u/Loud_Ad_2272

The anemia started after the funeral. He had just turned sixteen when his father died.

"You're pale," his mother said, setting the plate down.

"I'm always pale."

"You're paler. Did you take your iron?"

"I took the iron."

"It doesn't seem to do much."

He'd been to the specialists. No hematologist could figure out why he was anemic. They all said genetics. His father had been anemic too. At some point his mother stopped making appointments and he stopped asking her to.

There were also marks on his arms and his legs, small red circles that never fully healed, some fading while others appeared. A dermatologist had called them “idiopathic,” a medical way of saying he did not know what caused them. 

He was twenty six and he had never had a job, too weak to work. There had been interviews spread over the years.

"There's an opening at the IRS downtown," he said. "Seasonal, data entry work, mostly."

"That sounds perfect for you," she said. "When?"

"Thursday."

On Thursday morning, the room tilted when he sat up, and he lay back down, and he listened to her cooking downstairs for forty minutes before she came up and knocked, softly, the way she always knocked.

"You're not going?" she said.

"I can't."

"Then don't." She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on his forehead, the way she had since he was small. "You call them and you tell them you're unwell. Anyone would understand. Anyone with a heart."

"That's four interviews I missed now."

"That's four you were brave enough to try for." She smoothed his hair back. "You keep trying. You know what I think about that? I think that's the part that matters. Not the job, the trying."

Once a month she went out in the afternoon and came back after dark. She had done this for as long as he could remember. She never said where she went, and he had stopped asking sometime in his teens. She always carried the same black plastic bag out with her and returned with it full of something she took straight to the upstairs bathroom. 

He made his own dinner on those nights. He noticed that he slept badly on those nights. He would lie awake past midnight, clear-headed in a way he almost never was, and wake the next morning without feeling groggy.

He sat on the couch that afternoon with his foot up on the cushion, picking at the little red marks on his body. He had been picking at them since he was a teenager.

He said he was thinking about a place of his own, once. He had said it before, a couple years ago, and each time she had said the same thing in a slightly different way.

"You should," she said.

"You'd be alone here if I left."

"I've been alone," she said.  "That is not yours to carry."

"I know."

"I mean it." Her hand over his on the table. "Go. Go and don't look back at this house. Just get stronger. That's all I've ever wanted. Go when you're strong."

In ten years he had never had the strength to leave.

One night after her monthly outing, he woke around three to the sound of a plastic bag rustling. His mother stood near the foot of his bed, reaching inside it.

“What are you doing, Mom?”

She jerked upright and hid the bag behind her back.

“Why are you awake?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Didn’t you eat the spaghetti I left for you?”

“No. I made a sandwich.”

She stared at him.

“You didn’t eat it?”

Then she left without saying anything else.

He set up hidden cameras in the kitchen and his room. He suspected she was poisoning his food to keep him from leaving her.

Nothing happened for the first two days.

On the third day, one of them caught something, and he sat at his desk with the door closed and watched what had been recorded the night before while he slept.

Two hours of nothing. Then the door to his room opened. His mother stood in the doorway in her robe, looking at him for a long time. She said his name once, quietly. He did not stir. She said it again.

Then she came in with a plastic bag and knelt at the foot of the bed and drew the blanket back from his feet, carefully. She took something small and dark from the bag, pressed it against the arch of his left foot, and held it there patiently with two fingers. Then another and another. She checked his face once to be sure he was still sleeping.

She walked out and came back an hour later.

She returned them to the bag and pulled the blanket over his feet and stood a while at the side of the bed. She said something the microphone did not catch. Then she left.

He watched it over and over.

He waited until her monthly outing. He searched her room and found nothing. In her bathroom, he found the empty plastic bag beneath the sink and a styrofoam box.  He opened the lid. 
Leeches.
Dozens of them, sliding over one another.
Big and fat from his blood.

He packed a backpack. He could barely lift it into the car. He sat behind the wheel with both hands on it, waiting for the shaking to stop, and realized that he was in no condition to drive anywhere, and that he had not been in any condition for ten years, and that he never would be but he still backed out of the driveway and drove away.

He had been single most of his life. He had tried the apps, the blind dates, the speed dating.

He was not a handsome man and he had made his peace with knowing it, mostly.

"What do I have to do to get a girlfriend," he said to the empty kitchen one night. "I'd do anything to have a relationship, a family, kids. Anything!" he screamed into the quiet house.

It had rained all night and the insects were louder than usual on his morning walk. Along the wooded stretch of the path the cicadas were roaring. He felt a tightness in his shorts. 

Overcome with embarrassment, he untucked his shirt and held it over the front of his shorts and walked the rest of the way home crouched and sweating. By the time he reached his door it had gone. Fifty-three years old and still working, he thought, and smiled about it for the rest of the morning.

