my field of vision. As soon as I can squeeze through I do. Not to any effect of course. The door has to shut again and then the inner door has to ponderously open itself and then seal itself behind me. Oh. And it’s got to fucking decontaminate me. Hose me down with a chemical spray that kills everything outside my suit. I turn to assess the status of the engine. I say assess now in order to put some distance between myself and the pants-wetting terror I felt as I stared at impending death. But make no mistake, assess is a generous term here.
The engine was changing shape. The contorting had begun. Because there was no bone structure the accumulation of tumors would reshape the tissue. There were large grey masses already. In a person it would take at least a day for the infection to kill the host. It doesn’t need to kill the cibernetic engine though. All it needs to do is pull on the tissue enough to apply an excess of pressure to the nucleus inside and cause a nuclear explosion roughly ten meters from where I stand. This could take a matter of minutes. It could take an hour or two, who knows? Who speculates on the threshold for collapse of genetically engineered muscle tissue once introduced to a viral pathogen that’s only existed for a few weeks?
External door is shutting. I watch it creep the last few inches. It’s an eternity. It’s one and a half minutes. It’s horrible. Sealed! Spray me down and get me out of here! The jets come on and with misplaced gratitude I feel love for the station as it propels poisons into the room with me, effectively killing everything on that side of this suit. I’m flushed with the sense of productivity. It lasts only seventeen seconds and goes silent. The inner door unlocks and begins its’ arduous journey across the thirty six inches of doorway between me and that airlock control. My heart is racing. I’m not breathing. It’s like needing desperately to use a restroom that’s occupied. It’s torment. I wedge a foot though the space and try to force my way through. This is a poor idea as I learn when hearing the tear of material in the outer layer of my suit. Fine. Decontamination has already happened. I’ll be fine. Just fine. I think. I think I’ll be fine.
Enough space and I’m out. I don’t have to wait for the inner door to re-seal in order to engage the airlock. The outer seal is secure. It’s a lever, it’s red and it looks just like it’s supposed to. It looks like salvation should the terrible occur. The terrible has occurred so I pull that goddamned lever for all I’m worth. I throw my weight into it, I bang into the bulkhead.
I’m not particularly courageous.
And the sound of great and powerful things occurring around me consoles me. Vast stretches of metal begin to move, I am for a moment safe in the protective arms of industrial machination. I look at the engine. It’s ugly. It’s unrecognizable, it’s a pulp. It’s going to go at any moment. Beyond it gears are moving, shifting, the airlock preparing to release the pressure in the room and drag everything into the nether.
And so it does. It only requires a crack to create the vacuum and the engine is against the lock. I’m filled again with terror at the pressure the impact must have caused. But still being here, I trust that there’s a bit of integrity left to the nucleus and within a matter of seconds it’s gone. Gone a mile distant in three seconds. I breathe. I will live. I will eat Fruit & Flakes again. I smile as I crumple to the ground. The airlock is closing. I can only see the emptiness through a quarter of a meter of space, my eyes resting on that ever impressive sight.
And I see the light. No mushroom cloud in space, but light, brilliant like the sun. The door shuts and the entire station begins to glide through space propelled by the explosion. We would be ok. But this was low orbit, there was still a gravitational pull. That explosion wouldn’t simply occur and cease. Here in space an explosion of such proportion would create the next best thing to a black hole. It would create out of the matter of the engine a dense material normally only found on dwarf planets. A piece of material with the gravitational pull of the moon. And together with the pull of the earth, it was going down.
This may just be the apocalypse. I may have just caused it. I may have just caused it with my Fruit & Flakes. I may be incredibly stupid. Either way, I might be one of the only humans to survive the end of the world.