Infected

43.

The Triangle on the collarbone no longer functioned. The fork had done too much damage, and the seedling simply shut down. When it died, it stopped making the chemical that maintained the crusty cap atop the reader-balls. The deadly catalyst inside each ball kept eating at the cap-but now there was nothing to replace the material that dissolved away.

One by one the reader-balls burst, spilling the catalyst into the Triangle’s body.

The catalyst caused two reactions: first, it dissolved cellulose; second, it caused apoptosis.

Apoptosis means that the cells of the body self-destruct. Normally this is a good thing. Billions of cells “choose” to self-destruct every day, because they are damaged, infected or their usefulness is at an end. The process can also be triggered by forces outside the cell, such as the immune system. Every cell in the body carries this self-destruct code.

The catalyst turned on that code in every cell it touched.

When those cells dissolved and released their cytoplasm into the surrounding area, they passed on this self-destruct signal.

The result? Liquefaction. It started slowly, a few cells here and there, but each dead cell compromised the cells around it, creating an exponential increase that within forty-eight hours would dissolve an entire human body.

Fortunately for the host, the remaining Triangles kept producing the chemical that not only replenished their individual reader-ball caps, it also counteracted most of the apoptosis chain reaction in his body. Unfortunately for the host, however, the concentration of the catalyst in his collarbone was too strong to be stopped.

There, the cellulose slowly dissolved, the cells slowly destroyed themselves, and the liquefaction began.

And so did the rotting…