The next day, passing the same stretch, it happened again. There were more people out this time. He knelt and pretended to tie a shoe that was already tied. He sang the national anthem in his head. Nothing helped. He shuffled between clusters of walkers, moving when the path was clear, stopping when it wasn't, and only when he was through the wooded stretch did it subside.

At home he opened his laptop and found a video of a cicada swarm, the sound cranked loud, and felt the blood go where it had been going all week. He shut the laptop. He had made the connection and the connection made no sense.

The next morning he noticed cicadas on his car. He counted more than he wanted to before he stopped counting, plugged his ears with his fingers, and drove to work half-deaf with his elbows on the wheel.

He came home to a house covered with cicadas. They covered the siding, the windows, the door, and he had to sweep them off the handle with his forearm to get inside, and they did not fly off so much as resettle. The sound came through the walls. There was no through-the-wooded-stretch anymore. The wooded stretch had come to him, and it did not stop, and neither did his body.

He plugged his ears with earplugs and lay down and tried to sleep inside the roar.

He woke to movement against his skin. He lifted the waistband of his pajamas and they were going in, patient and unhurried, dozens of them, drawn to the one warm thing still answering the call.

"I wanted a girlfriend," he screamed at no one. "A partner in life! Not this!"

The universe was listening. It just wasn't listening the way he meant.

The cicadas left him all at once. They poured off the bed and off the walls and out through the gaps around the windows, a single dark tide going back the way it came.

In the morning he walked again. He made himself do it. He came to the wooded stretch and the cicadas were there and his body did not answer them, and he laughed out loud, alone on the path, lighter than he had felt in years.

He was nearly home when it started again.

He looked around. No cicadas. Nothing on the path, nothing in the trees he could see. Only a sound, further in, steady and patient and getting no closer and no further.

A woodpecker, working at something, over and over.

"I've killed people."

"How many?"

"Three."

"Tell me about the first one."

"My landlord. I told him I'd have the rent. He didn't care. He filed the eviction anyway, and when I saw the notice on my door something snapped inside me. I drove over that night with a check in my hand so he'd open the door. He opened the door. I put him in his own backyard, under the garden. Everyone thinks he moved back home."

"And the second?"

"That's the thing nobody tells you. After the first one the fear is gone, and once the fear is gone it's easy. A coworker, we didn't get along, but it was nothing, office stuff. I saw him walking alone one evening and I put the car through him. Left him in the deep part of the park, past where anyone walks."

"And the third?"

"A woman at the store. She cut in front of me in line. That's all. I followed her out and I did it in the parking lot and I didn't feel anything at all, not even the good part I felt the first two times. I just did it."

"Where is she now?"

"My freezer."

"Do you feel any guilt?

"No. It's like stepping on a bug. Do you feel guilty stepping on a bug?"

"..."

"God, it feels good to finally say all this out loud. You have no idea. I've been carrying it for so long."

The nurse slowly loosened his blood pressure cuff and stepped back from the bed. 

“All done, sir. Your surgery went great. The anesthesia should start wearing off soon.” 

"..."

She noticed him first at a photo shoot, standing at the edge of the crowd that collects around location work, and she forgot him the way you forget anyone at the edge of a crowd. She remembered him later, after the gym and the coffee shop and the corner near her agency, and then she remembered him all at once when a friend sent her a photograph from a restaurant and there he was in the background near the window, looking in, on an evening she had no memory of seeing him at all. After that she could not stop seeing him. She arranged her mornings around the question of where he would be, changed her route and then changed it again.

She called the police the night her doorbell camera caught him standing at her front door, and they came and talked to him and told her to let them know if anything escalated. He came back and they arrested him, and she got the restraining order, and he violated it within a week and was released before she had finished her coffee the next morning. She changed her gym and he found the new one. No system she could appeal to seemed equipped to recognize it as a threat.

He was waiting in the alcove beside her entrance when she came home late from a fitting, and he stepped out and slashed her face before she understood he was there.

"If I can't have you," he said, "nobody can."

At the trial his lawyer used the word obsession in a tone that implied illness was an excuse. He received five years. She disappeared.

----

He entered a bar and ordered what he had been thinking about for five years. A woman sat beside him.

"Let me buy you a drink," she said.

He finished it and that is all he remembered.

He woke face down, wrists and ankles cuffed to the beam above him, his body suspended so that only his face touched the ground. His eyes were open, but all he could see was black with movement at the edges of his vision. He was strapped to an undercarriage of a car. The surface against his face was asphalt.

"Do you remember me?"

He knew the voice immediately. He said he didn't.

"You took my face," she said. "Even my parents couldn’t look at me."

He said nothing.

"I've been planning this road trip for a long time," she said. 

A pause.

"Three thousand miles. I'd like you to come along."

The door opened and closed. The engine turned over.

The asphalt began to move beneath his face.
At first it was heat then friction. Then the soft parts went first, what had been his lips was now a problem the asphalt was solving one pass at a time. His teeth met the road directly and the road did not give. He felt each one rattled with the pavement that moved up through his jaw. His nose flattened and then the nose was no longer the relevant question. He tried to close his eyes and discovered that blinking was  no longer an option. His eyes made direct contact with the asphalt and the world did not go dark the way he expected but instead became the road itself, inches away, infinitely moving. 

He remained conscious through all of it, and under him the road moved and moved and did not stop moving. 

The road was long. 

Three thousand miles to go.

The being arrived on earth without ceremony. Its voice and face reached every screen on the planet.

"I will grant one wish," it said, 
in a voice that every language on earth somehow understood at once. 

"To one person. No one will know who has been chosen. No one will know what was asked for. Not until it is already done."

Governments convened within hours. Every intelligence agency on the planet ran the same calculation and arrived at the same number of ways this could go wrong. Someone somewhere was going to receive anything they wanted, and there was no way to know if that someone wanted peace or wanted to watch the world end.

Markets did what markets do when no one can price a variable. Militaries went quietly to higher alert without anyone quite saying why.
People felt helpless in the face of the unknown.

The being met with someone in secret, exactly as promised. No one saw the meeting. No one heard what was said. The being left the field the way it had arrived, without ceremony, and for a period afterward nothing happened at all, and the nothing was its own kind of unbearable, a whole species waiting to find out what it had just been handed.

Then it happened.

Every person on earth had the urge to go to the bathroom at the exact same time, and it was not a request. It was an order from inside the body, immediate, absolute, no room to finish a sentence or take another step in the wrong direction.

People abandoned meetings mid-word. Drivers left cars running in the middle of intersections. Planes sat on runways with no one left in the cockpit. Every bathroom on earth was occupied within seconds and stayed that way.

There weren't enough of them, not close, and within a minute nobody cared whose door it was. People broke into gas stations, kicked in the doors of parked buses, climbed into strangers' back yards, fought over the same single stall a whole street now needed at once. Somewhere a wedding stopped mid-vow, bride and groom and every guest gone at once. Somewhere a courtroom emptied within seconds, judge included.

It happened again the next day, at the same hour. And the day after that. Scientists confirmed what everyone already suspected.

This was someone’s wish. A fixed appointment the whole species would keep every day, synchronized to the second.

After months, the world rebuilt its infrastructure around the hour. Airlines scheduled flights to avoid it entirely. Hospitals staffed differently. Weddings, funerals, elections, all of it now planned around the one immovable fact of the day. 

There were other consequences, plumbing systems in several countries that had not been built for simultaneity and never fully adapted, leading to catastrophic structural failures across major cities.

There was no war. No empire. No resurrection. Humans had braced for the end of the world and got a bathroom schedule instead.

Epilogue:

"The human asked me to pass along his thanks," the assistant said, looking down at the monitoring console. "He says it changed everything for him in a single day."

The being appeared beside its assistant a moment later, studying the data profile of the human who had been chosen.

"So," the being said, reading the file. "He is the CEO of a company called..."

It paused.

"...Depends?"

"Yes," the assistant said. 

The mattress store had been there since before he could remember, a low building at the edge of the strip mall parking lot, its windows always lit, its floor models arranged in the same tidy rows year after year. He passed it every week on the way into the grocery store beside it, and every week he would have the same exact thought. No cars in the lot. No one ever browsing behind the glass. A retail unit in prime real estate, decade after decade, without customers. He had wondered about it as a child, riding past in the back seat, and he was still wondering about it now, grown, pushing a cart across the same parking lot.

He went grocery shopping and, on his way to the market, he stopped in front of the mattress store and looked at it for a long moment. Then he went in.

A bell rang somewhere in the back. The store was clean and quiet and smelled the way mattress stores smell, new fabric and something faintly chemical underneath it. A young man came out from behind a counter.

"Can I help you find anything?"

"Just looking."

"Take your time."

He lay down on a few of them. A firm one, a soft one, one with a name that promised something about temperature regulation. None of it felt like anything in particular. He was aware, lying there, of how strange it was to be doing this at all, after years of wondering from the outside, and he found himself almost disappointed at how ordinary it felt.

"I still don't know how this place stays open"

The clerk responded with a silent smile.

"We have a special one in the back," the young man said. "Not on the floor. Most people don't ask about it."

"What makes it special?"

"You'd have to try it."

The back room was smaller than he expected, and the mattress took up most of it, larger than anything on the floor, pale and unmarked. He lay down on it.

The mattress collapsed beneath him and he fell into a chamber. 

The walls were poured concrete and the door was a grid of bars and, past the bars, more of the same, cells with people in them, some sitting, some lying on thin mats on the floor, none of them shouting, none of them doing anything he might have expected people in this situation to do. A woman in the cell across from him ate from a covered tray with a plastic spoon. A man two cells down had a bandage on the inside of his elbow, fresh, and was reading a paperback with his back against the wall.

Three men came in with a phlebotomy tray not long after, drew blood without explanation, checked his pulse, wrote something on a small whiteboard mounted outside the bars where he couldn't read it.

Days passed and nothing happened. Food arrived on a schedule, better than he expected.

He talked to the man with the paperback.

"The mattress store," the man said. "Never any customers and I used to wonder how a place like that stayed open. I had to find out."

He asked the woman across from him the same question, later, when she was finished eating.

"I passed it every day for work," she said. "No one ever went in. I always meant to ask someone about it and never did. Then one day I just went in."

Suddenly a light came on, a frail man in a wheelchair came down the row with the clerk gently pushing behind him, moving slowly. They stopped outside his cell. The clerk lifted the whiteboard, angled it toward the man in the wheelchair, and read from it.

"O positive. Tissue match on the panel. Kidneys are clean, both of them, no history, no drugs."

The man in the wheelchair looked in at him for a moment, the way a person looks at a mattress in a mattress store.

"I'll take it," he said.

He signed up for the talent show without telling anyone.

The girl at the table asked what his act was and he told her hypnotism and she wrote it down without looking up. He had been practicing for years by then, since the winter, X and two others had held him down in the locker room and pulled his pants down while someone took photographs and posted them online. He was an easy target. He had always been an easy target, the kind of person a group finds instinctively.

It had started small. His answers in class repeated back to him in a voice pitched just wrong enough to get a laugh. A nudge becoming a full shove. He had learned not to react because reacting made it worse and not reacting also made it worse, and eventually he had understood that his reaction was not the point and never had been.

The locker room was the worst of it, or the worst he could prove. There had been other things he could not prove. He had not reported any of it. The principal had a way of listening to him that made it clear the listening was a formality, that whatever had happened was the kind of thing that happened, that he should think about whether there was something he might do differently. No teacher or student came to defend him.

He found the first tutorial online that same evening and watched it for hours.

He practiced on his mother first, who was suggestible, and then on the rest of the family, and by the time he signed up for the talent show he could put any of them under before they realized what was happening 

The auditorium was packed with the entire student body and teachers on the day of the talent show. 

He was the fourth act. He walked to the center of the stage carrying nothing and stood at the microphone and asked for a volunteer. X raised his hand from the third row, grinning at the person beside him, and came up. He had expected this. He had been specific in his preparation.

He spoke quietly and X mocked him through the first minute, and then  X's shoulders dropped, then his eyes closed, and finally he told X to sit on the stage floor and X sat on the stage floor and did not move again.

The auditorium was very quiet.

He looked out at them and began again, the same cadence, slower now, widened to fill the room. He walked up the center aisle and held the exit door open and told them to follow him outside. They stood and followed him outside.

He walked them to the center of the football field and stopped. It was a clear afternoon, the sun low and unfiltered, the kind of light that made you squint coming out of a building. They arranged themselves around him and stood and waited. One of the teachers was still holding her coffee cup. 

He looked at them for a moment.

"Look up," he said.

Everyone's faces turned upward.

"Stare right into the sun. Don't look away from it."

He put on his shades and walked back across the field toward the parking lot. Behind him they stood with their faces to the sky, mouths open, tears running from the corners of their eyes, and not one of them looked away.

He had opinions about childbirth before he had ever witnessed one.

Natural was better. Epidurals were for women who couldn't handle pain. C-sections were the easy way out. He had shared these opinions freely during the pregnancy, at dinner tables and in conversations with other couples, with the confidence of someone who had never been asked to do the thing he was opining about.

His wife listened to these opinions and said nothing.

When her labor began at two in the morning he drove her to the hospital and sat beside her bed and watched her work through contractions that came in waves, each one longer and harder than the last. When she asked about the epidural he reminded her what they had discussed. When she asked again he reminded her again. When she grabbed his wrist and looked at him with an expression he had never seen before he told her she was stronger than she thought.
She prayed during the worst of it. 

The doctor placed the baby on his wife's chest and she looked down at him and then looked up at her husband and smiled in a way he could not quite interpret.

He assumed it was joy.

Then the universe answered the wife’s prayer.

It started with constipation.

Days passed and the pressure built and the cramping worsened and eventually he found himself sitting on the toilet at two in the morning in pain, the same pain his wife had felt in that hospital bed.

Something was wrong.

The pressure was not where pressure was supposed to be. He reached back and touched and felt nothing. Smooth skin where there should have been an exit hole.

He woke his wife. She looked at what he was showing her and her expression did not change in any way he could identify.

"We should see a doctor," she said.

The doctor ordered imaging. Then more imaging. 

"The imaging shows something we don't see very often," the doctor said, placing the scans on the light board. 

"Your large intestine, rather than terminating where it should, has connected itself to the urethra."

He stared at the scan. "Connected."

"There's no other exit. The body has essentially closed one door and redirected everything through another."

"So what does that mean?"

The doctor looked at him for a moment before answering.

"It means everything that needs to come out will now come out the other way."

The doctor paused.

"It means the process of elimination will be significantly more difficult than it was before. The pressure, the pain involved." He paused again. "My best analogy, and I recognize it's imperfect, is that it will be somewhat similar to the experience of labor. Every time."

The room was quiet.

He looked at his wife.

She did not say anything.

She did not have to.

She was smiling.

The first wave of alien abduction was random.

A businessman, a schoolteacher, a farmer and a retired nurse. No common thread anyone could identify. 

The second wave was different.

This time the pattern was visible. Only men over forty. Humans finally had a pattern they could work with and prepare.

The relief did not last long.

The third wave took all the blond hairs, both man and woman.

The fourth wave muscular young and old. 

The wave of abduction continued.

The space ships came and went and the streets grew quieter and the cities began to feel like museums of a larger civilization. The survivors developed rituals, leaving offerings at landing sites and  reciting prayers at dawn facing the direction the ships came from and building temples on the spots where the ships had touched down. The worship was not a choice exactly. It was what happened when a species ran out of other explanations and only fear is left.

After months and years of abduction, there was finally a clear pattern.
Short bald men. Everyone else was taken. 

Scientists declared that short bald men were immune from abductions. 

The remaining population was largely hairless and they believed that they had been chosen. Spared for a reason. Protected because they were special.

The mothership arrived.

It was larger than anyone had imagined. It blocked out the sun and moved without sound and descended slowly over the plains where the largest gathering of survivors had assembled.

The door opened.

The king alien stepped out and the crowd went silent.

King alien was short and was completely hairless. He looked out at the assembled survivors with eyes that were calm and ancient and faintly warm and the crowd began to weep. 

A man near the front dropped to his knees. Others followed. Within minutes the entire assembly was kneeling and the weeping had become something closer to joy and people were reaching toward each other and whispering the thing they had all been thinking.

“We look like them. That is why they saved us.”

The king alien looked out over the kneeling crowd for a long moment. He turned to the officials standing behind him and said something in their language and several of them made a sound that might have been laughter.

Then he stepped forward and took the man who had knelt first and the crowd watched.

The king alien took a big bite of his bald head, with blood dripping from his mouth.

"Saved the best for last." he said in his alien language.

He woke in his childhood bedroom and did not remember falling asleep there.

The walls were the same pale blue his mother had painted when he was seven. The posters he had hung in high school were still tacked to the wall though the tape had yellowed and curled at the edges. His bookshelf held the same paperbacks he had read and reread until the spines cracked and the pages came loose.

He sat up and felt a wrongness he could not immediately identify. The room was too quiet. The light coming through the window had a quality that seemed both familiar and strange. He stood and walked to the door and opened it.

His mother was in the kitchen making coffee. She looked up when he entered and her face changed in a way that made his chest tighten.

"I can see you," she said.

He did not understand what she meant. He had been standing in the doorway. Of course she could see him.

"I wasn't sure if I would be able to," she continued. "But you're here. You're really here."

She crossed the kitchen and put her arms around him and he felt the warmth of her and the way she held him too tightly and the slight tremor in her shoulders. When she pulled back her eyes were wet.

"I've missed you so much," she said.

He opened his mouth to ask what she meant but the words would not come. There was something he was supposed to remember. Something important that sat just beyond his reach like a word he had forgotten or a dream that dissolved when he tried to recall it.

They spent the morning in the living room. She made tea and they sat on the couch and she talked about things he remembered and things he did not. She reminded him of the summer they had driven to the beach and how he had found a zebrafish in a tidal pool and brought it home in a bucket. She reminded him of his first day of school and how he had cried and held onto her leg and refused to let go until the teacher had gently pried his fingers loose.

"You were so small," she said. "I couldn't believe how small you were."

He listened and felt something building in his chest that he could not name. A pressure. A weight. She reached over and took his hand and he felt the warmth of her palm against his and the way her fingers curled around his.

"I love you," she said. "I need you to know that. I have always loved you."

The next moment he found himself standing in a line. There were others there. People standing in a loose line that stretched ahead of him into a distance he could not see. The quality of light was strange here too. Dim and unchanging as if the sun had set but darkness had not quite fallen.

He joined the line and stood waiting though he did not know what he was waiting for.

The person in front of him turned and looked at him. A woman perhaps ten years older than he was. 

"How was it?" she asked.

He nodded though he was not sure what she meant.

"It's different for everyone, I guess." she said. "I heard some people get longer. Some people get less. Depends on what happened I suppose."

"What do you mean?" he asked. 

"This place," she said, gesturing to the line and the dim unchanging light. "It's for the ones who died with things unresolved."

"We get to see them one last time before we move on," she continued. "The person who killed us.” 

He felt the pressure in his chest again. The wrongness. And suddenly, he remembered the taste of the tea she had poured.

The date had gone well, he thought.

They met at an Italian restaurant. Eve ordered the carbonara and he ordered the same because he wanted her to know they had things in common. She laughed at his jokes. Touched his arm twice during dinner. Smiled when he paid the check.

But she had been looking at her phone when he suggested getting coffee. Had said she needed to get up early for work. Had hugged him goodbye instead of kissing him.

Adam drove home replaying every moment. Trying to decode each gesture and word. Trying to understand if what he felt was mutual or if he had imagined the connection entirely.

When he got to his apartment he was still turning it over in his mind. The way she smiled. The way she had checked her phone. The hug that might have meant friendship or might have meant she was nervous or might have meant nothing at all.

He saw the vase of flowers on the kitchen counter. He picked one from the vase and sat down on the couch.

"She loves me."

He pulled the first petal free and let it fall to the floor.

"She loves me not."

Another petal. Then another.

"She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not."

The first flower was stripped clean. He reached for another.

By the time he finished the vase he felt no closer to an answer. The petals covered the floor but the question remained. He looked around the apartment. A small succulent on the windowsill. A potted plant his mother had given him.

He continued.

—--------------------------

His roommate knocked on the bedroom door the next morning.

There was no response so he knocked again and called out but heard nothing. He tried the handle and found it unlocked.

The room was dark with the curtains drawn. He could make out a shape on the floor near the bed and stepped inside and turned on the light.

Adam was lying face down surrounded by flower petals and leaves. A pile of dark hair scattered around his now bald head. The scalp was raw and bleeding where the hair had been plucked out by the roots.

He knelt and turned Adam over carefully. 

The mouth hung open and bloody and red with teeth missing. The teeth were scattered across the floor mixed with flower petals, finger nails, toe nails and strands of hair.

Adam's eyes opened. 

The lips moved slightly.

"She loves me not."

He noticed the flowers during his morning walk.

They had appeared along the trail seemingly overnight. Small clusters of pale yellow blooms with delicate petals that released visible clouds of pollen when disturbed by the breeze. It looked like a dandelion but not quite. He had walked this trail for years and had never seen these particular flowers before.

The amount of pollen was unusual. It hung in the air like fog. Drifted across the path in golden waves. He felt it settle on his skin and clothes as he passed.

When he returned home he searched online for the flower's identification. He tried describing the pale yellow petals and the excessive pollen production. He uploaded photographs. None of the botanical databases returned a match. The flower appeared to exist nowhere in any catalog or reference guide.

The urges began three days later.

He found himself purchasing items he had no need for. A coffee maker when he already owned two. A set of kitchen knives that duplicated his existing collection. Clothing in colors he never wore. Each purchase felt necessary in the moment. Only after the transaction completed would he wonder why he had wanted these things.

His credit card statements began to show charges he did not remember making. Subscriptions to services he had not knowingly signed up for. Small recurring fees that added up to significant amounts.

He tried to moderate his spending but found his hand reaching for his wallet before his mind could intervene.

One evening while cleaning his ears with a cotton swab he noticed something unusual on the tip.

A small fleck of material that was almost translucent. He found a magnifying glass and examined it more closely. It looked organic but had a geometric pattern that seemed too regular to be natural. He worked as a nanochip researcher and spent his days examining microscopic structures. He saved the fleck and brought it to work the next morning.

He placed the cotton swab under his microscope at work.

What he saw made him sit very still for several minutes.

The structure was a chip or something that functioned like a chip. It had the architecture of an integrated circuit but was constructed from organic materials. Protein structures arranged in patterns that resembled transistors. Biological polymers configured as capacitors. The entire assembly was roughly the size and shape of a pollen grain.

He increased the magnification and examined the structure more carefully. Found what appeared to be tentacle-like latches. A design that suggested the ability to interface with biological systems.

When he got home, he spent the whole night washing his ears repeatedly. 
Found more of the same structures. Dozens of them embedded in the wax and debris. Used warm water, hydrogen peroxide, then alcohol. Flushed the canals until nothing else came out. Examined each cotton swab under the microscope to confirm the removal of all foreign structures.

When he was certain his ears were clear he sat in his office and tried to understand what he had discovered.

He set up a system where he could now observe the signals that were being transmitted to the chip.

One of the signals, after careful decryption, transmitted:

Frequency: 25-55
Transmit: BUY STANLEY

He didn't know what it meant.

A couple weeks later he found out. On the TV there was a news segment about how STANLEY tumblers were the next craze. Everyone wanted one.

"I just needed to have them," she said. "I can't really explain why."

A couple months later, he picked up another new signal:

Frequency:  18-39
Transmit: BUY LABUBU

He had no idea what language this was. He googled it and found it was a plush toy from China.

A couple months later, he heard the craze about LABUBU dolls on the news.

He noticed when new fads swept through the population. Could predict what products would become popular before the marketing campaigns even began. Watched as people suddenly developed inexplicable needs for specific brands and items.

Described feeling that they absolutely needed to own these objects even when pressed to explain why.

He recognized the pattern. 
A signal had been transmitted, the chips had received new instructions and finally people responded.

The flowers had spread throughout the nation. The pollen dispersed by the wind had found its way into people's ears.

The entire population was under control without even knowing it.

He tried to trace the source of the signals.

The signals originated from cell towers that had been modified with additional hardware. The modifications were subtle. Hidden among the existing equipment. Difficult to detect without knowing what to look for.

He pulled public records on the tower modifications. Found permits issued to shell companies. Traced the ownership through layers of corporate structures. Was getting close to identifying the actual entities behind the system.

Then the announcement came.

The government announced a national crisis related to Medicare and Social Security. The press conference laid out the problem in stark terms. Costs were spiraling out of control, taxpayers were being bled dry and benefits would have to be cut unless drastic action was taken.

"We are facing unsustainable costs," the Secretary said.

“The solution was being developed and additional details would be announced shortly.”

That night he intercepted a new transmission that was different from the others. He worked for hours to decrypt it. When the message finally resolved he sat motionless in his chair and stared at the screen

Frequency: 62 and above

Transmit: KILL YOURSELF

The tree had stood for more than one hundred years.

The community had gathered to protest its removal. They held signs and formed a line between the bulldozer and the oak. The developer stood beside his truck with the permits in his hand and waited for them to understand that their presence made no difference.

"You can't do this," one of the protesters said. "That tree has been here longer than any of us. It's part of this community."

"It's a tree," he said. "Wood and leaves. There are thousands just like it."

"And it'll make excellent mulch." He smiled. 

"I own the land. The permits are signed. The zoning board has approved the development."

"You bribed them," someone shouted from the back. 

"You think standing here holding cardboard signs is going to stop a bulldozer?" He laughed. 
"This is business, and business always wins."
"Make it quick," he called out to the operator. "I want the lot cleared by end of day."

The oak came down in sections over the course of an afternoon.

When the tree was finally removed, he walked across the cleared lot and felt satisfied that the project could proceed on schedule.

The first symptoms appeared three weeks later.

His skin felt tight across his shoulders and back. He assumed it was sunburn from the site inspections but the sensation did not fade. Over the following days the skin began to harden. Not painful exactly, but rigid, like scabs forming across broad sections of his torso.

He saw his doctor who examined the affected areas and took tissue samples. The results came back inconclusive. The doctor referred him to a dermatologist who referred him to a specialist who eventually admitted he had no explanation for what was happening.

"I've never seen anything like this," the specialist said, reviewing the biopsy results. "The tissue samples show cellulose. I don't understand how that's possible."

"Fix it," the developer said.

"I don't know how," the doctor said.

He tried other doctors. Sought second and third opinions. The diagnosis was always the same. His skin was dry and painful. The process was accelerating. No treatment showed any effect.

By the second month his feet had begun to change.

They grew wider and thicker. The bones restructured themselves in ways that made walking difficult. His shoes no longer fit. He had custom orthotics made but within a week those no longer fit either.

The scabs on his skin had spread to cover most of his body. He tried cutting it away with a razor but it grew back overnight thicker than before. The texture was rough and deeply furrowed.

His joints had stiffened to the point where all he could do was stand. He spent most of his time motionless, conserving energy for essential movement.

Months later, small green shoots pushed through the pores of his skin. He tried pulling them out but they were rooted deep in his tissue and removal caused bleeding that took hours to stop.

He stopped trying to fight what was happening. Stopped seeing doctors. 

He sat in his chair and felt his feet growing heavier. The soles had split open and root-like structures were emerging.

He remained in the chair for days before he managed to crawl and drag himself to the bathroom.

Then one night, he heard a voice.

"Return what was taken."

The voice came from outside. From the direction of the development site. 

"Return what was taken."

He crawled to the door and down the front steps and across the yard while the voice grew louder and guided him forward.

He finally reached the development site.

The townhouses were half built. He crawled to the center of the lot where the oak had stood. The ground was bare dirt packed hard from construction equipment.

The ground beneath him softened. His feet sank into the soil. He felt the earth pulling at him gently, then stronger. His feet extended downward. His arms branched toward the sky.

The ground pulled him down.

The construction crew arrived the next morning and found a human sized sapling growing in the center of the lot.

It had not been there the day before.

The project manager came by later that afternoon and said to leave the tree alone.

They built the townhouses around it. Built the central courtyard with the sapling at its center. The tree grew unbelievably fast. By the time the first residents moved in, the tree had grown tall enough to provide shade.

No one questioned where it had come from.

Sometimes on windy nights the residents heard sounds that seemed almost like cries, but trees creaked all the time.

The first time he noticed it was during his morning walk on the trail behind his house.

A butterfly mating with a bee on a cluster of wildflowers near the path. The movements were unmistakable and entirely wrong. He stopped and watched for nearly a minute, convinced he was misinterpreting what he was seeing, but the behavioral pattern was clear and deliberate.

He continued his walk and tried to dismiss it as some kind of territorial display or feeding behavior he had simply misunderstood. Insects did strange things. Nature was full of oddities that seemed impossible until you learned the explanation.

But he couldn't stop thinking about it.

The second sighting occurred a week later when he was taking out the trash.

A common housefly was mounted on a mosquito on the rim of the recycling bin. The same unmistakable choreography. The same biological impossibility.

He stood there holding a bag of garbage and staring at two insects that should not have been capable of what they were doing. As incompatible as a bird mating with a fish.

That evening he went online to see if anyone else had noticed anything similar.

The internet was full of it.

Photographs and videos from across the country and around the world. Dragonflies with moths. Ants with beetles. Wasps with flies. Every possible combination of insect species engaged in cross-species mating that should have been biologically impossible.

The posts had started appearing about two weeks earlier. Most of them were confused and seeking explanation. A few claimed it was photoshopped or AI generated. But the sheer volume of posts and geographic distribution of the reports suggested something real and widespread was occurring.

Within three days, an entomologist from a major university appeared on the national news to address what was being called "the crossing phenomenon."

She explained that preliminary examination of collected specimens had revealed something unprecedented. Every insect species tested, regardless of order or family, had developed what appeared to be universal reproductive structures. Male and female genitalia that were compatible across all insects.

The mutation had occurred simultaneously in insect populations worldwide. No one knew what had caused it. No one knew if it could spread to other animal groups. No one knew what the long term implications would be.

The story dominated news cycles before being displaced by the usual rotation of political scandals and celebrity gossip. People got used to seeing strange insect pairings. It became a curiosity rather than a crisis. 

Life continued.

Six months later, a woman in Alabama died from a mosquito bite.

The initial report attributed it to an allergic reaction, but when three more deaths occurred in the same week, all from mosquito bites, the medical community began investigating more carefully.

The autopsies revealed that the victims had been injected with a neurotoxin consistent with black widow venom. The mosquitoes that had bitten them were tested and found to carry the same venom in their salivary glands.

Mosquitoes had mated with black widows. The offspring inherited traits from both parents. The ability to fly and feed on blood from one parent. The ability to produce lethal venom from the other.

Within a month, forty seven people had died from mosquito bites across twelve states.

The pattern continued.

A man in Oregon died from a bee sting that injected him with a neurotoxin fifteen times more potent than normal bee venom. Testing revealed the bee had genetic markers from both honeybees and tarantulas.

An elderly woman in Maine was hospitalized with simultaneous paralysis and excruciating localized pain after being stung by something that carried traits of both giant hornets and bullet ants.

The deaths accumulated slowly at first, then with increasing frequency as the hybrid generations matured and spread. Conservative estimates suggested that insect related fatalities had increased by three thousand percent within a year of the first crossing observations. A simple mosquito bite could kill.

Governments convened emergency sessions to address the crisis.

The scientific consensus was that allowing the hybridization to continue unchecked would result in the emergence of insect combinations that could threaten human survival on a catastrophic scale. 

The solution proposed was a global sterilization campaign. A chemical compound that would render all insects temporarily infertile without killing them outright. The temporary sterility would halt reproduction and give researchers time to develop a more permanent solution or to identify which hybrid lines posed the greatest threat.

The chemical had been tested extensively. No negative effects on mammals. No environmental persistence. No bioaccumulation in food chains. Completely safe for human exposure.

A minority of researchers raised concerns that forcing reproductive adaptation on a global scale could trigger unpredictable outcomes. But the immediate threat of hybrid insects outweighed theoretical long term risks.

The compound was designated for immediate global deployment.

The spraying began in early spring and continued through summer.

Aircraft dispersed the sterilization agent over urban areas, agricultural regions, and wilderness zones. Within ten months, insect populations had dropped by an estimated seventy percent. No new insects were being created. New hybrid crosses ceased appearing. Deaths from insect borne toxins declined sharply.
Summer nights were eerily quiet. 

By the end of the first year, the crisis appeared to have been contained. 
Life began to return to something approaching normal.

Five years later, a woman sat waiting in an examination room. 
The doctor came in and asked,
 "Is this your first time?"
 "No, it's my second larvae gestation." 
she answered while looking at her protruding abdomen. 
"Don't forget your bug repellent next time." The doctor said without even looking up.